Roger speaking in Berlin

Contents

Introduction

Internal Communications & Transactions

External Communications & Transactions

Membership Activities

Conference Organisation

The Bargaining Process

Education & Training

International Work

Obstacles To The E-Union

Why The E-Union Will Happen

Conclusion

Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

My starting point for this presentation is a quote from “Business@The Speed Of Thought”, the 1999 book written by the Microsoft Chief Executive Bill Gates [for review click here]:

“Here on the edge of the 21st century, a fundamental new rule of business is that the Internet changes everything”.

The structure of this presentation is to look at seven strands of trade union activity and, in each case, examine how ICT can be used to benefit trade unions and to give some specific examples of relevant activity by British trade unions, including my own union the Communication Workers Union (CWU).

INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS AND TRANSACTIONS

First, let me look at how ICT will affect internal communications and transactions:

• All memos should be electronic. The effort, cost and time involved in producing paper memos means that they should be redundant.

• All meeting papers should be electronic. My union now issues agendas, papers and minutes for Executive meetings in electronic form (but then we issue them all in paper form as well!).

• All records should be electronic. The CWU’s Information Manager Ian Cook has developed an Electronic Management System so that over time most records will be electronic and accessible remotely.

• All diaries should be electronic. It should be possible for PAs to access the diaries of all Officers and Executive members in order to arrange meetings when colleagues are free.

• All expense claims should be electronic. They already are in BT which employs most of our telecommunications members. We should do the same.

• One should use electronic notice boards for information and announcements. The CWU now puts all personnel notices on the Head Office intranet.

EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS AND TRANSACTIONS

Second, let me consider the impact on external communications and transactions:

• The obvious starting point here is the union’s web site which enables a union to communicate directly with all its individual members and indeed others interested in the union’s information and views. The first point here is to make the homepage a compelling attraction. Some unions still have very few 'buttons' and no news on the homepage which should be viewed as prime virtual real estate. By contrast, other unions have made sure that they have lots of 'buttons' linking to useful parts of the site and plenty of current news items - see, for example, the UNISON site [click here].

• However, the next stage is to make such web sites both personalised and interactive. By personalised, I mean that, because an individual union member will register on the site providing certain basic information about him or her, when that individual accesses the site in future, he or she will be welcomed by name and directed to those parts of the site which are most relevant, taking account of factors such as the individual’s industry or occupation or gender. By interactive, I mean that the individual should be able to search the site for specific information, e-mail specific union officials, and conduct transactions. If business-to-business commerce is known as B2B, we could call this type of interaction union-to-member or U2M. The model is Amazon [click here]. When I access this site, it welcomes me by name, makes recommendations based on my known interests, and enables me to order goods with just one click.

• Union web sites should become much more topical. In the larger unions at least, there should be a news story every day – the CWU does this [click here]. There could be a monthly report of the Executive – the Public & Commercial Services Union does this [click here]. Certainly the Union's Annual Report - often the most boring publication in the organisation's repertoire - could be made more user-friendly by putting the text on the web site with hyperlinks to other parts of the site or other sites that give more detailed information on the subject under report.

• Some unions – probably acting collaboratively – may wish to go beyond the provision of a web site to the development of a portal providing access to a whole range of external services. The simplest way to start this is to provide a link to the LabourStart site run by Eric Lee [click here] which offers a comprehensive and continuous news service on union activities around the world. A fully-fledged union portal has been created by the AFL-CIO in America [click here] which enables each participating union to customise the experience for its members.

• Union web sites should host discussion groups which enable their members to discuss with each other issues of current interest or controversy in the union. This might be the union’s current pay claim or some future policy initiative. We could characterise this form of interaction as member-to-union or M2U.

• Union web sites should also host electronic networks, enabling members with specific interests or commonalities to interact together. A good example of this is provided by the union Connect which represents managers and professionals in BT and other communications unions. The Connect site hosts members’ networks under the headings of Black and Ethnic Minority, Disability, Graduates, International, IT Contractors, Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual, Personal Contractor Group, Sales and Women [click here]. We could characterise this type of interaction as member-to-member or M2M.

• Web sites should increasingly enable the electronic purchase of goods and services from the union centrally or locally. On the TUC web site, one can effectively buy gas and electricity from Scottish Power. This would mean that the unions would classically be operating a business-to-consumer or B2C model of e-commerce.

• All communications betwen Head Office and branches should be electronic. From the Head Office point of view, this should be easy because most of the information they communicate was produced on a PC or Mac and therefore already exists in digital form. From the branch point of view, a major attraction is that they can then very easily pass on this information to members with e-mail addresses or cut and paste it into newsletters or leaflets. Connect is one union which already does this.

• All accident claims should be electronic. A secure part of the web site should have standard templates for each kind of claim. When I put this idea to one union, I was told it would not work because their existing paper forms were in different colours!

