Critiques

For the second year in a row, the Communication Workers of America's "Speed Matters" campaign has released "A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States." The campaign surveyed almost 230,000 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico between May 2007 and May 2008 on their speedmatters.org website to gather the necessary data.

My point in the last post was that what is internal and what is external has changed: so-called internal union affairs are now largely external and forums and media outside the union are increasingly part of the union's internal culture and politics.

I think Steve's question is worth a separate discussion:

How does a union organization grapple with the legitimate need to "stay on message" with the need to allow members to have their voice heard in a public venue? It seems
unions, being more "of the people" than say private corporations, have a unique expectation placed upon them to discuss and debate disagreements in public.

What I advise unions to do is the following:

1) Screen comments. As much as I love free-for-all, spirited debate, there are times for having it and times for not having it. A public union website is not the forum for that. Do it behind closed doors.

2) Allow criticism. Members need to be heard. And a good leader will should listen to all criticisms. And the union needs to show that it is genuine about listening to its members.

3) Require all criticisms be done respectfully. No name calling, nothing that even hints at an insult. People must be extremely polite.

4) Require criticisms be accompanied by an alternative suggestion.

5) Criticisms should only be about the stance leaders take on issues, not the leaders themselves. If the leader is an alcoholic megalomaniac, take that up in the union meeting, not in public.

To me, we have to take a step back to get this discussion in the right framework. I think the underlying problem is that some of the foundations of unionism have shifted. Meaning, the old concept of that which is "internal" to the unions and that which is "external" has changed, particularly in relation to communications and politics.

Richard Dorrough called my attention to the submission guidelines on TeamsterPower.org. http://teamsterpower.com/teamster-power-posting-guidelines

TeamsterPower is a good looking site designed by CorD's own Steve Dondley and run by Richard Negri. Its mission is to promote the union and its members, "our national campaigns, our victories, our struggles." It is run by IBT International staff, but is not an official union site.

What follows is the first part of a recent article by Herman Benson and me, that appeared in Union Democracy Review. The audience is not just tech-savvy people, so forgive the elementary stuff.

The internet poses a dilemma for union officials because they are losing their monopoly control over access to their membership. As long as communication depended upon the printed word, they had no problem. They had the official union publication, printed and mailed to the whole membership at union expense, reporting on their services to humanity and on the plaques they received and bestowed for supporting worthy causes. True, most members discarded the products after a casual glance, along with all other bulk mail. Nothing to worry about, because no one else could reach the membership with a contrary message.

Independents, dissidents, critics could print their own stuff, but it was often burdensome and costly. Usually it was technically impossible and prohibitively expensive to get it into the hands of the membership, even more so as autonomous local unions were merged and reorganized from modest-sized manageable units into sprawling mega units, councils, and districts.

But the internet is changing all that. Now anyone can set up a website. E-mail can go out to a whole list at the click of a button. No postage costs, no fancy printing charges. It is economical, convenient, and even free (if necessary you can use a public library.) As more and more unionists become computer savvy and sign up for their own internet services, they cease to be passive recipients of messages; they seek out information available on websites. What they find, they share. And so union oppositionists can be partially relieved of the burden of seeking out an audience; it comes to them and spreads the word.

In response to the challenge of this new medium, most unions have established their own websites and line up their members to receive e-mail. Some unions try to limit their critics or shut them down by assorted disciplinary threat. But nothing works to eliminate the perceived danger from the independent internet.

The typical official website serves a narrow administrative purpose. Members can turn to it for technical information on meeting dates, pensions, legally required notices, and the like; but everyone knows it contains little beyond the acceptable politically correct line and puff pieces for the officers. For something exciting, or revealing, or imaginative, or even fictional, they turn to the independent sites. The reader may be outraged by some of the attacks on their leadership or may laugh off an absurdity, but they find the exchanges interesting. They pay attention, and they can participate in the discussion. The official site is no competition.

