Labour website competition teaches us how the net has changed

With nearly 7,000 votes cast, a winner has emerged in the 9th annual Labour Website of the Year competition — and for the third time, it goes to a British website.
The 200,000 member NASUWT won an easy victory over hundreds of other union websites from around the world. This represents a considerably better performance for British union websites than last year, when not a single one of the top 10 sites was from the U.K.
The process by which the NASUWT was chosen revealed a few things about how the Internet has changed since the first competition was held in late 1997.


It should now be absolutely clear to unions that there is no more powerful tool than email. Simply putting up something on your website and saying “click here” is not enough, if it ever was. One of the largest union websites in Britain did precisely that; it put a graphic on its front page urging its members to vote for the site. But even after a month, only a trickle of members seemed to have noticed. Bombarding one’s members with email messages seemed to have worked for the sites which managed to collect hundreds of votes, including the NASUWT — the first site ever to receive more than 1,000 votes in the competition.
It is also clear that old days of an Internet based on trust are long behind us, even within the family of the international trade union movement. Persistent attempts at ballot-stuffing over the years forced the competition’s organisers to introduce strict security in this year’s voting, compelling voters to confirm their choice by email.
And finally, the proliferation of labour websites has made many struggle to capture attention — and this annual competition has proven to be an effective way for some of the very best sites to raise their profiles. For example, the excellent US-based health and safety website “Confined Space” campaigned actively to win votes, placed third, and will have a larger audience in future as a result.
The top ten winners are listed here.