Virtually all workers in the U.S. (and globally) have at least one of the following devices: cell phones, personal digital assistants, mobile computers or netbooks. These devices are all moving towards some kind of convergence as can be seen with devices like Apple's iPhone, T-Mobile's G1 (running Google's open source Android operating system), Openmoko's open source Neo FreeRunner - which combine features of all of the above.
Most workers can't yet afford to use these devices, as the cost of decent mobile web access generally runs about $60/month on top of cell phone costs. But as demand increases for mobile web functionality, those prices are likely to drop. The devices themselves run from $200-$400 on average, but prices have already been dropping for next-generation technology like iPhone's - which starts its new 3G line at around $200.
Regardless, cell phones in and of themselves are deploying more and more features every month - and many advanced phones are already within the reach of the average worker.
Which begs the question, if everyone has a mobile device in their pocket, doesn't that mean the physical barriers that have prevented unions from communicating with workers on the job have now, for all intents and purposes, become irrelevant?
I think that's fast becoming the case.
For example, let's take a union drive at a company based in a typical suburban building in an industrial park. Traditionally, unions organizers can leaflet workers as they left the premises at the end of a shift, but they cannot enter the building. Once a worker decides to sign a union card (and sometimes before), organizers will try to develop a list of that worker's contacts in the shop and do house visits with them - or at least talk to them on the phone. After weeks or months of such activity they might get enough of a critical mass to call an organizing meeting, and then get the drive properly underway from there.
But now it is possible to develop such networks inside a shop much faster by using available social networking technology together with mobile devices to reach workers on the job, faster and in larger numbers than ever before. Once contact is established and an organizing committee formed, it's a piece of cake to keep in regular touch with workers with bulletins and updates of every kind.
Imagine that the first worker to express interest in a union is asked to give the union access to all his/her work-related social networks - via Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. That worker's co-workers can then be encouraged to form an organizing committee online - a realm outside of the workplace that they can keep in touch with from the workplace.
Then traditional physical leafletting can be accompanied by virtual leafletting in the form of mass text messaging, and posts to social networks. Furthermore, the "leaflets" can now be full multimedia presentations - produced by your union's media department. Used properly, this kind of approach should help significantly accelerate a drive.
Even more exciting is the fact that this technology is two-way. The workers in a shop can also communicate out by text message and micro-blogging services like Twitter from their mobile devices in real time. The onboard Global Positioning System feature sported by more and more mobile devices can even be used to track workers whereabouts - which in the near future could allow labor organizers to, for instance, prove that management had forced workers into a captive audience meeting by pinpointing the exact location of workers at a particular time on a Google Map mashup.
Once a drive is really in full swing, unions can take advantage of more than just excellent real time communication with workers in a shop, they can stage highly coordinated workplace actions by using social networking tools to call a flash mob into being. Heretofore, flash mobs have been used primarily by artists and other urban bohemians to call lots of people together to do fun things in public places, but they have also been used for political purposes by tech-savvy activists to call lots of people together to take action against, for example, some corporation - whose representatives happen to be in a given place for a brief time. Without a fast response that kind of opportunity would have been missed, but the ability to call out 50, 100 or 500 people to swarm a particular location within a 30 minutes.
It goes without saying that these mobile devices can talk to each other as well as the union. So internal communication among workers can flower very quickly - which has interesting implications in a number of positive directions.
This kind of technique should prove wildly effective in organizing drives. Especially drives where management is attempting to divide and conquer workers, and stooping to a campaign of dirty tricks in the service of that goal. While in-shop zap actions can be extremely difficult to pull-off, and a legal nightmare for the organizing union to defend, if such actions are large and lightning-fast they will be much harder for companies to stop. And those actions, together with rallies, marches, and other public events outside the shop can create such a storm of solidarity that management will be more amenable to a fast settlement.
Another barrier than can be overcome in union drives with mobile technology is the language barrier. Alerts and other communications can be released in multiple languages simultaneously, and workers can be encouraged to communicate with unions in the language they are most comfortable with. Unions can make more effective use of available bilingual organizers in responding to online queries than they can trying to deploy such translators in the field. Once the union has thus established its sensitivity to non-English speaking workers it will be much easier to induce them to trust the union. A win-win all around.
Of course, no technology is perfect, and all mobile communications and computing devices share one critical flaw - they can be turned off. Or, more to the point, workers can be ordered to turn them off. However, it's highly unlikely that management will be able to enforce any shop-wide edicts to force workers to do so. And even an attempt to do so would likely cause a huge backlash in the union's favor - not to mention eliciting legal challenges from civil liberties organization who could conceivably be alerted to these kinds of shenanigans by the union.
Also, it's important to mention that none of these techniques are a substitute for face-to-face organizing methods, but should be seen as an extremely helpful adjunct. And an excellent addition to existing methods of mass communication to groups of workers once contact is established.
I'd be curious to hear our viewers early experience with the kind of techniques mentioned in this post - and related experiences - as well as what people think about the efficacy of such tactics in the field.
Jason Pramas is Communications Director and Project Manager for Prometheus Labor Communications - "Union Made Websites for Unions" - and Site Administrator for Prometheus' Communicate or Die labor tech blog.
