Eric Lee

Ajax was a mythical Greek hero who faught against Troy. Ajax is also a powder you'd use to clean dishes and sinks. And today it is the name of a group of technologies which together create an utterly different experience for users of the world wide web.

I could tell you what Ajax stands for (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) but -- there we go, we've lost all those who hate technical jargon.

In plain English, Ajax is a way to bring desktop-type applications to the web. And that's probably not clear enough either. You really have to experience it to see what I mean.

I'll give you a concrete example of how this new technology is already being used by trade unionists.

Visit Backpack, located at http://www.backpackit.com. I use Backpack together with others to maintain common web pages including to-do lists, notes, and more complex documents. It's a powerful tool for collaborative authoring, whether of a website or a conventional document. And the basic version is absolutely free of charge.

Another really well-known showcase for what Ajax can do is Google Earth. I'd tell you the web address for that (http://earth.google.com/) but if I did, you'd probably wind up wasting a lot of time as you play with this addictive -- and free -- online tool.

This is all light years ahead of what unions are doing these days on the web. The very best union websites are still barely interactive -- the interactivity consisting mainly of being able to send in a form (like joining) and maybe submitting a comment to an online blog or discussion forum. Ajax promises a much higher level of interactivity, and a richer experience for users.

In another five years, all our sites will work a bit like the way Backpack works now, using Ajax or something like it.

Posted by Eric Lee at 06:35 PM | Permalink

A version of this article is also online here.

Usually at this time of year, I am asked by Workers Online to review the world geographically, continent by continent, country by country, and point out the highlights of the past year. But this year, I think a different approach might be interesting.

This year, LabourStart was asked by trade unions to launch 24 global online campaigns. Seven of those campaigns are currently active. I thought by looking at a handful of them, we'd remember some of the highlights of the year, and get a better sense of what is really going on in the international trade union movement.

In August, we launched what was our most successful campaign ever -- in support of striking workers at Gate Gourmet at London's Heathrow Airport. Gate Gourmet is a giant multinational corporation which decided to save some money by sacking unionized workers and replacing them with low-cost new employees, imported from abroad. Hundreds of workers were sacked by megaphone, triggering a massive walkout throughout the airport and the shutdown of London at the peak of the summer tourist season. Our campaign pulled in more than 8,000 messages to the employer (1,000 in the first four hours) and was part of a broad effort linking the union in Britain and sister unions abroad through two global union federations (the ITF and IUF). In the end, a compromise was reached, leaving no one happy. But the memory of this very high-profile dispute will not soon be forgotten.

Our second largest campaign was launched in May at the request of the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF). It concerned three trade union leaders in Eritrea who were arrested by police and detained in a secret security prison. Even though most trade unionists will admit to knowing little about Eritrea, the growth of a new internationalist sentiment in the trade union movement (made possible by the net) means that this kind of outrage is quickly answered by widespread protest -- in this case, over 5,200 messages were sent. In addition to an email campaign, and knowing that Eritrean government officials are not easy to reach through the net, faxes were sent to a large number of Eritrean embassies as well. At the time of this writing, it is not known if the three trade unionists have been freed or not.

The third biggest campaign we did in 2005 was done in support of telecommunications workers in British Columbia, Canada, battling against an anti-union company (Telus) in a story that will be familiar to telecoms workers everywhere. That campaign lasted for a few weeks and produced over 4,000 messages of protest to the company.

Those of you who have seen the film "The Take" will be familiar with the case of the Zanon workers in Argentina. Those workers took control of their factory once the owners had abandoned it and once they got it up on its feet again, the former owners tried to take it away from them. LabourStart's campaign was part of a broad international effort which attracted some 20,000 signatures on one website, and generated almost 3,300 protest email messages from LabourStart readers as well. In the end, the workers have secured some breathing space.

