I want to talk about three things.

First, about the question itself, about whether we should be using online tools and their role in social change.

Second, about the part of this debate that has nothing to do with technology – about the role of organizations vs loose networks and spontaneity.

And third, about the case of Joanne Delaney.

Online tools and their role in social change

There is a sense in which the debate itself is sterile.

It’s not either/or, not between using the latest technology or something else.

Obviously, serious activists use every tool at our disposal.

Imagine if we were having this discussion a century ago.

Would someone have gotten up and said that we shouldn’t be using new-fangled tools like the telegraph or later, the telephone?  Would someone have claimed that these are not as powerful or effective as face to face meetings?

And would their opponents have said that the telegraph is going to utterly change the balance of power in the world, that information now flows at the speed of light, across continents and the world will never be the same again?

Both views would have been nonsensical.

After all, we are talking about tools.  And serious advocates of social change use every tool that works.

Organizations vs spontaneity

Part of the debate has focussed on spontaneous organizing – on people using tools like Facebook and Twitter to create, apparently out of nowhere, mass movements that topple dictatorships and the like.

But of course this is absolute nonsense.  The people who write such stuff either misunderstand the technology or know nothing about the country they are discussing.

I was in Egypt a year ago, as a guest of the Centre for Trade Union and Workers’ Services.  This is an organization that was set up in 1990, 21 years ago, to campaign for workers’ rights and human rights in Egypt.

It was involved in a massive strike wave that for the last decade or so has rocked the country.  That strike wave involved millions of workers and brought tens of thousands of them into the streets into direct confrontation with the Mubarak government.

Two years ago, 10,000 workers staged a three-day sit-in opposite the offices of the prime minister in Cairo.

So when those thousands of dissidents and independent trade unionists took over Tahrir Square and then basically shut the country down with a general strike, it was the culmination of many years of struggle and organizing.

During the entire time I was in Cairo, no one mentioned Twitter or Facebook even once.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t use such tools – they do.

But they’d have overthrown the Mubarak dictatorship without them just as well.

In fact if we look at the region today, we can see that one of the very big differences between Tunisia and Egypt on the one hand and Libya on the other, is that Libyan civil society was under-developed and poorly organized.

The Libyans had no equivalent to the Centre for Trade Union and Workers’ Services.  They were not as well organized and were therefore not as well placed to overthrow their dictator.

In the trade union movement, organization is everything.

Facebook, Twitter, email, the web, instant messaging – these are just tools.

The case of Joanne Delaney

In the autumn of 2005, Dunnes’ Stores, a notoriously anti-union department store chain in Ireland, sacked 22 year old Joanne Delaney for wearing her union pin to work.

Joanne has just been named a shop steward for her union, Mandate, which was aiming to organize workers in Dunnes Stores.

The union had few effective tools at its disposal – the company was intransigent, there was not a strong power base for the union inside the company.

The union turned to us, to LabourStart, and asked if we could wage an online campaign to flood Dunnes Stores with messages of protest from around the world.

We did – but that would not be an interesting story in itself.

What happened next was that our online campaign got the attention of a friend who worked for a Labour MP and who asked me if it would be alright to introduce an Early Day Motion.

When that happened, members of the Scottish Parliament followed suit, and then the Labour faction in the Irish Dail, and then members of the Dublin City Council as well.

Picket lines went up at Dunnes Stores as word went out about the campaign.

Within two weeks, the online campaign had triggered a wave of protest in the real world that compelled the employer to think again about what it was doing.

And then one evening I got a message from the union in Dublin telling me to look at the RTE television news broadast online.

And there stood Joanne Delaney, telling the camera that she’d got her job back – and that apparently there had been this huge online international campaign in her defense.

I often cite this story when talking with trade unionists as an example of what happens when you combine the power of new technology with the time-honored tactics of trade union solidarity.

You create the possibility of actually changing the world.

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