Attempts at repression by those in power are doomed to failure. Union officials bring disciplinary charges against their internet critics: libel and slander, revealing union business to the public, violating a claimed union copyright on information, failing properly to distinguish the insurgent site from the official site. The latest: a technical demand that insurgents seal off their sites from non-members by imposing a password that would require readers to identify themselves before opening the independent site. But none of this will really work. The dictatorial Chinese government, empowered by jails and police, finds it impossible to silence the internet voice. And this is the U.S.A. where leaders have only the limited power of their union office; even if they could drive the independent internet into a union underground, they could never repress it.

But some union leaders are enlightened or intelligent enough to know that something new is necessary, or shrewd enough to realize that they must become kind of union democrats despite themselves. (If you can't eliminate them join them!) They even post on the independent sites or establish official union blogs where members are encouraged to express themselves more or less freely, to reject union policies, and even to criticize their leaders.

A blog is a special type of online journal where the blogger offers commentary. Blogs do not stand alone. They offer links to other blogs and sites. Visitors can post their own comments. Blogs form a network, encouraging discussion and exchanging information. In many cases users of websites can establish their own blogs on the site. One expert notes that these new tools are "evidence of a staggering shift [away] from an age of carefully controlled information provided by sanctioned authority." Bloggers are creating a new community, an online community.

By encouraging free dissent under official union auspices, union blogs aim to bring members back home to an arena where their discontent can be, not only expressed, but answered under controlled conditions. To the extent that union members can find an outlet for democratic discussion under union auspices, it is hoped, they will cease to rely exclusively on the independent sites. But the turn to an official arena creates new problems for the union leadership.

The independent internet, uncontrolled, poses an outside democratic challenge to any union establishment. If to mitigate that challenge, they establish their own forum where members can speak freely, they must accept the dangers of internal union democracy. We find them confronting that dilemma in the experiences of several of our most important unions...

What is it that causes some people to accept new inventions quickly and others never? In his book, The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski says: “The very fact that we are so adaptable to our artifactual and technological environment is often what makes us resistant to changes in it, especially as we grow older and accumulate our own familiar things and ways with them.”

The United Farm Workers have updated their website (http://www.ufw.org).

While it certainly is a visual and/or informational improvement over their previous site, they still lack user-driven interactive features, such as user accounts, the ability to post news and blog entries, and member driven forums. Like so many other CTW and AFL-CIO websites, the UFW remains at best ignorant and at worst fearful of a democratic communications network.

You can’t take technology out of politics, and you can’t take politics out of organization. A perfect example of this effect is the means and ends debate. This discussion directly impacts the use of technology in unions. How union organization confronts the necessity of gaining worker’s trust and participation goes hand-in-hand with their attitudes towards the significance and use of tools.

There at least two divergent ideas of how to convince workers to join the union struggle. The first is a variation on “build it and they will come.” This is a bureaucratic theme which argues that good organization is a meritocracy run by experts that understand the “big picture,” plans the strategy and looks out for the best interests of the members. This is identical to the old industrial division of labor where “efficiency” was achieved when managers understood the purpose of the assembly line and the workers only understood a piece of it.

It is not a democratic vision because what democracy means within this model is not good. If you flatten the organizational decision structure you simply get mediocrity and self-interest. You get everyone looking out for themselves, opportunists and free loaders and a bunch of timid people afraid to take risks or a bunch of hot heads who charge off into oblivion. You get ill informed debates because of uneven experiences and different levels of political savvy. You magnify your weaknesses. So, as long as you feed them steaks, who cares how you slaughter the cows? Results matter.

Anyone with experience in the nitty gritty of union politics recognizes that this argument has some truth to it. For example, bargaining committee members who only care about their pet demand. Executive board members who only want to get their hands on the treasury and accumulate perks. Weak International leadership that enables corrupt, business unionism to flourish. Racist, white guy’s cabals.

