Eric Lee

I returned a few weeks ago from a month-long journey to Australia and New Zealand, countries in which the trade union movement has taken some huge steps forward in its use of the new communications technology. I'd like to share six of the things that I saw -- examples of trade unions using the net effectively.

1. There are unions in Australia which recruit members online. By that I don't mean that they allow potential members to print out a PDF file of the membership application form which they can then fill in by pen and mail in. (Though there are unions which consider that a kind of "online recruitment".) Nor do I mean that a potential member fills in an online form and then gets sent something in the post which they have to fill in again in order to join. I'm talking about real online recruitment, where joining a union is as easy as shopping at Amazon.com. A pioneer in this field is the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF) whose website is located at http://www.nswtf.org.au/ The NSWTF website allows teachers to join their union paying with a credit card -- in spite of a rather complex payment structure. If they can do this, why can't workers join any union, anywhere, the same way?

2. Unions in Australia have begun to make use of a campaigning model pioneered by LabourStart, using keyword-based advertising on Google. One of the first to do so is the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU). In early May, childcare workers and their supporters from all across Australia took part in an email campaign based at the LHMU's website ( http://www.lhmu.org.au ). At one point, a thousand email messages a day were pouring into the inbox of the country's Treasurer, Peter Costello. Google's keyword-based advertising is now playing an increasing role in the union's online campaigns.

3. In several of the events I participated in, I spoke about how someday we will all be using handheld, wireless devices to access the Internet. For at least one Australian union, that "someday" is now. The flight attendants (members of the Flight Attendants Association of Australia - http://www.faaa.net/ ) were quick to inform me that use of wireless devices to access the net was common in their union. That shouldn't be surprising; flight attendants spend a great deal of their time in airports and hotels, two of the places where wireless internet access is most likely to be available. The FAAA is one of the unions making the most of tools like email, as it is the only way to reach most of the members.

4. One of the big issues facing the trade union movement in the advanced industrial countries at least is going to be ensuring that members and potential members have access to our websites and email from their workplaces. Employers are going to have to be compelled, either by collective bargaining or by law, to a give unions electronic access to their members. In most countries, this is at best an aspiration, but in New South Wales, the trade union movement has managed -- after a five year struggle -- to get the government to propose powerful new legislation to ensure just such access. (For full details, go here: http://workers.labor.net.au/215/news3_legal.html )

5. That last link would have taken you to what is perhaps the crowning achievement of the Australian labour movement online: the weekly online newsletter Workers Online. Launched more than five years ago, Workers Online has already published some 225 issues, all of which are still viewable on the net. Edited by a half-time journalist staffer, it has become essential reading every Friday not only for trade union activists, but for journalists, politicians and others. To see what an online trade union newspaper would look like, check out http://workers.labor.net.au/latest

6. And finally, there's news syndication. Many Australian websites share their news content through something called LaborNet ( http://www.labor.net.au/ ). If I visit the website of, say, the New South Wales Teachers, I can read the latest news coming from the nurses union. It may not seem like much, but at least here in Britain, the idea that unions will run links to other unions' news stories is Utopian. Globally, LabourStart has managed to do something like this, but Australia offers perhaps the only example of a national labour news syndication service online.

None of this should be taken to mean that unions in Australia have done a perfect job. I also saw examples of unions with poor websites, or unions that were doing nothing to collect the email addresses of their members, or who were doing an utterly inadequate job of campaigning online. Just like unions in most countries.

But I also saw some examples, six of which I mentioned above, of truly impressive work being done down under. I have seen the future of how trade unions everywhere will use the net, and like Australia itself, it's bright and sunny.

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Posted by Eric Lee at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ronald Reagan and Victor Reuther were born only months apart in the years before the first world war. They both died last weekend in America, aged 92 and 93. One is being mourned by the rich and powerful, with a lavish state funeral planned. The other is being honored more quietly by ordinary working people. Their lives ran along strangely parallel lines, but in the end they came to represent two very different Americas.

Reagan was the son of a shoe salesman in Illinois, while Reuther came from a family of a steel worker in West Virginia. Both were sons of the working class.

Both men eventually became active trade unionists. Reuther helped to found the United Auto Workers (UAW) together with his brothers Walter and Roy. Reagan was repeatedly elected president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Both men played controversial roles in the cold war within the American unions. The Reuther brothers, though committed democratic socialists themselves, purged their union of Communist influence. Reagan was also involved in struggles against both Communist and mob-dominated unions, and apparently quietly informed on Communists in Hollywood to the FBI.

By the 1940s both men were supporters of the Democratic Party -- Reuther having abandoned the Socialists, and Reagan not yet having embraced the Republicans.

And both men were the targets of assassination attempts. In the case of Victor Reuther, a 1949 gunshot attack on his home cost him his eye.

Victor became active in the trade union movement many years before Reagan did -- perhaps inspired by the example of his father who was an active trade unionist.

And while both men opposed Stalinist totalitarianism, Victor Reuther remained a committed democratic socialist even as Reagan drifted further and further to the right.

Victor Reuther retired from the UAW, where he had headed the education department and worked in international affairs in 1972, not long after his brother Walter was tragically killed in a plane crash. At the same time, Ronald Reagan's career was just beginning to take off, leading to a nearly-successful bid for the Republican nomination four years later, when he was already at retirement age, and his election at the age of 69.

Though the two men's lives were lived in parallel, they represented two sides of American life.

Ronald Reagan began his presidency by destroying the air traffic controller's union in the most unabashed and shameless union-busting ever undertaken by the federal government. The unions never forgave him. Reagan's years in office were marked by a spectacular decline in union strength -- a decline from which unions have yet to recover.

Reagan represented that side of America which believed in the individual, distrusted government, and yet wanted to strengthen the military.

Reuther came from that wing of the American trade union movement which promoted "social movement trade unionism." His brother Walter was the outstanding trade union opponent of the Vietnam War, incurring the wrath of more traditional labour leaders like George Meany who supported every military action so long as the enemy was perceived as being "Communist".

Ronald Reagan is today being mourned by the rich and the powerful and by the millions who voted for him and even by some who did not. He is admired for his wit and his charm, and some give him credit for ending the cold war and bringing about the downfall of Communism.

Victor Reuther will not have a grandiose state funeral. Newspapers will not devote pages and pages to his memory. But for trade unionists everywhere, the death of the last of the Reuther brothers is a sad moment indeed.

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Posted by Eric Lee at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)