Eric Lee

Dear Sir:

I was pleased to see that you vigorously condemned last week's terrorist attacks by jihadists in Bangladesh.

As I'm sure you know, today -- less than a week after Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip -- a terrorist attempted to blow up a bus in the Israeli city of Be'er Sheva. According to press reports from Israel, some 48 people have been injured, some seriously.

It is believed that the terrorist who undertook this attack was a member either of Hamas or Islamic Jihad -- both groups which are closely identified with the groups which carried out the attacks in Bangladesh (and London last month).

I was wondering when we could expect to see your condemnation of today's bombing?

Thank you. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Business Week recently devoted an entire special double issue to India and China, and surprisingly (for Business Week) had a relatively sympathetic account of the problems faced by workers in the latter country. Quoting from sources at the China Labour Bulletin, the magazine came up with an estimate of tens of thousands of industrial actions taking place in China every year. And in the same issue of the magazine, it reported on the spectacular growth in Internet use in China as well.

So in China you have two revolutions taking place at once -- a huge surge of worker unrest at the same time as there is a massive increase in the number of Internet users and websites. The China Labour Bulletin is, of course, taking advantage of this with its excellent website, but what about the various international institutions of the labour movement?

Amazingly, none of them has yet produced a Chinese language edition of its website.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) website continues to appear only in English, French and Spanish. Global Unions, the website it created together with other global union organizations, is still in English only. And the websites of the various global union federations (GUFs) don't do any better.

One of them offers free online translation services which might allow for a Chinese worker to generate a laughable version of the organization's web page.

Another does list Chinese as one of the available languages but -- and this is about as bad as it gets -- when you select the language you see a page which reads: "Content available in Chinese is shown below ... There are no pages in your selected language ... There are no documents in your selected language."

Presumably, these organizations will point out that they have no affiliates in China (expect perhaps for some in Hong Kong or Taiwan). And it's true that the languages used on some of the global union websites reflect the strength of their affiliated organizations, which is why we tend to see languages like Swedish and Italian, but don't see Urdu or Indonesian. But unions that want to reach out and build a much broader and more powerful global labour movement should have the Chinese working class on their radar screens.

Global corporations are already way ahead of us. Wal-Mart's Chinese language website is at http://www.wal-martchina.com/. Microsoft's is at http://www.microsoft.com/china/. And McDonald's Chinese site is at http://www.mcdonalds.com.cn/.

In fact, it seems that every anti-union multinational that is racing to exploit low-paid non-union workers in China has rushed to set up a website touting its products -- and its corporate "vision". Chinese consumers and workers can learn all about what great companies Wal-Mart, Microsoft and McDonald's are. If they are online and they want to know the other side of the story -- the side being told by the international trade union movement -- they will simply have to learn another language.

Of course there are costs involved in setting up Chinese language websites -- though these are considerably less than the costs of producing print publications in that language. Certainly those costs could be shared among the global union federations and the ICFTU, just as they worked together to create the English-only Global Unions website.

With tens of thousands of industrial actions taking place every year in China, and with millions of Chinese citizens coming online for the first, I don't know what the international labour movement is waiting for.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jakob Nielsen is a name that will be familiar to those of you who design web pages. Nielsen is the world's leading expert on website usability. Thanks to his efforts, a lot of websites are a lot easier to use these days. (One of his fortnightly columns on the subject of "why frames suck" is one of the reasons why so few websites use frames anymore.)

These days Nielsen has been writing about other aspects of usability, including how to write for the web. He taught thousands of web designers that it's not enough to design a clean and attractive website -- the site has to be written for an audience which tends to scan, rather than read.

Now Nielsen has explored the question of designing websites for "lower-literacy users". Nielsen estimates that some 30% of Internet users in the United States today fall into this category and expects that number to rise to 40% within five years. It goes without saying that many of those "lower-literacy users" come from the working class and the poor.

This makes his recommendations for designing websites for such audiences particularly relevant to trade unions -- but I wonder how many union websites come close to understanding the issues involved.

Nielsen says that "lower-literacy users" tend to read a page word-by-word. They do not scan. As they have to spend considerably more time reading a page, they may lose patience and not complete the text.

Because of this, he makes several clear recommendations which should be adopted by websites -- including union sites -- aiming to reach such audiences:

1. Use text aimed at a 6th grade reading level. (For regular websites aimed at the general public, Nielsen urges an 8th grade reading level.)

2. Prioritize information -- put the most important stuff up on top. (I'm reminded of the old journalistic advice to put the who, what, when, where and why in the first paragraph of a news story.)

3. Use static text, not animations.

4. Streamline page design -- ideally, use only one column.

5. Optimize search to make it tolerant of mis-spellings.

Most of this is pretty good advice in general, and not only for "low-literacy users". If you want people to be able to read your website on their mobile phones and PDAs, or to make the site more accessible to disabled readers, you'll be following some of these guidelines anyway.

How do union websites stack up to these recommendations?

I've just had a look at the Change to Win site. Its opening paragraph is a single sentence consisting of no fewer than 79 words. That's not only unsuitable for "low literacy users" -- that's simple bad writing.

As for the reading level required to understand the "Change to Win" website, it's a whopping 13.6 -- in other words, on average, a person would need to have completed some university to understand the page. The Wall Street Journal, by comparison, is rated at 11. That's right -- it's easier to read The Wall Street Journal than it is to read this union website.

The AFL-CIO website comes in a 9.23 and the IWW is rated at 10 -- better than "Change to Win", but still far above what Nielsen recommends.

In general, trade union websites do not receive massive amounts of traffic. And this is still true, even though more and more union members and potential members have come online in recent years. There are many reasons for this -- including the simple fact that many of our sites are boring. But another reason might be that for many members, the sites are simply too difficult to read. And that is something which can be fixed.

Posted by Eric Lee at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Unions that want to recruit new members will make it as easy as possible to join. In this century, that means allowing people to join unions online.

There have already been a number of examples of unions in other countries -- such as the New South Wales Teachers Federation -- recruiting online. But British unions, for the most part, have generally told visitors to their websites that the best they can offer is to allow potential members to request application forms, which are sent out by post and returned to the union by post.

Some unions -- such as the NUT -- have long allowed non-paying members (students, for example) to join online, but have insisted that recruiting actual working, dues-paying members does require a paper form sent in by post.

The problem is that even those who send in a request to receive an application form often do not return completed forms. One major British union discovered a couple of years ago that more than 50% of those who requested application forms did not fill them in and return them to the union.

Meanwhile, organisations like Amnesty International and the Labour Party have long allowed individuals to join online, not requiring signatures nor paper.

Unions often claim that there are complicating factors, such as legal requirements, the right of branches to vet potential members, and the payment of dues, but none of these seems to have stood in the way of one British union which now does recruit online.

That union is Connect. The Connect website (http://www.connectuk.org) has a very prominent link labelled "Join online" on top of its home page. (Other unions use more obscure ones such as "Membership" or "Organising" -- how many non-members will understand that clicking on "Organising" is how one joins a union?)

The process for joining Connect online is as straightforward as, for example, buying a book at Amazon.com. One is taken to a secure web server where credit card details are encrypted. There are four steps to the joining process, each of which is clearly labelled. The third stage allows new members to choose how they wish to pay, the choices being monthly or annual direct debit.

Connect is rightly proud to be the first union in the UK to recruit online. Clearly whatever legal or technical obstacles seem to be blocking other UK unions from following suit have been overcome. If Connect can do this, I wonder why other unions in this country haven't done so yet.

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)