Several years ago, the Canadian labour educator Marc Belanger proposed the creation of an online International Labour University. His dream was never realized, but if you ask Marc today, he'll tell you that websites like the one I established – LabourStart (http://www.labourstart.org) -- are in fact, online labour education projects on a global scale.

At first glance, that sounds like a rather expansive view of what constitutes labour education. After all, the primary features on a website like LabourStart are daily links to news stories about workers and unions around the world (in ten languages) and several online campaigns. There's not much in the way of traditional educational material – indeed, even the many discussion forums set up on the website, which could have played the role of online classrooms, have been for the most part dormant.

So in what sense could LabourStart be seen, as Belanger sees it, first and foremost as an educational project?

I think to understand it in that sense, one has to remember what international trade union activity was like as recently as a decade ago. Before the popularization of the Internet, most trade unionists knew very little about the broad international labour movement. Indeed, they often knew little outside their own union, let alone outside their own country. And that is still the case for most trade unionists, even the ones with Internet connections.

However, increasingly there are thousands of trade unionists who because they are connected to the net, and because they access websites like LabourStart, see the world differently.

They no longer get their international trade union news and appeals for solidarity through the filtering of their union or national trade union center (or worse, filtered by the mainstream media). Instead, they get it directly to their email inbox. Organizations like the US-based Campaign for Labor Rights with its 12,000 email subscribers, or LabourStart, with its 16,000 email addresses, are able to bring news of violations of trade union rights to the inboxes of union activists within hours of the violation taking place.

Sometimes those campaigns succeed – as happened in 2002 when the Sydney Hilton hotel tried to shut down for renovations and sack the entire staff in the process, thus triggering a massive online campaign. But more interesting to us as labour educators might be the “failures”. A good example of this might be a campaign we waged together with the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF), an IFWEA affiliate.

The IUF was concerned that the Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus was going to seize control over its affiliated union there. There was little time to spare – the expected coup d'etat would take place in only two weeks. There was no time to do a proper educational campaign, online or off. So we created a web page giving background information and the chance to send a message of protest off to the Belarussian government.

In terms of reader response, it was one of our least successful efforts. While the Sydney campaign had rapidly produced some 3,000 protest messages to the Hilton management, the Belarus campaign ended in September 2002 with only 383 messages having been sent. Lukashenko did indeed succeed in crushing the union.

So where's the educational bit here? Well, the lack of success for the campaign might be attributed to the fact that most people, even trade union activists, know little or nothing about the country of Belarus. I often ask people at a British trade union college where I do some teaching if they have ever heard of this country, or its leader, or know anything at all about its repressive policies. I have not yet met a single trade unionist here in the UK who knew anything at all about this issue.

Using the powerful tools of the web and email, with news stories, background material and above all a campaign in which people could participate, we were able to do some very basic educational work around the subject of trade union rights in this neglected corner of Europe. True, only 383 people were prepared to sign off on the campaign at that time, but I bet if we were to do a similar campaign in the future, we'd get a larger response.

Ask a labour educator like Marc Belanger what's the point of doing a campaign like the one we did on Belarus and he'll explain that what we're doing is what labour educators have always done – except that we're doing it online.