Eric Lee

In the last few months, LabourStart has added two new languages (Danish and Finnish) to its editions. The online global labour news service is now available in twelve languages. And there are more on the way.

I mention this in passing because it should be obvious that if you want to use the Internet to communicate, and if you are aiming to reach a global audience, surely you will want to do so in as many languages as possible.

But a brief look at the other international labour websites will reveal that we have a very long way to go before we can claim to be speaking to workers in their own languages.

The Global Unions website is a joint effort of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), all the global union federations, and the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC). The aim of the website is to give the affiliated unions "the ability to draw the attention of their partners, their members, and the press to the news they produce and the campaigns they run." Unfortunately the site – several years after its launch – is only in English.

The website of the ICFTU itself adds Spanish and French to its list of languages, but this hardly makes it accessible to the organization's 151,000,000 members, only a minority of whom will be able to read from the three languages being offered.

The global union federations fare somewhat better. The food workers (IUF) have a website in eight languages (soon to be nine), with the number of available languages having nearly doubled in the last three years. The metalworkers (IMF) have seven languages available and the chemical workers (ICEM), transport workers (ITF) and public sector workers (PSI) follow with six each.

The textile workers (ITGLWF) and Union Network International (UNI) offer four languages each, the journalists (IUJ) three, the Education International two, and TUAC and the building workers (IFBWW) only one.

ICTUR's own website offers material in three languages.

In contrast, a number of web-based projects (often run entirely by volunteers) have been far more successful at serving those Internet users who are not English speakers.

The web's leading search engine, Google, offers interfaces in 88 languages. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, appears in 51 languages. The Open Directory Project features directories in 72 languages.

The software we use to browse the web is also increasingly multilingual. The open source web browser Mozilla has 98 language versions. Its commercial rival Opera is available in 34 officially supported languages. The popular instant messaging software ICQ is available in 19 languages.

There are an estimated 6,000 spoken languages in the world today. Many of these are spoken only by small numbers of people and roughly half of these are expected to become extinct in the next several decades. But there are still forty languages spoken by fifteen million speakers or more.

But many of these are languages we never see on the global trade union websites. If we look at a list of languages spoken by at least fifty million people, they include the following: Chinese, Arabic, Bengali, Panjabi, Hindi, Javanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Turkish, and Urdu.

One might argue that a global trade union website need not feature languages that are only spoken in one country (such as Korean) – but if that were the case, why are global union federations choosing languages like Italian, Croatian and Japanese?

Alternately, it could be argued that there might not be very many Urdu or Marathi speakers online – but that is certainly not the case with Chinese or Korean, which have enormous numbers of Internet users.

In their defense, trade unions will argue that creating websites in additional languages is costly – but the examples given earlier of the Wikipedia, Google, the Open Directory Project, and even LabourStart do show that if there's a will, there's a way. Even if there is no money.

It might also be argued that there wouldn't be much of a readership for a global trade union website in a language like Chinese. I would argue the opposite. There is an urgent need to get the message about workers' rights and free trade unionism to places like China, in Chinese. That's why the work of groups like the China Labour Bulletin is so vital. For the same reason, the ICFTU and all the other members of the "global unions family" should be producing material online in the world's most widely spoken languages. And so should ICTUR and LabourStart.

Working together with unions in developing countries, the international trade union movement could be creating a strong web presence in all the major languages spoken in the world. Such websites could prove vital tools in campaigning for workers' and promoting trade unionism in countries (such as China, Burma and Vietnam) where free and independent unions do not yet exist.

Globalization and the Internet have given our movement the opportunity to break out of its North American and Western European ghettos. But we cannot do so if we choose to speak to the world only in the languages that are spoken in Geneva and Brussels.

Posted by Eric Lee at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had to read this story twice to be sure it wasn't a joke.

Yesterday, at a private meeting with U.S. governors in the White House, George Bush's Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, called the National Education Association -- one of America's two national teachers' unions, with 2.7 million members -- a "terrorist organization".

The union has responded by saying that "it is morally repugnant to equate those who teach America's children with terrorists". Obviously. But the really frightening part of the NEA response reads:

"This is the kind of rhetoric we have come to expect from this Administration whenever one challenges its worldview."

Remember that in the USA of 2004, when a cabinet member calls a group a "terrorist organization," that's a highly explosive term. As they used to say in the Wild West, "them's fightin' words".

Meanwhile, the spokesman for John Kerry, who recently won the unanimous support of the AFL-CIO in his bid for the presidency, said:

"Secretary Paige should apologize for his remarks calling the National Education Association a terrorist organization. These remarks are inappropriate, particularly at a time when our nation has experienced the devastation caused by terrorism."

Inappropriate? Is that the strongest word one can think of?

The American Federation of Teachers emphasized -- as Kerry's spokesman did not -- that "Paige's remarks are more than an 'inappropriate choice of words'."

Today, Paige issued a brief apology, which began:

"It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA's Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind's historic education reforms . . ."

Maybe it's just me, but I think we cannot accept that a cabinet member in the U.S. government can call a trade union a "terrorist organization". And a simple apology is hardly the appropriate response. The apology should come from President Bush, following an announcement that he has fired his Education Secretary.

Not likely, right? Well, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to write to Rod Paige myself, telling him that an apology is not enough and that he should resign. His email address is Rod.Paige@ed.gov

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The Wobblies taught the labour movement to sing. I was reminded of this a couple of years ago in the city of Inchon, South Korea. I was part of an international delegation of people from metal workers' unions and we were paying a courtesy call on the leaders of the Daewoo car workers. At the time, they were holed up in the city's cathedral, where they had sought asylum from the police.

