Wiki/guide for effective rank-and-file websites

"Official union sites should be under a creative commons license, not regular copyright. We want people using and improving the contents. Unions should be providing free internet access, without censorship powers. Official union websites should provide links to independent members' websites and blogs... it is not hard to imagine what it would be like for a union to try to facilitate dialogue and discussion, if you just take the first step."

Yes I agree totally about the copyright thing. But no one in my union agrees with me :-( I complained about this far and wide and some people got very affronted that I was complaining about this because they thought it was perfectly acceptable. I think that the corporate "intellectual property" model has become so accepted that people are incapable of even imagining a different way of doing things. And there is the related problem of people not being able to imagine democracy in a union, or in the country. Corporations are extremely hierarchical, therefore everything should be top-down.

But I don't think tho that we should be encouraging unions to provide web sites or other kinds of communication technology. The temptation factor is too great there. (Snooping, logging, censorship, look and feel, "rules".... Recall what happened to me. I ran the local web site for years, and the mailing lists. No one complained about it to me altho one of the officers was very unhappy about people posting announcements about antiwar rallies on the membership mailing list. He wanted the list moderated instead of the policy I had that any member can post whatever they want.

Our state federation volunteered to be part of the "brandwagon" initiative as they called it (this also entailed the extremely costly requirement to change the name of the state federation itself to start out with the name of the international, rather than the name of the state.) One result of this was all of our signs disappeared at that point because they had the "wrong" name of the affiliate on them. Now we have no signs. Sure I could make one but honestly I don't feel like being part of the brand experience. I'm going to rallies representing just me now. The next step was the official branded web sites. When that was rolled out, I was informed my web services were no longer needed, with no notice. That official web site doesn't have clutter on it like the constitution :-) And the official mailing list is so uncluttered it doesn't include the name of the mailing list, anywhere. I'm guessing they think this secret listname technique outwits some prohibition of censorship. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the next step in branding would be to require the locals to change their names to put the international in there and first.

But the constitution never meant much in our local anyway where people have never been constrained from quoting the imaginary constitution :-). In fact they quoted the imaginary constitution when this happened saying the secretary had exclusive rights to creating web sites. (The real constitution said nothing about web sites nor mailing lists period and little about the duties of the secretary.)

I would have to say based on my experiences that I think it would be best for there to be one democratic constitution for all "democratic union locals" that is mostly unchangeable by the local. For example our president has claimed year after year that he has the right to appoint all delegates and that the president is always a delegate by office. It never was true. The constitution said all delegates were elected, no exceptions. This kind of thing is so easy for people to pull off because of the fact that every local can have whatever crazy stuff in their constitution. That unpredictability of what could be in a constitution facilitates the imaginary constitution phenomenon. This is particularly an issue in our case because our local and not even the State federation is covered under LMRDA. I would really like to see there be one model democratic constitution that facilitated rank and file democracy and most importantly, specified a dispute resolution mechanism. At no level do we have a dispute resolution methodology. This makes it a moot point what is in the constitution since there is little ability to enforce it. For example, the international gives the local president the last word on approving delegates to anything. No matter who was elected, the president potentially gets to override that in a silent confirmation step. That's not in our constitution, it's a practice that the international has, one of hundreds of president-power-enforcing practices. But what it does effectively is overturn our constitution because that step allows the president to have 100% control of delegates (and committee assignments). (The same president who has control of the list of nominees for delegateships and offices, which list drops some people with an amazing regularity. So typically he doesn't have to resort to "accidentally" dropping elected delegates since he was typically able to keep them from getting near being elected in the first place. :-) It's really not easy to be a delegate nor an officer in our local if you're not in favor with the prez! This takes a level of energy that it's really hard to summon, especially since we have to take personal vacation time to do any union stuff.

I suspect these time-honored tactics are very common in lots and lots of locals. Typically it is extremely difficult to reform a constitution in a local, only to have it occur that someone can then change it to democracy-unfavorable terms. As soon as I demanded originally to see the constitution in our local, which had been out of sight for years, the president appointed a committee to rewrite it. (No there was no presidentially appointed rewrite committee feature in the constitution. That concept came from the imaginary constitution:-) For that reason I propose a fixed immutable democratic constitution with only a few local-specifiable options. If enough locals joined on we might be able to beat down both the imaginary and the real but lousy constitution problems.

"And instead of fighting against branding style marketing, let us focus on self organized viral marketing:"

Not so fast. That's what the international wants but what some of us rank and filers are saying is, we want to see some changes in the Internationals to make them, for lack of a better term, more marketable. Think of it this way, does a corporation just find a product or service laying around and not making any changes or putting any thought into it whatsover, proceed to spend a lot of money marketing it as is? You know they don't. They do all kinds of testing and modifications to the product. They research exactly what flavors the customers would want and so on. They don't say, "this is our flavor and you're going to like it"

Unions used to have a monopoly that they had numerous lifetime exclusive representation arrangements with non-compete agreements with other unions. Now it has become very easy for a union to lose representation in a workplace and extremely difficult to gain representation. This causes unions to have to work much harder on ensuring the good will of the membership and creating a good reputation. But they're not doing that. That's the problem.

To that end I propose a standards based union "quality" campaign. I say quality but a better name is definitely needed as who didn't loathe the TQM era? I know I really hated it and those snarky MBA's who promoted it. But they did pull off an amazing stunt there. A mighty force of consultants quoted other consultants and they convinced everyone to believe in six sigma quality and all that stuff. Did they have any actual evidence for it? I don't know if they did, or if it was all sailing along based on the fact that the word quality is linked in everyone's mind as "goodness", so who'd argue against "goodness"?

But my point is they created standards and then that was a marketing point. Baldridge standards, ISO standards...
all that. I propose standards for unions such as the aformentioned Internal Democracy Standard where the union adopts a standard democratic constitution and we could fill in other exercises to show they are adhering to the standard, like the ISO standards do. There are definitely others that could be created like excellence in collective bargaining, organizing, and so forth. The smart thing about TQM was that they could create standards, and then promote a business based on it fulfilling those standards. It's all positive. They didn't say that business is bad because they don't do TQM, they said "we are good because we do TQM and fulfill all these standards and get these awards and do these practices..."

In the current union system, we only hear about it when unions run afoul of the law. For example,there's tremendous bad publicity about embezzlements now and then that makes all unions look bad by association.(My international has a very bad history in this area, which is one reason that I don't want to be too highly associated with their brand.) But if we could get unions to promote accounting standards as a selling point, individual unions could get good press for their adoption of those standards, making unions look good. Say every year a whole bunch of unions can brag that they have fulfilled the honest accounting standard and got the good accounting award, that would hopefully counteract somewhat the bad publicity of the occasional zillion dollar embezzlement. And if we were really lucky, we'd be able to cut down on the embezzlements :-) Our international mandated to large locals that they do extremely expensive CPA audits yearly. So they shell out all this money to an audit firm but THERE's NO GOOD PRESS from it. It may help cut down embezzling but it's not doing anything about the problem that everyone thinks unions are corrupt. I think doing the TQM thing might be a way to try to climb out of that kind of rut.

This has been going on these days in corporations with the whole post-enron ethics schtick. There are even computerized ethics systems.
http://www.ethicspoint.com/en/default.asp
Ethics is definitely an area that could be incorporated into a standard for unions also. As I said previously, not all unions are covered under LMRDA. We don't even have that lowest common denominator. Who has seen a union that wasn't covered under LMRDA that voluntarily adhered to it? They don't. But if we said, we expect unions to have standards and show that they comply to them, and unions that have standards are getting a lot better press than the ones that don't, it might change things for the better.