{"id":80,"date":"2004-04-07T10:08:29","date_gmt":"2004-04-07T08:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=80"},"modified":"2004-04-07T10:08:29","modified_gmt":"2004-04-07T08:08:29","slug":"why-we-dont-give-online-donations-and-international-solidarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/why-we-dont-give-online-donations-and-international-solidarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we don’t give: Online donations and international solidarity"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can also read it this essay in print in next month’s issue of Industrial Worker<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

One of the great things the Internet allows organizations to do is raise money. Any organization can easily and quickly set up a secure online payment facility and then sit back and watch the money pour in.
\nAnd there are the big success stories that inspire one to believe that it really is this easy. First Howard Dean, and later John Kerry, succeeded in raising millions and millions of dollars from a very large number of people who donated online.
\nThe experience of unions has been somewhat different.<\/p>\n


\nIn early March, workers at a textile factory in Haiti who had tried to form a union were sacked by their employer and then intimidated by gun-toting “rebels”. A number of groups including LabourStart campaigned to get people to send email messages of protest to the employer, a company based in the Dominican Republic, and to jeans giant Levi Strauss, which buys textiles from the plant.
\nThe email campaign was a success: in the first month, over 2,100 messages were sent by trade unionists around the world. Levi’s grew concerned; they wrote back to everyone who sent off messages, saying that they would look into this. The union compelled the company to open negotiations, which have so far not been very productive. But clearly the global campaign was having an impact.
\nBack in Haiti, the workers were facing a difficult situation. Without any income, they would be tempted to accept the company’s offer of a one-off payment — and the union would disappear. To strengthen the workers’ resolve, it was necessary to try to raise some money for a solidarity fund. The union in Haiti, activists in Europe, and LabourStart all appealed to the tens of thousands of trade unionists on their email lists and through their websites to donate small sums of money.
\nAt the same time, LabourStart together with other organizations launched an appeal for funds to support the new independent trade union movement in Iraq.
\nTo be honest, the response has been less than what we had hoped. A lot less.
\nBecause of our failure to raise money for the workers in Haiti, we risk losing an important battle.
\nI’ve been thinking about why this might be the case and I have come up with two answers.
\nThe short answer is that individual trade unionists have grown used to having their unions pay for things like solidarity campaigns. We all pay dues to unions and we expect the unions to share some of that money with campaigns for workers rights. We know that many of our unions belong to things like the global union federations (GUFs), whose budgets come entirely from dues paid by us. And international solidarity is their job.
\nFor many decades, this has been the case. The fact that a hundred years ago, workers would routinely donate their paychecks in solidarity with this or that solidarity campaign is long forgotten. We have institutionalized global labour solidarity, and no longer feel any personal responsibility. We gave at the office — literally.
\nThat’s the short answer, but there’s a somewhat longer one as well.
\nIt goes something like this: even though the last ten years have seen a remarkable revival of international trade union solidarity going down to the grassroots level, that revival is not yet complete.
\nIf we run an online campaign today in support of workers in, say, the USA, we will get a lot more support than if the campaign supports workers in Korea. American workers are far more likely to send off email messages in support of striking California grocery workers than they are in support of imprisoned Korean construction workers.
\nWe can now mobilize thousands of people around the world in support of workers in a Haitian textile factory. We can get those people to send off email messages, but we cannot — yet — get them to donate money.
\nWorkers will donate money online in support of workers in their own country. We saw that in the case of the California grocery workers, who were able to raise an extraordinary amount of money through the Internet. But we are not yet seeing the same level of support in international solidarity campaigns.
\nThere’s an irony here that’s painful. I just saw an appeal from the union in Haiti, suggesting that what was urgently needed right now is around $8,000, and half of that would go to paying for food for the union members who lost their jobs.
\nJohn Kerry and Howard Dean were able to raise millions of dollars from activists, even though each individual, small donation in itself made only a small difference. For a tiny fraction of the money they were able to raise, we could keep alive the flame of free and independent trade unionism in Haiti, and make a big difference.
\nThe same people who rush to donate to liberal political campaigns, and to a lesser degree give to striking workers in their own country, don’t yet fully grasp that a dollar invested in supporting incipient union organizing campaigns in places like Haiti is worth much more than a dollar spent on politicians who claim they are going to stop the export of American jobs.
\nIn an increasingly globalized world, the only job security any of us have is a strong trade union movement. If you don’t want your job exported to a low-wage country, help strong unions emerge in that country.
\nI think we have reached a crossroads. We now have an extraordinary new technology (the Internet) which allows us to be more involved than ever before in international solidarity work. This has been an educational experience for trade unionists everywhere. A decade ago, none of us would have known the slightest thing about the emerging trade union movement in Haiti or Iraq; today the net is full of information on the subject.
\nThousands of us are getting involved in online campaigns, sending off messages of protest and solidarity. Some of us are even beginning to use the new online tools to donate money to striking workers in our own country, like the California grocery workers. Many of us are donating online to support political candidates who seem to be offering solutions to the problems posed by globalization, such as job loss.
\nBut we have not yet fully grasped the real meaning of globalization, the one which should be compelling us all to donate, and donate regularly, to workers in need around the world.
\nOver the next few months and years there will be more and more appeals like the one we have just had from Haiti. Those appeals test our understanding of that most famous of trade union slogans: an injury to one is an injury to all.
\nThose who understand the meaning of that phrase, give and give generously.
\nI think it is not an exaggeration to say to that we can measure the growth of our understanding of globalization with nearly-mathematical precision by measuring the growth of our solidarity donations. And judging by the response to recent appeals, we still have a long way to go.
\n***
\nDonations to Haiti: http:\/\/www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org\/whats_new_index.html<\/a>
\nDonations to Iraq: http:\/\/www.iraqitradeunions.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can also read it this essay in print in next month’s issue of Industrial Worker. One of the great things the Internet allows organizations to do is raise money. Any organization can easily and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industrial-worker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}