Our fifth largest campaign in 2005 is an ongoing one. On 22 September, Diosdado Fortuna was shot and killed by unknown gunmen on his way home from a picket line at the largest Nestle factory in the Philippines. The factory has been the scene of a bitter dispute between workers and Nestle over the issue of retirement benefits, with a strike going on for nearly four years. Trade unionists have so far sent in over 2,800 messages (and still counting) demanding that the government of the Philippines investigate the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice.

As I look over this list of the five largest campaigns we were involved in during 2005, I see that we've covered the globe -- Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America and Asia. The campaigns have tackled issues like arrests and killings of trade unionists, attempts to break a union by mass sackings, and heroic resistance by workers with their backs to the wall.

These may not be the big headline news stories that we would normally reflect upon at the end of the year, but they are the real news. The reality around the world is one of people fighting every day for workers' rights, sometimes against overwhelming odds, against governments that don't hesitate to jail or kill trade unionists. Sometimes those workers win, sometimes they lose, often there are compromises.

But one thing is absolutely clear: as use of the Internet becomes more widespread and global, and as unions increasingly take advantages of the possibilities, such as online campaigning, a new kind of solidarity and a new kind of trade union internationalism is being born. The mobilization of thousands of trade unionists in response to some of these events, often in a matter of hours, was impossible a decade ago, or even five years ago. That is a real revolution.

Posted by Eric Lee at 08:05 PM | Permalink

This letter was published in the London Review of Books.

I was happy to see Ilan Pappe open his article on Amir Peretz (London Review of Books, 15 December 2005) with a quote taken from my interview with the new leader of the Israeli Labour Party.

But there was little else in Pappe's piece that I would approve of.

To sum up Pappe's argument, it seems to be that while Amir Peretz might be a wee bit better than Sharon, it really doesn't matter much. Israelis will continue with their Zionist project, and what we really need are boycotts and sanctions to secure justice for the Palestinians.

The article is filled with inaccuracies. Pappe sums up Amir Peretz's relationship with Palestinian workers in the following way: the leader of Israel's national trade union centre, the Histadrut, "did nothing to limit the organisation�s extensive involvement in the occupation: in areas directly or indirectly controlled by Israel, the Histadrut granted the settlers union rights while denying them to Palestinians; as for Palestinian workers in industrial plants within the border zones (areas inside the Palestinian Territories under direct Israeli control), it ignored their situation entirely despite their having no basic human or workers� rights." And that's it.

He completely ignores the historic 1995 cooperation framework agreements reached between Peretz, representing the Histadrut, and the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU). Those agreements, which followed the Oslo accords, have done much to create bonds of friendship and trust between the two country's trade unions, and to give some hope to the Palestinian workers. The Histadrut has already transferred several million dollars in dues collected from Palestinian workers to the accounts of the PGFTU. In April this year, at a meeting in Brussels brokered by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) -- to which both the Palestinian and Israeli centres belong -- Peretz and his Palestinian counterpart "agreed to move forward quickly on finalising a joint cooperation agreement between the two organisations. Key issues for the agreement include access for Palestinian workers to employment in Israel, relief funds for Palestinian workers and their families, action to prevent and resolve cases of exploitation of Palestinian workers, implementation of a March 1995 Cooperation Framework, and perspectives for future cooperation between the two organisations."

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Amir Peretz has long been convinced that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands is like a cancer, eating away at the fabric of Israeli society. He has been fighting for more than 20 years for an independent Palestinian state and for Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands.

Pappe says that if Peretz were to come to power, the best the Palestinians could expect would be the Geneva Accord. Um -- has Pappe read the Geneva Accord?
Do LRB readers know anything about them?

These were a set of agreements reached in December 2003 between Israeli doves, led by Yossi Beilin (now the leader of Meretz-Yahad) and a number of key Palestinian figures, led by Palestinian Authority minister Yasser Abed Rabbo (who apparently represented the views of Arafat). In other words, they are pretty close to what could be achieved when reasonable Palestinians and Israelis sit down and try to work out an agreement. If Pappe thinks they don't go far enough in securing justice for the Palestinians, he should bring that up with the Palestinians who signed them. It seems to be a case of someone trying to be holier than the Pope.

