Seven years ago, I was talking about the Internet to leaders of one of Britain’s largest unions. I suggested that we consider sending out a mass mailing — by post — to inform the union’s members about our new website. “Can’t do it,” they said. “It costs too much money.” It turned out the union simply could not afford to mail to each of its members, and its only regular communication with members was its quarterly magazine.

It struck me then that a union which is unable to communicate with its members is powerless. Imagine if the union needed urgently to get all its members to do something, such as to send protest messages to the government about something. A union which cannot contact the vast majority of its members within a reasonable period of time is not serving its members properly. Why have big national unions at all if this is the case?
That was seven years ago. Now, everything is different. In modern industrialized societies, the vast majority of our union members will have access to email. For large national unions, this means the problem is solved. There’s little or no cost involved in writing to every single union member whenever a union leadership feels the need to.
Except that there’s one little problem here.
In general, unions don’t have the email addresses of their members.
There are obvious exceptions. Unions of academics often do. So do flight attendants unions in some places. But my experience with British and other unions shows that those are exceptions. Most unions have extensive databases of their members, including home addresses, phone numbers, and so on, but very few have email addresses of all or most of their members. An even smaller number make use of those email addresses.
Some are prevented from doing so because of the very nature of the union. I know one large blue-collar union in Canada which not only doesn’t have its members email addresses, it doesn’t even have their names. That information is collected by local branches and is not shared with the national union. As a result, if the national union wants to communicate with all its members, it has to do so indirectly, through the locals.
Recently I met with the communications director in one of Europe’s largest unions — a union which has an excellent website, which campaigns and in general seems on the ball with communications. But when I asked about how many email addresses of members the union had collected, I was met with a blank stare. While some specific sectors may be organized that way, and while locals might have done this, the national union has nothing like it.
In the USA, I was shown the email campaigning system of one of the country’s most effective unions. It was truly impressive, and the union had in fact collected a tremendous number of email addresses for its members. Nevertheless, three-quarters of the membership either did not have email addresses (unlikely) or were not sharing this information with the union.
Unions need the email addresses of all their members in order to be effective. In the twenty-first century, unions that don’t have those addresses are like paper tigers.
Here are some ways they can go about getting members’ email addresses:
1. When signing up new members, make sure to collect their email addresses. Make it a required field. Potential members who don’t have email addresses should be given addresses by their union. If they don’t have computers or access to computers, local unions should make sure that they know how to get access — in their union hall, public libraries, wherever. In many unions, turnover of membership is so high, that merely by collecting the email addresses of new members, within a few years the union will be able to reach all its members.
2. Incentivize the branches. I spoke the other day with an organizer for a small British union who told be that local organizers are actually paid for every new member they recruit. I don’t know how common this is, but it struck me that unions should think of ways to reward locals which produce the most email addresses. That reward could be non-monetary — simply publicly recognizing locals which reach the target of 100%, an email address for every member. But unions should consider other ways of persuading local activists to do their utmost to get email addresses for every member, including prizes and rewards.
3. Run campaigns and competitions online for your union members — and harvest their email addresses in the process. This is what LabourStart does both with its ActNOW campaigns and its annual Labour Website of the Year competition. Of course it is essential that members opt-in voluntarily, and not be tricked or lied to about this.
4. Sometimes, the employer makes this easier for us, intentionally or not. I’ve worked with one union whose members all worked in the public sector and for a single employer. That employer gave each worker an email address according to a very specific formula, involving their first name and last name. The union was able to correctly guess the vast majority of the email addresses and generate a mailing list that worked.
5. And here’s the most radical solution of all: give those members who agree to be contacted electronically by their union a break. Reduce their union dues. The economic logic is compelling: if I cost the union less money because I don’t need to be sent stuff by post (saving on postage, printing, and labour), I should share in the cost saving.
If your union has found other ways to get the email addresses of members, I’d like to know about it.
Of course it’s not enough to collect email addresses of members. You have to know what to do with them. I worked with a large British union which discovered to its surprise that it actually had 18,000 email addresses of members. That was a small percentage of the full union membership, but it was still 18,000 people. We were able to do two mass mailings to those members before the union leadership basically ran out of things to say, and the mailings stopped. Amazing, but true.
Collecting the email addresses of members is essential, but it is only the beginning. How to do mass emailings, how to make them effective, what not to do — those will be the subject of a future column.