Europe's unions attempt an online campaign
You know that the technology of Internet-based campaigning has matured when even the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) starts using it.
A group like the ETUC is almost by definition going to be the very last to adopt cutting edge technology. Founded more than 30 years ago, the ETUC represents 81 national trade union centers in 31 different European countries, representing some 60 million workers. Keeping in mind that dozens of languages are spoken by those workers, it is understandable that it took a while for the Confederation to get around to online campaigning.
But in November 2006 the ETUC embraced web-based campaigns in a big way, launching an initiative to support “high quality public services available to all”. And they announced the goal of getting one million signatures on their petition within a few short months.
It's now mid-March – nearly four months have passed – and the online petition has gotten just 56,000 signatures. At that rate, it will take another six years or so to reach the ETUC's goal. A lesson all unions should learn from this is to never announce a numeric goal for an online campaign that you are probably not going to reach – or if you do so, don't make public the fact that you're nowhere close to reaching it.
But there are other lessons to be learned as well, and some of them reflect well on the ETUC. For example, the campaign is available online in twenty languages. These are not all the languages spoken in Europe, but it's a lot more languages than you find on most union websites – even global union websites.
And they reaching out beyond the borders of the European Union – even if the petition is addressed to the European Commission. For example, one of the twenty languages is Norwegian, and Norway is not a part of the European Union. (But the Norwegians participate in the ETUC.)
The petition is brief and to the point, and signing up requires only a name and email address (some union campaigns ask for all kinds of useless information – the ETUC does not.)
And they've offered an offline version as well, which is critical to get beyond the core group of those who participate in online campaigns.
They have created a special domain name for the campaign and they've prepared printer-reader versions of campaign posters and logos.
All this demonstrates a seriousness about online campaigning which is worthy of praise.
That having been said, why have 99.9% of ETUC members not signed up to the campaign? Why are they something like 70 months away from achieving their target?
I think part of the reason might be the very nature of groups like the ETUC itself. Workers tend to feel closest to their local union, and somewhat close (perhaps) to their national union, but they are unlikely to know much about their national trade union center.
I've never forgotten the response given to me by a maintenance worker in a New York City apartment building. When asked what union he belonged to, he said “32BJ”. And that was all he knew. He didn't know the name of the national union (the SEIU), nor the national trade union center that union was affiliated to (Change to Win).
The ETUC is a federation of national trade union centers, each one of which (like the AFL-CIO or Change to Win) is in turn a federation of national unions.
The ETUC doesn't really have 60,000,000 members – it has 81 members. Whether those members are able to mobilize their affiliates, and whether those affiliates are able to reach down to the workplaces and mobilize actual workers is debatable.
If it sounds like I'm trashing the ETUC, I'm not. It's a commendable effort and it's great to see the huge investment in multilingual campaigning. And getting nearly 60,000 people to sign up to an online trade union campaign is no mean thing. LabourStart, which has been at this for several years now, has never done a campaign that got more than 8,000 signatories.
I hope that the ETUC is collecting those 60,000 email addresses. If they are, the next time they campaign, they'll be able to write directly to 60,000 activists rather than only to 81 union officials, and the next campaign will be bigger than this.
If that's the case, the ETUC campaign may fail to get the million signatures it was hoping for, but could be the beginning of something much more important: the online mobilization of trade unionists in dozens of countries in support of a common cause.
The petition is available online here: