Eric Lee

Last Friday, the British daily newspaper The Independent ran a column by Johann Hari which while it opposed the AUT boycott of Israel did call for "smart sanctions" instead. My letter in response to Hari was published today, and appears below.

Johann Hari suggests that "smart sanctions" are a better way of dealing with Israel than the academic boycott which was overturned last week. Certainly compared to the proponents of that boycott, Hari's suggestion is a step forward.

But it is still the wrong approach. If there is ever to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians, it will come about because both peoples have grown tired of war and more willing to make the painful concessions that peace requires. In that sense, there is very little that we in Britain can do at all.

To promote peace, we must be guided by what the moderates on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides want from us. The peace camp in Israel does not want well-meaning people in places like the UK doing things which strengthen Sharon at home, as the short-lived AUT boycott did.

The Israeli left is also acutely sensitive to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere. Every Israeli listens attentively to criticism of the Jewish state to catch the nuances that would indicate whether this is constructive criticism coming from a friend, or whether it is tainted with hatred of all things Jewish.

I am also struck by the insistence in these debates that we must focus on positive ways to change Israel's behaviour. This is a conflict in which there are two sides. Israeli behaviour in the occupied territories is indefensible, but Palestinian suicide bombers have done their fair share of indefensible things, too. What sanctions are being proposed against them?

Sanctions and boycotts will do no one any good. We in Britain should be asking ourselves one simple question: what can we do to support those brave souls in Israel and Palestine who are struggling for peace?

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A decade ago, maybe even five years ago, the story I'm about to tell could never have happened.

A few weeks ago, the Association of University Teachers here in Britain decided to launch an academic boycott of two Israeli universities. An internal debate ensued and as a I write these words, the union is reconsidering its decision.

Unions often pass resolutions on international affairs, expressing their solidarity with this or that cause. This is nothing new and it goes back to the very earliest days of the British trade union movement. What it utterly new is the fact that such decisions now travel at the speed of light through the Internet -- and the debate around them is instantly globalized.

The AUT decision was, of course, a controversial one. And just before its meeting to reconsider the boycott, the AUT learned of a resolution passed by the largest union of college and university faculty in the United States, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT, which represents some 150,000 college and university faculty, called on its sister union "to reverse their vote" on the boycott. The AFT's Executive Council stated in its resolution that "boycotting universities and their faculty is anathema to academic freedom".

Now, I can't remember the last time that something like this happened.

And regardless of what one thinks of the AUT's original decision, or the AFT's intervention, it is indeed an extraordinary development that a union in one country would call upon a sister union in another country not to boycott a third country. And I think this intervention is a direct result of the new communications technology.

The Internet has been absolutely full of information on this debate. The AUT's own website at http://www.aut.org.uk/ has had information of course, and those supporting or opposing the boycott have set up sites of their own, most notably Engage, at http://liberoblog.com/. The moment the debate was publicized on the Internet, it was globalized. The anti-boycott statement on the Engage website, for example, was signed by teachers and others not only from Britain, but from the USA, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia. Palestinian academics and others have come down on both sides of the debate.

It used to be the case that an internal debate by a national trade union remained that -- internal and national. No longer. The new communications technologies have erased old boundaries, and the intervention of a union in the United States in an internal union debate here in Britain now seems entirely natural and normal.

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

Two of the recent campaigns we've run on the LabourStart website are what one might consider success stories. And yet the results -- so far -- could not be more different.

One of the campaigns -- in support of workers in the Bahamas who lost their jobs -- resulted in a big victory. The other -- in support of imprisoned trade union leaders in Eritrea -- has produced no concrete results; the union leaders are still in prison. And yet both campaigns, the Bahamas one and the Eritrean one, have been successful. In some senses, the second one -- even though the union leaders are still in jail -- may be even more of a success story than the first.

Let me explain what I mean.

In late February 2005, we reported that an unscrupulous company had shut down the Royal Oasis Golf Resort and Casino in the Bahamas, leading to the loss of 1,200 jobs. The government allowed the employer to get away with paying nothing to the workers -- no severance pay, no back pay and no accrued benefits. This a violation of the country's laws and it looked like the resort owner was going to get away with it. The families of the 1,200 workers were facing extreme hardship. Their union, the Bahamas Gaming & Allied Workers Union, asked for a world-wide online campaign to be launched to compel the employer to pay what it owed the workers.

