Will private enterprise fill unions' void on the Internet?

In their defense, although they may not have a blog yet (I imagine most of the "Change to Win" unions will follow in Stern's footsteps) the Teamsters are one of two unions that have a public RSS feed that syndicates their news. That is a good step in the right direction. The other one is the AFGE. Other then that I have been to every union site listed on the AFL home page and no others have RSS (I even ran them all through feedburner to be sure I wasn't missing something).

The following was written at the bottom of postalmag.com's "About page." Note that Tom Wakefield, mentioned below, is the proprietor of postalmag.com:

"Coming Soon! Christianity and Capitalism: The Economy of Compassion: (An updated version of the 2000 book Social Gospel 2000, by Tom Wakefield.) Though the original was hardly a bestseller, it was featured in the bookstore at Pat Robertson's The Christian Broadcasting Network Web site. Additionally, a copy was given to President George W. Bush, who actually said that he would read the book, though there has been no feedback that he did. The updated book, Christianity and Capitalism: The Economy of Compassion, will be released in 2005."

Now if you were a union, would you rather have your members talking about their jobs on the site of a George Bush fan or your own union's site?

I don't think that a private enterprise COULD replace a labor union, ever. You might be able to find competing leadership within a union which might have more information than the current leadership, but the only incentive that is out there for a private organization would be to sell ads.

One point that I don't think is very well understood, at least I didn't understand this before I got heavily involved in union issues, is that newsletters really are the lifeblood communication tools for unions. Every member recieves one in the mail. There are a LOT of comparisions that can be made regarding the differences between newsletters and websites, but one the core arguments in favor of newsletters is that they are easily mass distributed and are you don't need a computer to read them. The biggest drwaback is that unless you are in the union or affiliated with that union, you would never know the newsletter even existed.

Since the topic is postal workers, I can give an example of where this issue has been brought up from the APWU National Postal Press Association (commonly known as the PPA) here and here. Postal workers also have an interesting reason to prefer newsletters to the web... newsletters are sent using the US Postal Service! What better way to support labor (namely postal workers) than by using USPS rather than FedEx or UPS?

One of the interesting things about the PPA is that they do recieve funding from the APWU as well as from local editors, but the organization is independent of the national union. The primary reason that they are able to do this is because their bylaws state that the PPA cannot function as a political organization.

I work with Tony Carobine, the president of the APWU National Postal Press Association, and I will be speaking at their upcoming conference regarding websites. The name of the session I am doing even describes websites as being an additional tool in combination with newsletters. Right now, newsletters are far and away more effective than websites are. (This might someday change, but until that day comes, labor has a lot more invested in their glossy newsletters than they do in web development.)

As far as RSS feeds go, I could probably add an RSS feed to the PPA site (I am the person who created this site from scratch, check out what the site used to look like before I created a new site for them Here), however I have focused my work more towards ease of administration and the website is not a blog. I am not planning to implement RSS anytime soon, but it is a possibility when I have more free time.

The PPA conference is a great opportunity to present information to postal workers who are learning how to strengthen their local union, however the drawback is that each session is 3 and a half hours long and it is not easy to prepare that much information on such a broad topic as websites. Some unions already have a website, others don't. Since my talk is going to be all about the technical side of websites I am planning to prepare a lot of hard copy references so that all the information that would otherwise be forgotten can be used as a reference. I will post that information here once it is all organized because I am sure that it will be useful to other labor leaders.