Each of us was asked to say a few words to the hundreds of Daewoo workers who were encamped on the cathedral grounds. One of those who spoke was a UAW official (and a Wobbly) who grabbed the microphone with a courage which I could never muster and sang "Solidarity Forever". I'm not sure how much the Korean auto workers understood of the song's lyrics, or if they knew its history, but I, for one, was deeply touched.

Maybe it was at that moment that the idea for Radio LabourStart gelled in my mind.

I have long been convinced that we should be using the Internet for more than just the creation of text and still images on websites. In fact, in my 1996 book on the subject of unions and the Internet, I had a chapter on streaming multimedia and its potential uses by trade unions. More than seven years have passed since I wrote that, and unfortunately, little progress has been made.

Perhaps the most ambitious step so far was the launch of the Workers Independent News Service (WINS), which can be found on the web at http://www.laborradio.org. WINS is a great idea, but they've limited themselves to producing a daily three minute news summary and some features, and these are made available to "real" radio stations to be played to a large audience. A great idea -- but not the kind of online labour radio station I was dreaming of.

A great labour radio station would start out on the web, but also be available for re-broadcast via FM and AM stations, via satellite and through whatever other means become available. It should be multi-lingual, reaching out to the workers of the world in their own languages. It should include news, features, interviews, and music -- lots of music.

The idea is radical and it is subversive to its core. Imagine, if you will, workers in any modern workplace who are chained to desks instead of machines, and on whose desks sit computers with high-speed Internet connections. There are millions of such workers, the vast majority of them not union members, often working in environments which are extremely hostile to unions.

Studies show that millions of such workers listen to Internet radio stations during their workday. Some of those stations are Internet versions of existing, conventional stations while others are Internet-only. Millions of people sit at their desks, in their offices and schools, doing their jobs, listening to music.

Now, imagine that more and more of them discover Radio LabourStart (http://radio.labourstart.org), which was launched at the beginning of February. Instead of hearing the latest top tunes from MTV, they begin to discover songs like "Solidarity Forever". Imagine a workplace where always seems to be hearing bits of song by people like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Utah Phillips. At first the bosses may not notice. And people will listen because it's just one of those subversive little things one does in one's workplace.

People will listen to Radio LabourStart because they're told not to. They'll listen because when they discover the half-forgotten world of workers' songs, they're going to find the experience liberating and wonderful. They'll listen too because they want to hear union news and they want to hear telephone interviews with workers on picket lines and with trade unionists in jail.

Never underestimate the effect of radio as a subversive tool -- 1989 would never have been possible without Radio Free Europe, with all its flaws. For millions of people living under one-party regimes, the BBC World Service today, as during the dark days of the second world war, is a vital source of information.

A trade union radio station, broadcasting 24/7 to a global audience, will play no less a subversive and liberating role.

Radio LabourStart isn't yet that station. It is already playing a nice mix of labour songs and songs of protest and social justice. It's airing the daily WINS news and some news stories of its own, taken off the LabourStart website. It broadcast a couple of interviews in its first two weeks on air.

But we have a long way to go. I'm delighted to be announcing the launch of this station in my own union's newspaper because as I said at the beginning -- the Wobblies taught the labor movement to sing. I look forward to working with you on this exciting project, and to use Internet radio, as we have already used websites and email, to change the world.

Posted by Eric Lee at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

As I write these words, it's becoming increasingly likely that John Kerry is going to be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 2004. I was looking at Kerry's website the other day and was struck by how far advanced the U.S. Presidential candidates were in their use of the net.

There are features on the Kerry site that I'd never seen before, such as "MeetUp". Clicking on that link would take you to an independent website which organises meetings around the world for people who share common interests. Over a million people in more than 50 countries have registered for the service, and they meet to discuss nearly 4,000 different topics, of which the John Kerry campaign is only one. If you register for the site, you can agree with others who share your interest on a date, time and place for a meeting, and you then meet up. Kerry's campaign is using this well – over 40,000 of his supporters have already signed up through this site to meet face to face.

Another surprising feature on the site is the long list of weblogs linked to the campaign, nearly all of them unofficial – weblogs with names like "Moms for Kerry". The campaign seems to be encouraging its supporters to create their own online journals and is giving prominence to these, even though they're not under the control of the campaign. Naturally, there's an official web log as well, updated daily.

There's an "online action headquarters", with a list of suggestions for things activists can do without getting out of their chairs. These go way beyond conventional things like signing up for a mailing list or downloading campaign material. They include an online discussion forum, a web ring, joining online networking groups like Friendster, Ryze and Tribe, and sending emails to editors of online publications.

It goes without saying that you can watch all the candidate's television advertisements and most of his interviews and speeches through the website. You can donate money, and Kerry's campaign raises a lot of money through the web.

What amazed me about all this is that Kerry's campaign is not the one people point to as being Internet-savvy; Howard Dean is the one who is supposed to have made such great use of the web. Nevertheless, the Kerry website can teach trade unionists much about how to use the Internet to organize and campaign, how to raise money and organize face-to-face meetings, and how to build strong networks of volunteer activists. I've never seen a trade union web page as exciting as the Kerry page – but there's no reason why we couldn't be using many of the same tools Kerry does.

John Kerry's official website is located at:

http://www.johnkerry.com/

Posted by Eric Lee at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)