Over the course of some twelve weeks, we ran a campaign which was (to be honest) not the most successful we'd ever run, in terms of the number of messages sent. Fewer than 1,000 messages were sent. But the pressure worked, and as the union president Dennis Britton wrote to us, "The Government of the Bahamas finally made good on their promise to pay to the displaced workers their entitlements under the law. Hundreds of displaced workers converged on the auditorium of Christ the King Parish to receive their long awaited redundancy packages."

Britton was delighted at the help we were able to provide, and wrote: "I thank all of you for your untiring support of the Gaming Union and the Workers of the Royal Oasis. Without LabourStart and your support I do not think we would has succeeded."

That's a classic campaign victory, even if the workers did not receive exactly what they were looking for. It was a victory for them and a victory for the international labour movement which rallied around them.

But that's only one kind of success in online campaigning. There's another way of measuring success too.

In mid-May 2005, we were informed by the Geneva-based International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) of some bad news coming from Eritrea. It turned out that three trade union leaders had been arrested.

Tewelde Ghebremedhin, chairperson of the IUF-affiliated Food, Beverages, Hotels, Tourism, Agriculture and Tobacco Workers Federation and Minase Andezion, secretary of the textile and leather workers' federation, were arrested by security police on March 30. They had been held in a secret security prison in the country's capital, Asmara, for some six weeks before the campaign was launched. Meanwhile, another union leader, Habtom Weldemicael, who heads the Coca-Cola Workers Union and is a member of the food and beverage workers' federation executive, was also jailed. Their arrests were part of a pattern of human rights violations by the Eritrean regime which had been condemned by Amnesty International and other groups.

This confronted us with a difficult challenge. To be honest, most trade unionists around the world know little or nothing about Eritrea. Until a moment ago, did you know that the name of the country's capital was Asmara?

Our experience in the past with this sort of thing was not good. Back in August 2002, we did a campaign in support of independent trade unions in Belarus. The country's dictator, Lukashenko, was about to destroy the last remnants of free trade unionism in the country and we needed to quickly mobilize international solidarity with a brief campaign. It was a flop; only 383 messages were sent to Minsk. Free trade unionism was snuffed out in that European country with barely a whisper of protest from the rest of the world. I often tell that story as an example of what happens when you try to do an international solidarity campaign around a country trade unionists tend to know little or nothing about.

What would happen with those Eritrean trade unionists? Would trade unionists in places like Australia and Canada and the US rally to their defense? I didn't have high expectations.

And yet the immediate response was overwhelming. Within 14 hours, the first 1,000 messages had reached us. They were automatically passed on to two Eritrean government ministries which had identifiable email addresses. Later on we began forwarding messages to Eritrean embassies by fax, bombarding the embassies in Canberra, London, Oslo, Pretoria and Washington. I suddenly received a phone call from a man who would not identify himself, but said he was calling from Norway and that I was sending him too many faxes. I asked if he was calling from the Eritrean embassy there, and he said no -- but insisted that I had sent him ten faxes and that I must stop at once. He then hung up the phone. I checked and saw that the number he phoned from was the Eritrean Embassy in Oslo. Naturally, we resumed sending off the faxes to even more embassies.

The campaign was quickly picked up and spread by others. The Campaign for Labor Rights, based in Washington, sent it off to their list. The Stop Killer Coke campaign made it an urgent alert to their thousands of activists. And of course the IUF and its affiliate unions were working hard to send off as many messages as possible.

One activist whose campaign got involved wrote to tell me that one couldn't miss the "buzz" on the Internet around the Eritrean trade union leaders who had been jailed.

After a week or so, the Eritrean campaign had become the largest ever waged by LabourStart. It broke the 4,500 mark and continued picking up more and more supporters.

And for many of those people, it was their first contact with a LabourStart campaign. They added themselves to LabourStart's mailing list, now growing at a rate of more than 1,000 new subscribers per week. By late May, that mailing list had shot up to 26,000 addresses, and was still growing quickly.

Meanwhile, the Eritrean union leaders continued to languish in prison.

