In early May this year I visited Canada as a guest of the trade union movement and conducted several workshops on the subject of online campaigning.
During one of the workshops, an all-day session with national trade union staffers held in a Toronto hotel, I was able to put into practice some of the ideas I had been discussing.

I had argued that the Internet gives campaigners certain advantages, and that these include the ability to respond rapidly to violations of trade union rights. And that any campaign would by definition be a global campaign.
I asked the participants in the workshops if any of them would be interested in launching a global campaign in defence of union rights then and there, in real time.
A group representing a number of unions in British Columbia came forward with an idea.
Their provincial government had just achieved a degree of international notoriety for being condemned by the International Labour Organization. The ILO had ruled in uncharacteristically blunt language that several of the laws passed by the province’s Liberal government violated ILO Convention 87.
Canada and all its ten provinces ratified that Convention some 30 years ago according to the B.C. Federation of Labour.
Sitting at a borrowed laptop computer connected to the hotel’s network, with everything we were doing appearing on a large screen projected before the group, I undertook to organise a full-blown online global campaign in real time, to demonstrate that what once would take hours and days could now be done in a matter of minutes. And it could be done while away from one’s desk and one’s office.
During the lunch break, the B.C. delegates came up with a few lines of text as background to the story as well as the text of a protest message to the province’s Premier, Gordon Campbell. The message called on Campbell to “treat public sector workers fairly and with dignity”. It also demanded that his government “comply with international law and repeal the offending legislation”.
We found Campbell’s email address and also located a detailed document on the web laying out the ILO’s critique of B.C.’s laws (for those who wanted more background information). This was all we needed in order to begin.
I logged onto LabourStart’s ActNow campaigning system, copied and pasted in the texts, clicked on the ‘Submit’ button and the campaign was “live”. It was 1:38 in the afternoon. In another 22 minutes, our web server would automatically put the link to the new campaign page onto the front page of LabourStart and about three dozen other websites running our syndicated campaign wire. (See my column in the previous issue of IUR.)
Meanwhile, using a web-based email system (like Hotmail), I was able to write up a short message to LabourStart’s nearly 15,000 email subscribers, which I then sent out.
At 2:00 P.M., we checked to see if LabourStart was now showing the link to the campaign on the front page of the site. It was. I then showed the audience the website of the largest union in Ireland, SIPTU. And right there in the middle of its front page was a link to the same online campaign.
We then logged onto the Google website and using their AdWords program, purchased an advertisement that would run every time someone searched for the term ‘winter olympics’. The ad read “BC violates labour rights. ILO finds Olympic bidder guilty. Demand fair play for BC workers.” (British Columbia is a bidder to host the 2010 Winter Olympic games.) The idea was not only to attract new supporters to the campaign, but to embarrass the Campbell government.
Within a week, over 7,800 people would see that ad when searching for ‘winter olympics’ on Google.
Half an hour after agreeing on the text of the protest message, we went to check the results on a special page we’ve set up to monitor the number of protest messages having been sent.
Initially, as individuals participating in the seminar came up and filled in the online form, we saw the number go up slowly to three or four. And then nothing happened for half an hour or so.
I told the seminar participants that the mass mailing would take at least half an hour to complete, but that sometime after that, we’d see something. One of the participants asked me to refresh the screen in our web browser. I said it was too soon, but clicked anyway. The number of email messages sent to the Liberal Premier had shot up to 37.
The emails had begun reaching LabourStart subscribers. Some of them were forwarding them on to their own lists.
By the following evening, as I wrapped up my last workshop in Toronto, we had reached just over 1,000 messages.
We managed to put together a powerful online campaign that reached thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of trade unionists around the world. We did this remotely and instantly using a combination of different software tools — including an online campaigning database, an automated email system, content syndication and web-based email.
As I write these words, we don’t yet know if there will be any result. The unions in B.C. are attempting to find out what the impact has been on the Premier’s office. Meanwhile, several Canadian unions including the largest, CUPE, have spread the news of the campaign even further.
I looked at the faces of the trade unionists from B.C. who had proposed the campaign as I demonstrated the effects on Google, on the SIPTU website, on LabourStart. When I showed the counter as it began to rise, the number changing each time I’d click on my browser’s ‘refresh’ button, I could see broad grins on several faces.
What a fantastic new tool we have, I thought.
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This article was published in International Union Rights.