The other idea takes off from Kurt Vonnegut’s contention that “You are what you pretend to be.” If you adopt a corporate boss organizational structure, well, that’s who you are. Your organizational structure “prefigures” your result. It argues that workers are not passive consumers but need to feel active ownership in their organization. Otherwise your operation will become a mile wide and an inch deep. The problem with only concentrating on results, is that as soon as you don’t deliver what the workers think they deserve, they leave. One leader, no matter how charismatic, is a liability. Organizations, just like complex computer systems, need redundancy.

Even if Democratic organizations do contain all of the faults listed above, you’re not looking for perfection in the bureaucratic sense. There are no shortcuts. You have to have an organization build on a solid foundation of people who want to be there and do not flee at the first sign of adversity. Without this you have a mirage.

We also know that this is true. I’ve been on picket lines where the only thing holding them together is a shared sense of justice. The history of labor in America wasn’t built on a string of victories but a stunning series of defeats where worker’s organizations rose phoenix like from the ashes based on a shared sense of injustice.

Ownership involves communication. The “noise” of democratic give-and-take is a necessary prerequisite for strong communities. It assumes that there is more value in diverse opinions and experiences than problems. It is not an undifferentiated, “mass” it is a series of individual strengths which you’ve now made available for the group to use in problem solving. Democracy is efficiency because it is flexible and fast and avoids bottlenecks that arise when every decision needs to be threaded through a small circle of decision makers. It routes around disruptions just like Internet protocols.

The whole means and end thing reminds me of a discussion I had when I was an enlisted man in the army. I was organizing to restore the idea of a citizen solider rather than a professional one. A Major confronted me on base and said it would never work. He said even the Chinese revolutionary army restored the concept of command and control by restoring officer’s rank because they realized you couldn’t convince someone to charge a machine gun nest. Recently, I ran across the picture of that single individual stopping a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. More on the connection to technology later, this is all for now, I need more coffee.

[image:179]I took a little heat for this swipe at AFGE's Local 1286 web site. To help clean up my sullied reputation as a "bitchy" person, let me now offer some words of high praise for a site that's doing things right, AFSCME Local 3800.

Flashback to the web circa 1997. Remember all the waving flag animations, scrolling text, and midi music? Well, our brothers and sisters at AFGE Local 1286 have perfectly captured that era to take CoD's first "Retro Site of the Week Award." Their site almost brought a tear to my eye. Make sure your speakers are on and then click here to enjoy.

Last November, SEIU launched the "Unite to Win" web site featuring a blog by its President, Andy Stern, making them the first American international union to dialogue with the public on the Internet. Stern's decision to start a blog was a great public relations strategy for his cause and it demonstrates that he has a much better grasp of the Internet's communicative powers than most other union leaders. However, SEIU's technical implementation and the administrative policies (or lack thereof) that govern the blog have problems that should be addressed if it is to become a model for other unions to follow.

The AFL-CIO has revamped its web site in time for the upcoming convention. Anyone expecting an embrace of new and interactive web technologies by America's largest federation of unions will be disappointed, however. Amazingly, the site still lacks an RSS feed for news. It also lacks a feature for facilitating any kind of two-way, online dialogue. One interesting change is that President John Sweeney has a column featured on the front page. You might be tempted to call it a blog, however, it lacks any blog features and its tone does not have the breezy, personal feel that characterizes the blog genre of writing.

I ran across an impressive site this morning. It's called PostalMag.com (a.k.a PostalBlog.com) and it provides a wealth of interesting features and material geared to postal workers. In short, it's doing many things the international postal worker union sites should be doing but aren't.

I think it would be a good idea to have a stated [Off Topic Policy] - if there is one, please point me in the right direction. I am not sure how I feel having this done to peoples posts: "Since this post is off-topic, I am disabling further comments here." I would be more interested in saying, hey, this isn't on topic, so I am moving it to your own weblog page. That way we encourage people who got something to say, to say it in the right places, while keeping the integrety of the site mission. What do other folks think?

"Techsunite.org is the nationally-oriented web site of WashTech/CWA, the nation's leading union for high-tech workers. We are ensuring that our voices get heard and our needs are met."

This is what they want you to believe, but the don't even have an RSS feed yet. Somebody help them out!!