The campaign is not yet over, of course, and will not end until Ghebremedhin, Andezion and Weldemicael are freed from jail, allowed to return home to their families and to resume their trade union work.

But even now, we can consider this campaign a success. I'll explain why.

By involving so many thousands of people in the campaign, in many cases for the first time, and by getting so many of them onto our mailing list, we are expanding the campaigning capacity of the international trade union movement.

This means that the next time we have to do a campaign, we will be able to instantly involve much larger numbers of people than ever before.

That is at the core of what we are doing. We are building something utterly new in the trade union movement: the capacity to react rapidly to violations of workers rights anywhere in the world, and to deliver thousands of messages of protest and solidarity within hours.

We are not there yet. I look forward to the day when the arrest of a union activist anywhere in the world will trigger such a public outcry that governments and companies won't even dare to do it. And before that, I hope to see us able to deliver not 1,000 messages in the first day, but 10,000 messages. I want the public relations departments of corporations in New York and in London to feel what embassy officials in Oslo and Canberra are feeling right now. I want us to be able to do what Amnesty International has long been doing for those it defines as "prisoners of conscience". I want us to be able to do this for workers who have been cheated of their severance pay, or whose employers refuse to bargain with their union. I want to us to be able to do this for workers who have been jailed, but whose only crime was to try to organize a union.

The success of the Eritrea campaign is that it makes that day come sooner.

So when I look back at the victory in the Bahamas, I'm happy that we were able to help out. This is not the first time that our campaigns have worked when focused on hotels and other parts of the tourism industry. Those companies and governments hate the bad publicity. They are more vulnerable, perhaps, to this kind of pressure than the dictators in Minsk and Asmara. And our victory in the Bahamas will encourage even more people to send off messages in support of Ghebremedhin, Andezion and Weldemicael. Every time we are able to announce a victory, people are eager to help bring on the next one. Each campaign, the big ones and the small ones, the ones that result in clear victories and the ones that drag on, each one reinforces the others, and the mailing list grows and grows.

Looking at the Bahamas campaign and the Eritrea one, it gives me hope that the Internet is really proving to be the tool that I hoped it would become. Many people are excited about the net because it makes their shopping more convenient, or allows them to discover long-lost friends. That's nice. But for me, what really matters is that the Internet is allowing us to do what unions were designed for: to build international solidarity, and to unite workers across borders. And it's allowing us to do this one campaign at a time.

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

The battle over workers' rights at Wal-Mart is increasingly being fought in cyberspace.

A number of unions, American and global alike, have recently launched high-profile websites aimed at focussing public attention on the giant retailer.

Wal-Mart Watch (http://walmartwatch.com/) is a project of the Center for Community & Corporate Ethics, and if that name means nothing to you, its Board of Directors lists "Andrew Stern, President, Service Employees International Union" first. The 1.8 million member SEIU is one of the unions that has Wal-Mart in its sites. Stern himself has urged the AFL-CIO, the national trade union centre in the United States, to devote tens of millions of dollars to organizing Wal-Mart. This website is dominated by frequently-updated news about the company, but also includes a mailing list, a tell-a-friend option, and a suggestion box for "your ideas ... to build a better Wal-Mart".

Another union-backed initiative is Wake Up Wal-Mart (http://www.wakeupwalmart.com/), sponsored the the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW). Like the SEIU-backed Wal-Mart Watch, this site features news, a mailing list, and background information. But it also specifically targets Wal-Mart employees. Curiously, when you click on the link for Wal-Mart employees, instead of getting the expected form for joining a union, or even requesting information about joining a union, you get a request to "fill out the form below and include any experiences you had while working at Wal-Mart." Just above this on the front page there's a promising headline -- "Wal-Mart workers speak out" -- but it is only one worker, for now.

Another giant North American union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has set up a Wal-Mart site of its own, which it's calling "Wal-Mart Workers Unite, the website dedicated to Teamsters organizing at Wal-Mart distribution centers, Wal-Mart driving units, and Sam’s Club Stores." This is the union site which is most up-front about what it's doing (organizing workers, not just "informing the public"), but it's also buried on the Teamsters website at a web address no one could possibly remember -- http://www.teamster.org/divisions/warehouse/walmart/walmartworkersunite.asp. But they are much more open about recruiting -- this site features a form which begins "If you are interested in more information about the Teamsters, the Warehouse Division or forming a union in your Wal-Mart warehouse workplace, please let us know". They include contact information for Teamster locals as well.

