Eric Lee

I don't know if anyone else is picking up on this, but computer viruses are increasingly becoming a class issue. An article in today's newspaper revealed that the author of the Mydoom virus which is now racing around the net deliberately chose to target home users rather than corporate, government or military users.

Home users are 'soft targets' for virus writers. They often barely understand the computer that they have purchased. They use whatever software came with it. If the computer comes with Outlook Express, they use Outlook Express. If Outlook Express turns out to be a highly efficient virus delivery agent that also sends and receives email, well then, nothing to be done.

Tell your average home user that they should change their email program over to something else (like the excellent Mozilla Thunderbird) and get ready for the blank stare.

And then there's anti-virus software. Buy a new computer and you will probably get something installed with it. But if you don't pay to renew the license, you don't get protection. And if you don't update the virus lists, you're not protected.

Home users suffer both a lack of funds and a lack of knowledge and they are increasingly the intended target of malicious attacks like Mydoom.

They are also, increasingly, working class people. The very rich will have the latest and best anti-virus software on their machines. They will be accessing the net through secure corporate networks, behind firewalls, and will rarely be exposed to problems. And if they do have a problem, they simply ring up the folks in the IT department who will come and fix it.

With help lines costing as much as £1.00 per minute here in the U.K., how often to you think working class people are going to pick up the phone and ask for help?

I don't like the comparison sometimes made between virus-writers and terrorists, but I do see one thing they have in common: they go after the easy targets. If you're a Hamas suicide bomber, you don't go looking for Israel's rich and famous. You blow up a bus filled with early-morning commuters, working class people.

If you're a virus-writer, you go after the masses of people who are likely to open your attachments, who are likely to not have the latest virus protection, who wouldn't know a firewall from a firefly, who haven't bothered to pay for any software that didn't come with their computer, and who don't call technical support because it's expensive and because they don't understand what they're told anyway.

Virus-writers are targetting working class people -- and the organizations whose job it is to defend working-class people (the trade unions) have a responsibility to help. Unions should be educating their members to use the new communications technology -- and to use it safely.

Unions should be promoting open source software like Mozilla, Open Office and Linux because it is free and because it is more secure. They should be partnering with software companies to distribute inexpensive (or free) tools to members that will protect their investments in their home computers. Tools like ZoneAlarm (a free firewall), anti-virus software, and programs like MailWasher Pro that allow users to preview their email on servers, downloading to their computers only emails that they know they want to read.

Unions have an interest in keeping their members online -- meaning that we have an interest in keeping them virus-free as well.

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

The annual labor website of the year competition -- which the IWW won four years ago -- has led me to discover many strange and wonderful websites. Some of these are more strange than wonderful. And some of the strangest of all have got to be the websites of the ultra-right wing John Birch Society.

I should begin by explaining that while there are "officially nominated" sites in the annual competition, anyone with an email address can vote for any site they want. This has led to some anti-union websites getting votes, though never more than a handful of votes. Companies sometimes create the web equivalent of a company union, websites which tout the advantages to employees of not organizing. But this year, I discovered something far more dangerous.

It began with a single vote cast for a site called RescueAmericanJobs.org. I decided to have a look at the site. One's initial impression is that this is just another union website -- and that impression is deliberately cultivated. There's a banner with the slogan "One person can make a difference". There's an appeal to buy American-made products. There's even a quaint story behind the site, apparently -- one which is designed to make a person think there couldn't possibly be an racist motive behind the campaign. "The founders of Rescue American Jobs are a unique pair of patriots - an American-born citizen from the rural South and her husband, a Chinese-Singaporean immigrant who is in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen," we are told. So there you go, we're not racists at all. One of us isn't even white.

One has to dig deeper, however. Rescue American Jobs is part of something called the Coalition for the Future American Worker which unites, it claims, some 100,000 people in a wide range of organizations -- none of which I can honestly say I have ever heard of. These include a number with very innocent sounding names, such as the National Association for the Employment of Americans, American Jobs Coalition, and American Labor First. No mention yet of anything as nasty as the John Birch Society, but hang on a minute.

On the site's news page, you'll find a link to two stories from The New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society. The articles are both by William F. Jasper, the magazine's senior editor, and are both from 2003.

One of them concludes with these words: ". . . more and more Americans are feeling the harsh reality of the planned 'new world order' or are beginning to see the writing on the wall concerning their own jobs, businesses, and professions . . . These newly awakened Americans can be reached and organized into a formidable force to upset the subversive globalist agenda and preserve our independence. But we have no time to waste."

A visit to John Birch Society's own home page reveals that its main campaign is now to "Stop the FTAA". It's even more prominent than its efforts to get the US out of the United Nations, or get the Panama Canal returned to US control. And they've created a special website at www.stoptheftaa.org.

The Birchers are clearly trying to tap into two genuine concerns of the labor movement in the US -- job loss and opposition to globalization. They're working on fertile ground. Their sites are virtually indistinguishable from genuine left wing and trade union sites, with their fluttering American flags on the one hand and opposition to the capitalist "new world order" on the other. They are trying -- with some success -- to blend in.