• Finally, it is most important that there should be a careful integration of on-line and off-line communications. The address of the union's web site should be on every piece of off-line material: headed paper, business cards, recruitment packs, campaign literature, conference reports. One union I know omitted to have the address of their site on the annual conference brochure and even on a leaflet announcing a new revamping of the site and even incredibly on the business card of the Website Development Manager! Every major feature in the union’s newspaper or journal should give the address of a relevant part of the union’s own web site or another web site that will provide further information on that topic.

MEMBERSHIP ACTIVITIES

Third, I want to look at how information technologies can shape those activities which revolve around organising, recruiting and servicing individual members which, after all, is the heart of trade union activity:

• As a starting point, every Branch of every union should have a web site which is constantly up-dated. Each union headquarters should be actively promoting Branch web sites and providing or promoting the necessary training and skills. One option is for the union headquarters to provide a template for a branch web site and host the site on the union's central server.

• We should make greater use of electronic organising, so that for instance, if we can obtain e-mail addresses of potential members in companies that will not provide us physical access, we can communicate with the potential member electronically and directly. Often before we have recognition, there will be no branch structure, so we could communicate with members at home by e-mail.

• We should enable electronic registration for membership. By this, I do not simply a declaration of interest. Too often, a union web site enables one to register an interest in joining, but then one is told that “a membership pack, appropriate to your needs, will be sent in due course”. This means that a pack has to be sent by post, the potential member has to complete a form physically, the form has to be returned to the union head office by post, and the membership card is then sent out by mail. All this is an incredibly laborious process and must act as a disincentive to membership. It ought to be possible simply for a potential member to provide credit card details, so that the membership registration is completed on screen within seconds. When I put this idea to one union, the objection was that the union did not want certain people to join!

• We should be looking at the development of membership smart cards which would enable the membership card to contain a great deal of information about the union, its activities and its services and possibly allow the member to conduct transactions.

• We should permit the electronic change of membership details which would involve the individual member having access to his or her own membership details and no others. Over time, this would cut down the incredibly time-consuming and costly process of union head offices constantly up-dating membership details and indeed the likelihood is that it would ensure that such membership records were much more up-to-date than under current arrangements.

• Equally, Branches should be able to download full details of their own Branch members from the Head Office membership system. The Labour Party already allows constituency parties to do this through its new Labour People system [click here].

• We should be pro-actively collecting the e-mail addresses of as many members as possible, so that we can use them to send out electronic newsletters and conduct consultative ballots (in the UK the law does not allow statutory ballots to be conducted eletronically). The communications union Connect has the e-mail addresses of some 80% of its membership which is unusally technical and professional, but currently most British unions only know the addresses of a small fraction of their membership. In Australia, the unlikely-named Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union sends out an electronic newsletter every fortnight to more than 5,000 members. This is a good illustration of what can be done.

• We should be using carefully targeted, electronic circulation lists to specific groups of members. Increasingly, union members do not identify with the union as a whole or even the local branch, but with members in the same company or employment unit and what they would really like is information from the union which is specifically targeted to their place of work delivered in timely and accessible way. Collating e-mail addresses of members in different companies or units into group lists, union officials at local, regional or national level can deliver such information at almost no cost and almost instantaneously.

• We might see the development of the virtual branch. If this seems a strange phenomenon, then I would refer to the example of the Communication Workers Union of Ireland which has created a virtual branch for teleworkers.

• We could even envisage the development of a virtual union. Again, at first, this may seem a bizarre concept but, in effect, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) has already created virtual unions for specific sections of their membership, such as the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech) for the staff in companies like Amazon.com [click here], and Alliance@IBM for staff in the computer giant [click here]. Another case where one might want to create a virtual union is in the case of a joint venture company with partners from different countries, where unions from different countries are organising the members in the different nations but wish to represent a common front to the generality of the members in the JV.

• Many of the services which we provide to members could benefit from an on-line facility or web presence. For instance, the union Connect runs a recruitment consultancy called Opus2 and details of available jobs are contained on its web site [click here]. The same union enables members to arrange a personal loan on-line and the relevant site includes a loan calculator which enables the member to calculate monthly repayments for the chosen loan amount and chosen repayment period [click here].

• We should be using the Web to reach out to potential, as well as actual, members. An excellent example of this is the Trouble at Work site [click here] run by the the trade union UNISON in conjunction with the National Union of Students. The site has three main aims: to show how trade unions can help working students by offering on-line advice on common work problems; to raise the profile of trade unions to a generation that often has not had any contact with the union movement; and to offer tailored advice to groups that UNISON recruits such as student nurses. A more recent example of reaching out to the non-unionised comes from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) itself under the logo Worksmart [click here]. This aims to be a one stop shop for all information concerning rights at work. It includes a union finder to direct those wishing to join a union to the appropriate organisation.

CONFERENCE ORGANISATION

Fourth, these technologies can have a major impact on the nature of trade union conferences:

• The agenda and papers for all union conference should be provided not simply to the delegates themselves, but should be made available to all members via the web site. If there is a need to password protect such papers, this can easily be organised, but in general unions should operate on the basis of a policy of open government. One union which is particularly good in making available to its members in electronic form information about its annual conference is BECTU [click here].