Finally, Pappe is dismissive of Peretz's chances to be Israel's next Prime Minister. He bases his conclusions on -- public opinion polls. That's incredible, coming from an Israeli scholar. After all, polls only a few weeks ago showed Shimon Peres easily winning the Labour Party primaries. Polls several months ago showed Amir Peretz placing last among the various candidates for Labour Party leadership. Polls in Israel are almost always wrong, and consistently underestimate the strength of Amir Peretz.

Pappe will also be aware that all new parties of the Israeli political centre -- parties headed up by media superstars like David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizman, and so on -- all those parties turn out to be a flash in the pan. They all disappear the morning after the election. This will almost certainly be the fate of "Kadima", the new party whose two leaders have between live been around for more than 160 years.

Ilan Pappe is convinced that there is no hope that Israelis will vote in a government committed to real justice for the Palestinians, and hence his call for international pressure. I wonder why he doesn't simply form a political party of his own, run for the Knesset himself. I wonder how many votes he'd get.

Posted by Eric Lee at 08:01 PM | Permalink

To the editor, Ethical Consumer magazine

As a new subscriber, I was looking forward to reading my first issue of Ethical Consumer magazine. Like most of your readers, I try to shop ethically -- I buy Fair Trade products when I can, I bank at the Cooperative Bank, I try to buy products from unionized companies. In fact, I do a bit more than that. As the editor of the LabourStart website (http://www.labourstart.org), I help promote such unionized, ethical businesses as No Sweat Apparel and Powells Books, the unionized alternative to Amazon.com

I was intrigued by the title of the feature story in your current (November-December) issue. Entitled "Islamic Boycotts", my first, instinctive reaction was -- why boycott Islamic countries or companies owned by Muslims? Sure, we all oppose dictatorships and terrorism, but I don't think we should punish entire countries' economies. I know that I still plan to enjoy the occasional baklava at our local Turkish restaurant.

Imagine my surprise at discovering that subject was not actually Islamic boycotts but Jewish boycotts.

The entire two page article is about boycotts of Israeli and Jewish-owned businesses. It is in fact an uncritical essay in support of the Arab boycott of Israel which, as the author notes, began even before the state of Israel was born, back in 1945. (That is to say, long before there were any occupied territories, long before any Palestinians fled or were forced to flee.)

As the article correctly points out that boycott had its headquarters in Cairo and Damascus -- the capitals of what were, I think we can all agree, brutal dictatorships. One can make the case (the author doesn't) that the Arab boycott of the Jewish state inherited the mantle from the Nazis, whose boycotts of Jewish owned businesses a decade earlier were the prelude to the Holocaust.

The article concludes with a helpful list of various sites about the boycott of Israeli and Jewish goods, and as I looked over the article and the list I began to wonder -- what on earth does any of this have to do with being an ethical consumer?

If I go into my local supermarket and I decide to buy fair traded bananas rather than the usual bananas -- for which I will pay a premium price -- that makes me an ethical consumer. But if I decide not to buy organic avocados today because the label says they were grown in Israel, that doesn't make me an ethical consumer. It makes me a racist.

Let me explain why.

To choose not to shop somewhere because the owners are Jewish or Muslim is a racist decision. To choose not to buy a product because its producers are black or white or yellow or red is a racist choice. Let us not mince words: boycotts targetted at specific ethnic groups, pioneered by the Nazis with their "don't buy Jewish" campaigns, are racist boycotts.

As the article in your magazine points out, Syria and Libya are still strong supporters of the Arab boycott of Israeli products. Are these "ethical" regimes? Should a magazine supporting "ethical" shopping be taking their side? Or, for that matter, taking the side of the Iranian regime, which in addition to denying the Holocaust is now racing forward to build nuclear weapons aimed at "erasing" the Jewish state. I wouldn't have thought of these governments as the natural allies of our movement aimed at creating a better and fairer world.