The AFL-CIO -- to which the SEIU, UFCW and Teamsters are all affiliated -- has a Wal-Mart site of its own at http://www.aflcio.org/corporateamerica/walmart/index.cfm It opens with an annoying musical animation and then offers up a page full of facts and information. It's "Wal-Mart workers speak out" section is considerably more advanced than that of the UFCW -- it features four different workers.

Meanwhile, one of the liveliest sites for Wal-Mart workers is actually sponsored by the venerable Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The IWW has a dedicated forum for Wal-Mart employees as part of its popular Retail Worker website, at http://www.retailworker.com/forum/210. It's not clear if the IWW has any members at Wal-Mart, but they are the first to create a completely uncensored discussion on the web of what it means to work for the company, and its popularity testifies to the need for something like this.

Wal-Mart is a global player, so it's only natural that the global union federations would get involved. Union Network International (UNI) has a Wal-Mart site of its own at http://www.union-network.org/unisite/sectors/commerce/Multinationals/wal_mart_campaign_index_page.htm -- again, not the most memorable of addresses. But the site is full of frequently-updated news about the company and links to many other Wal-Mart related sites.

A latecomer to the online campaign to organize Wal-Mart is LabourStart, whose Wal-Mart page is located at http://www.labourstart.org/wal-mart. It features news from many different sources (mainstream and alternative media as well as union websites), updated throughout the day. But it also features something that none of the union sites seem to have thought of: a syndicated Wal-Mart newswire. Unions can easily add this to their sites and get the latest Wal-Mart news updated every 15 minutes, at no cost. A number have already done so.

There are other Wal-Mart sites and we can expect more to spring up over time. Unions are trying a number of different approaches, ranging from the conventional "contact us for information about joining the union" to barely mentioning the union at all. They are focussed on local campaigns, but there is also a global dimension. They are building bridges to communities, but also creating a space on the web for Wal-Mart employees to sound off. The websites are overwhelmingly professional, attractive and effective. But does it mean anything in the long run? Will these online efforts contribute anything to bringing unions to Wal-Mart?

Nobody knows the answer to that. But no one should doubt the importance of successfully organizing Wal-Mart. For unions in the United States and elsewhere, failure is not an option.

Posted by Eric Lee at 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For the first time in memory -- perhaps the first time ever -- American unions are discussing their future. And that discussion is taking place, in large part, on the web.

The 1.8 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) triggered the discussion with its proposal last year, entitled "Proposals for New Strength". They set up a website to encourage discussion across all unions of the ways in which the embattled labour movement in the US could revitalize itself. The website can be found at http://www.unitetowin.org/ and amazingly, it gives rank and file trade unionists a chance to publish their own views. For example, a recent article by SEIU President Andy Stern is followed by no fewer than 138 comments. And they are not all compliments.

The launch of "Unite to Win" certainly influenced the AFL-CIO, the national trade union centre in the US, which created its own space on the net for this discussion, at http://www.aflcio.org/aboutaflcio/ourfuture/index.cfm
The AFL-CIO has asked union members to give their views on 11 topic areas and 4 specific questions, such as "What steps do you think the national union movement must take to address today’s threats?"

Most of the major unions in the US, as well as state and local organisations, have already posted their views on the debate online. A full list of these is available on the AFL-CIO site.

As I read through some of this discussion and debate, it struck me how impossible this all would have been a decade ago. Back in 1995, John Sweeney, at the time the head of the SEIU, was elected AFL-CIO President. He defeated a team which had been leading the American unions during a period of unprecedented decline. His victory was hailed as a new beginning for unions in the USA.

But it was more of a palace coup than a revolution. Few workers were involved in the actual decision to change the guard.

This time, thanks to the new communications technology, things are different. Other voices are being heard. And regardless of which proposals are adopted, the very fact that this discussion is taking place at all, involving many thousands of trade unionists down to the grassroots level, is what really matters.

Posted by Eric Lee at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)