All the various anti-immigration/anti-globalization sites in this network link to one another -- but they also link to sites which are part of the mainstream labor movement. For example, follow a couple of links from the Coalition for the Future American Worker site and you're on the "How Americans Can Buy American" website. This site promotes "Union Jeans and Apparel", a company which appears on the "Union Mall" together with a number of union-backed shops. There are also links to genuine union sites, such as the Communications Workers of America, or WashTech, the union organizing high-tech workers in the Pacific Northwest.

On the web, one can quickly throw together a website, creating what appears to be a genuine grassroots organization in a matter of minutes. The Birchers and their allies seem to have done this over and over again. Front organizations of this kind were invented by twentieth century totalitarians of both the Communist and Nazi variants to make it easier to recruit and organize. These websites are net-based versions of the old front organizations.

Unions which engage in over-the-top patriotism and flag waving, which don't know the difference between "buy union" and "buy American", are making it easier for the ultra-rightists to get a foot in the door. And left-wing anti-globalization protestors who substitute xenophobia for international solidarity are also setting themselves up for Bircher's "stop the new world order" propaganda. Only an informed, critical approach to these issues -- and a commitment to genuine internationalism -- can protect us from this danger.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

In late 1997, I had an idea. Why not sponsor a "Labour Website of the Year" competition? My book on "The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism" had come out a year earlier. There were already a number of union websites. I had a site of my own, at that time hosted by Canada's largest union, CUPE. It had been set up to accompany the book. LabourStart did not yet exist.

I put out the word, and to my astonishment, people began voting (by email). Seven sites received votes. The winner was the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM). Now to be perfectly honest, not very many people voted. And seven is not a whole lot of sites. But it was a beginning.

A few months later, LabourStart was launched. And in early 1999, I tried to hold a second labour website of the year competition. This time, dozens of votes were cast for some 25 sites. The winner was a British union, the GPMU.

It was clear that we were on to something. The number of votes began to steadily increase, and by early 2001 we were up to 37 sites in the running and some 300 votes cast. A year later, we experienced a more than 1,000 per cent increase as the number of votes shot up to 3,022 with some 200 sites in the running. Only four years had passed since we had begun.

Last year was our most successful so far, with 6,477 votes cast for some 330 websites. The winner was one of the very best union websites, Australia's Workers Online. It had featured as a runner-up in nearly all the previous competitions.

Today, voting began for the 7th annual Labour Website of the Year. There are 27 officially nominated sites, suggested by LabourStart's network of more than 230 correspondents. Those sites come from trade unions all over the globe -- in Australia, Malaysia, Nepal, Korea, South Africa, the USA, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. For the first time, one of the candidates is from an Arab country -- the website of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, which came into existence following the collapse of the Saddam regime.

Also for the first time, weblogs are prominently featured among the nominated sites -- the first two blogs produced by trade union general secretaries in the U.K.

Voters are not confined to the officially nominated sites. Not only can they vote for whomever they please using a 'write-in ballot', but any site can place a 'Vote for this site' banner on its home page and begin collecting votes.

Voting takes place over a three week period and will end on 31 January, with results to be announced the following day.

It may not be the Academy Awards, but it is the only global award for website excellence in the trade union movement. And that's pretty exciting, isn't it?

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More than three million homes and businesses in the UK now have broadband access to the Internet, with 40,000 new connections being made every week. By the end of 2005, it should be possible to connect every home in the country to a high-speed version of the net.

The very rapid uptake of broadband Internet by British consumers has implications for organisations which use the Internet, many of which are adapting to the new possibilities.

For example, it is now possible to hear reliable, high-quality audio streams through the net. After years of hype, Internet radio has become a reality.

Just one service – live365.com – is currently broadcasting 22,000 stations online. Compared to that, the digital radio sets that so many Britons received for Christmas, with their promise of up to 40 stations, seem rather limited.

The costs of setting up an online radio station are minimal. Going the full commercial route, the cost of a server and bandwidth would be around £100 a year. At those prices, it will not be long before there is a proliferation of trade union-based online radio stations, with even local unions beginning to broadcast content.

A pioneering effort in trade union use of Internet Radio was the launch a couple of years ago of WINS, the Workers Independent News Service, located at http://www.laborradio.org/. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, WINS provides daily labour news headlines and features, both through the net and, using the same technology, to radio stations which then re-broadcast the material.

In South Africa, labour radio production began as early as 1997, and Workers World Radio Productions, based in Cape Town, has recently been promoting the idea of international cooperation between union radio stations using the Internet.

And in February 2004, LabourStart will be formally launching its own station, http://radio.labourstart.org.

Just a few years ago, if unions wanted to broadcast audio, they had two choices – purchasing advertising on existing commercial stations, or getting air time through interviews. Setting up a union radio station was unthinkable.

Today, if British unions wanted, they could each (or collectively) have a radio station of their own, broadcasting their own news and views 24 hours a day, accessible to all those millions of people who now have broadband Internet.

Posted by Eric Lee at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)