None of this should be taken to reflect my views on the policies of the Israeli government. I have a long track record of opposition to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and have long supported an independent Palestinian state. In my work as editor of LabourStart, I have helped run online campaigns in support of Palestinian trade unionists who suffer under the blows of a brutal occupation, economic hardship and worse.

I oppose the current Israeli government and am enthusiastic about the campaign being waged by Amir Peretz, the new leader of the Israel Labour Party and the former head of the country's trade union movement, the Histadrut. Peretz is a vigorous opponent of the occupation and has been so for decades.

If I want to encourage an end to the occupation and peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, I do so by throwing my support behind the Israeli left and labour movements -- and not by refusing to buy an avocado which was probably produced on a left-wing kibbutz somewhere.

Of course you could make the case that ethical consumers don't buy from countries whose governments we don't like. If that were the case, there would be a very, very long list of countries on our boycott list. We could start with Afghanistan, where violations of human rights are an everyday occurrence and down the list to Zimbabwe, where the government is a notorious human rights violator, and find very few countries in between with really good track records on human rights. In fact, it would be easier to make a list of the few countries which are sufficiently "ethical". In the end, I guess we'd be buying only products from Sweden, but then again, it turns out that Ikea is not actually unionized.

If I weren't going to buy products from countries which occupied other people's land, or engaged in torture, I guess I'd have to boycott products made in the USA -- or for that matter, in Britain. Your magazine, for example, is produced by the citizens of a country which has (in the past, and perhaps today) engaged in torture, and with whose foreign policies many ethical consumers might disagree. So if you don't like the Blair government, your advice would be to boycott British goods? Including Ethical Consumer magazine?

I can already guess that one response to this might be -- it was just one article. Just two pages out of forty. Except that your "closer look" at supermarkets elsewhere in the issue begins by noting how several (including all those you previously cited as being ethical) are the subject of boycotts by the "Boycott Israeli Goods" campaign. Which I guess means that it's not just the view of the author of the "Islamic Boycotts" article -- it seems to be an issue for the whole magazine.

Racist boycotts have no place in our movement. Racism has no place in our movement. I think it is time for "Ethical Consumer" magazine to pause and reflect on its support for anti-Israel, anti-Jewish boycotts -- and to return to its true mission, which is to "promote change by informing and empowering the consumer." I'd sign up to that.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:08 AM | Permalink

For the ninth year in a row, LabourStart is once again organizing the Labour Website of the Year competition.

The history of that competition reads like a history of trade union use of the Internet.

Back in 1997, the competition involved around seven websites. All of them were based in the USA or the UK except for the winner, the Brussels-based International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions. I think enough time has now passed to admit that very, very few people actually voted in that year's competition. But a tradition was born.

Two years later, the IWW's own site won -- and this time it was competing against 41 other websites. There were a lot more unions with sites, but it was still possible for a relatively small union to win the competition. (The IWW followed up on its 1999 victory by making the list of runners-up in 2004 as well.)

By 2001, everything had changed. Now the winner was the health and safety website, Hazards, whose candidacy was backed by Britain's powerful Trades Union Congress (TUC). Over 3,000 votes were cast. Some 200 websites were now in the competition. With 755 votes, Hazards won easily -- and that record has not been beaten since.

In last year's competition, new records were set for the number of voters (8,343) and the number of sites in the running (525).

Trade union use of the net has vastly expanded in these last 8 years. There are now many more websites and many more users. And the websites are far better than the ones which competed back in 1997. (Even the IWW's site has hugely improved over the years.)

On 15 December 2005 we announced the launch of this year's month-long ballot, which closes on 15 January. To vote, go here: http://www.labourstart.org/lwsoty/

This year's competition will be different from previous years in a few ways.

