New idea

On October 16th and 17th, I organized a Digital Media Conference at Northeastern University under the auspices of the National Writers Union Boston Chapter - and my online metro news publication, Open Media Boston - to address a growing list of changes in the creative industries that are making it increasingly difficult for creative workers like writers to make a living. The situation is even worse for those many creators that are freelancers. Or to put it in labor terms, those creators that are contingent workers. Because one major problem that the labor movement has not yet been able to deal with in a comprehensive way is the resurgance of contingent work (a.k.a. contract work, indpendent contracting, temp work, day labor, etc.) in the modern economy. As labor's power has waned over the last 4 decades, our movement has lost the ability to control core labor markets enough to ensure basic labor standards for most workers. And we are being pushed to return to 19th century labor conditions by large corporations in ways that are very hard to defend against.

Many of the technologies I've discussed here at Communicate or Die over the last year are primary accessed as online services - available for free or cheap for use by the general public. This may seem like an odd thing to do on a company blog. Even one run by a unionized and pro-labor technology company like Prometheus Labor Communications. But the main mandate that my boss, Steve Dondley, gave me for CorD was to explore technologies of interest to the labor movement. And it's virtually impossible to do that without talking about various online services ... some, but not all, of which offer functionalities that compete with some of the services we offer our clients on the Drupal website we build for them. And most of which are owned by large corporations that we have serious problems with as a group of folks with strong labor backgrounds.

Recently the AFL-CIO launched a new site called Unemployment Lifeline that uses modern social media to provide a place for laid-off American workers to get some help and to connect - often for the first time - to the labor movement.

The surprisingly colorful and attractive site (sorry, but as someone involved in building labor websites, I notice that many union leaders ask for, shall we say, plain design concepts) offers a variety of ways for people to get involved with actions for national health reform and against giveaways to big business. It also provides forums where unemployed folks can talk with each other and compare notes, a calendar of relevant events nationwide, and a resource page where people can turn for human services and legal advice.

ArsTechnica, one of my favorite tech news sites, has been reporting for some months now that the much-hyped One Laptop Per Child project has fallen on hard times. This is interesting news for labor techies ... although a little background is in order to explain why.

OLPC was announced at the ever labor-friendly (not) World Economic Forum in 2005. The concept was straightforward - create a small laptop that can be cheaply mass produced and sold to the governments of poor countries for $100 per unit to distribute to schoolchildren and help close the "digital divide."

A couple of months ago at a talk at MIT on social media, I made a point that in a down economy, we should not assume that all the nifty free services we've all come to expect on the web are going to remain free forever. After all, only 10 years ago we still had to pay to have simple listservs and forums. We had nothing like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook and so on.

Yet we know that the business model companies have built many of these major services on - and they are, alas, mostly corporate run at this point - has been advertising-based. That is, these companies offer a service to users like us for "free," but hope to turn a profit based on selling advertising to other companies.

In an age when workers in all sectors are making ever more frequent use of mobile communications and computing technology, it is critical for the labor movement to devote a significant amount of time to thinking about exploring new organizing techniques that can take advantage of this development.

What does your union do when it's involved in a media-worthy event? Does it use its own public relations staff to get the union's perspective in the media's eye - and though them, the public eye? Does it hire a labor-friendly public relations company to do press work? And what about taking advantage of new social media technologies of the type we've engaged in an extended examination of here at Communicate or Die? Does your union make use of online social networks to get word out directly to large numbers of people in target markets? Does it have staff dedicated to this new and growing aspect of public relations work?

I got back yesterday from a great LaborTech conference in San Francisco. There was a lot of buzz and excitement in air there. I told Steve Zeltzer, the organizer of the conference along with his wife, Kazmi Torii, that I think I know how it must have felt in 1966 or 1967 when the world was on the cusp of a cultural revolution. It seems that the rise of all the powerful new communication tools at our disposal and the looming collapse of capitalism as we know it is creating opportunities for workers to have real influence and control over their own destiny.

What's missing in all of this, I think, is a concerted effort to make sure workers and their leaders know about these tools and how to best take advantage of them.

I'd like to invite people to participate in the pre-beta version of UnionBook -- a social networking site for trade unionists to be launched in early 2009 by LabourStart.

Please visit http://www.unionbook.org and register for an account.

We need your feedback to get this site ready for prime time.

Oftentimes what's good for people as consumers is also good for people as union members - and vice versa. Case in point, consumers' expectations that quality goods won't, say, explode when they're not supposed to coincides nicely with the elan that union workers demonstrate as regards their ability to produce quality goods. Labor's explanation for this pride in a job well done is that union workers have decent benefits and make fair wages, and because of that are in decent health and spirits. Which all translates to being able to do their best on the job, and results in their production of quality goods.

What is the marketing industry telling corporate leadership about social networking? We're as curious about that question at Prometheus as many other labor movement folks are; so we listened to a podcast from a recent conference called Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World for some answers. And the panel led by event host Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, was certainly not shy about providing them.