First, when voting for a website, you'll see the website displayed on your screen. That way, if you're typing in a web address and you've made a mistake, you'll immediately catch it. (Try typing in iwww.org or iw.org instead of iww.org and you'll see what I mean.)

Second, for the first time ever, we're requiring voters to confirm their votes by email. This is to prevent the persistent attempts by some overenthusiastic webmasters in previous years. (In one case, a union webmaster keyed in the email addresses of hundreds of union staffers, in alphabetical order, in a blatant attempt to stuff the ballot box.)

Third, we've gotten rid of the idea of nominated sites. LabourStart itself doesn't nominate sites, and participants can vote for any site they want -- and always could, anyway.

Running a competition like this is a lot of work, and you might be asking yourself -- why do it? What's the point?

There are two points, really.

The Labour Website of the Year does recognize excellence in trade union use of the new communications technology. That's important for a lot of reasons. The website which wins, and the nine runners-up, get a lot more traffic in mid-January than they normally would. Often unions which make the top 10 issue press releases. All this is good if you want to see unions moving forward, embracing new tools.

There's another reason too. Voters are given the chance to sign up to LabourStart's mailing list. Many of them do. In the last year, that mailing list has grown from around 20,000 names to over 31,000 names. The Labour Website of the Year competition contributes a chunk of that growth, as do the various campaigns we run.

The bigger the mailing list, the bigger the online campaigns. If we can bring a few thousand more people onto the mailing list each year because they want to vote in this competition, it means that our campaigns in support of workers on the picket line will be that much more effective.

Having largely eliminated the element of fraud in this year's voting for the very first time, we will get a real sense of which websites have generated the kind of enthusiasm among members that might get them included in the top ten.

Are these the best union websites, or just the most popular? It's an interesting question, and I'm not completely sure that the two are opposites.

In any event, we will all know on 16 January 2006 the results of the voting. Good luck to all of you.

Posted by Eric Lee at 06:36 PM | Permalink

A few years back, the TUC launched a website specifically aimed at union reps. It was called "unionreps.org.uk". The site has a few features, such as news (including a LabourStart newswire), a directory of resources, and so on. But at its heart, it is a giant discussion forum.

Union reps who sign up quickly discover that there are literally thousands of people just like them, reps who often have questions or problems, sometimes at odd hours. They turn to one another with their questions and answers and for them, the site has become an indispensable resource.

The most popular topics are what you'd expect -- health and safety, legal issues, and so on. These are the bread-and-butter topics union reps deal with every day.

Having said all that, I wonder why more than 96% of union reps in the UK have not even registered yet to use the site. With 8,000 registered users it's one of the most popular union sites in Britain -- maybe even the most popular -- but according to the TUC, that's only a little more than 3% of the intended audience. There are literally tens of thousands of union reps -- probabably more than 100,000 -- who are online but are not yet registered at this site.

At a recent TUC conference on organizing at which the site was shown once again to a room full of activists, one participant was amazed never to have heard of this site.

I asked John Wood of the TUC what was being done to promote the use of unionreps.org.uk. He told me that every participant in a TUC course (about 10,000 every year) learns about it, but even if all of them were to sign up, it would take decades to get most reps registered on the site. Individual unions have got to promote it.

Some unions seem reluctant to do so, and are convinced that they should have their own sites for their own reps. In my view, this is nonsense. The questions reps face every day cross union boundaries. The great thing about unionreps.org.uk is the diversity of its participants. A rep from one union could have his question answered by someone from a completely different union.

I often show off unionreps.org.uk as an example of best practice -- a useable, friendly website that provides a clear and tangible benefit for trade unionists. Imagine how much more effective it would be if another 100,000 union reps were to sign up to use it.

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A trade union leader's victory marks beginning of class politics in Israel. Workers' Online runs my analysis of Amir Peretz's victory.

Posted by Eric Lee at 09:04 AM | Permalink