• The voting at conference can make use of information technology to save time and cost and improve efficiency and accuracy. The CWU now uses a system of barcoding printed on voting slips and these are swiped through a machine to enable a computer to determine the outcome of a card vote quickly and accurately.

• The conference proceedings themselves should make much more use of PowerPoint presentations and the provision of screen-based information. This would certainly bring union conferences a little more into the 21st century and make them more appealing and stimulating to the delegates themselves.

• There should be almost live reporting of conference proceedings on the union’s web site, so that, once delivered, the speeches of the leadership and guests are immediately put in text form on the web site and an on-going record is transmitted of all those motions which have been carried, defeated or amended. A further step would be to film conference speeches with a digital video camera and then put the film on the web site in the form of streaming video.

• The next step of course would be to have the live web casting of the proceedings of the conference. No doubt initially, this would simply in audio form. However, as members increasingly acquire high bandwidth connections to the Internet, there is no reason at all why such web casting should not be in video format. I have already spoken at several non-union events which have been web cast.

• Finally, as regards union conferences, the web can be used to provide branches and members with an on-going report-back concerning the progressing and implementation of conference policies and decisions. One could use an Excell spreadsheet which sets out, in respect of each conference decision, who is progressing it, how to contact that individual, and what the progress is so far. This could up-dated as regularly as one wished and one could have hyperlinks to relevant correspondence with management or the text of resultant agreements. This kind of 'live' reporting would be much more democratic than the old Executive Report and indeed make such a report unnecessary (the backward-looking report could then be replaced by a forward-looking strategy document).

THE BARGAINING PROCESS

In effect, the ‘bread and butter’ activity of most unions is the bargaining process whereby, usually each year, pay and other conditions are negotiated between union and management. Therefore, fifthly, I want to look at how ICT can impact on the bargaining process:

• The web can be a fantastic source for bargaining and company data. At head and regional offices of unions, researchers will use the web to collate relevant information for the professional trade union negotiators. However, local branches can access either the union’s own web site [see, for example, the UNISON site click here] or other web sites such as those of the Labour Research Department [click here] to obtain bargaining and other data to enable them to conduct their own more local negotiations.

• There are a growing number of web sites that provide information focused on more specialist aspects of the bargaining agenda. For instance, the Trades Union Congress has a site concerning a better work/life [click here].

• More and more communication between unions and managements will be electronic. For instance, towards the end of 1999, BT gave notice to the CWU and Connect that, as from April 2000, it would only conduct communications with these unions in electronic form. Obviously this enables such communications to be much more speedy. However, it also facilitates matters such as the detailed amendment of various drafts of complex agreements.

• Increasingly we will see electronic balloting of members on agreements and proposals for industrial action. At first, the main use of such on-line balloting may be through the telephone, but increasingly we will find that unions will be enabling members to vote via their own PC or a company-provided Internet terminal. Unity Security Balloting Ltd – an organisation which has conducted many postal ballots for British trade unions – is now owned by Election.com Ltd, an American based company pioneering electronic balloting [click here]. In my own union, my CWU colleague Billy McClory conducted a ballot of our 300 members in the BT/AT&T joint venture Concert and this was conducted entirely by e-mail, using security systems developed by Election.com.

• Indeed, in the future, we are likely to see increasing forms of action against managements by unions which have an electronic dimension. For instance, in its dispute with Critchley Labels in South Wales, the CWU used a form of electronic picketing which involved overwhelming the company’s electronic communications by the making of many phone calls, the sending of many fax messages, and the communication of many e-mails. I can even envisage – although, of course, I would not recommend – the hacking of company web sites.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Sixthly, ICT technologies are ready-made for application to the education and training functions of trade unions:

• For a start, registration for courses should be electronic, confirmation of registration should be electronic, and the provision of supporting documentation should be electronic.

• For the courses themselves, more use should be made of ICT technologies with PowerPoint presentations by lecturers and use of PCs by students becoming standard.

• Every course should have associated with it a section of the union’s web site, where all the relevant information can be posted and where lecturers and students can continue to maintain contact with each other and have access to up-dated information. An excellent example of this comes from a course on which I lectured at the International Labour Organisation's Training Centre in Turin, Italy. The course was run for activists from the All NTT Workers' Union of Japan [click here]

• Increasingly we will see on-line training programmes operated by unions alone or by unions in partnership with management. This will enable union members, either working from home or in the workplace, to up-date information and skills. An example of this kind of initiative is a degree programme in computing run by the CWU and BT through Queen Mary & Westfield College in London.

INTERNATIONAL WORK

The seventh and final union area of activity which I will look at in terms of use of ICT technologies is international work. As companies and economies become more global, this work becomes more and more central to the domestic agenda of an increasing number of trade unions:

• It is not always easy to convince rank and file trade union members of the relevance and importance of internatioanl trade union work, but the new technologies can help. One British trade union - the Transport & General Workers' Union - has created a Web site specifically devoted to issues of globalisation and internationalism [click here].

• Obviously these technologies – especially through e-mail – enable trade unions to communicate easily across distance and time zones. It used to take a week or more to send mail to some countries and, because of the difference in time zones, telephone conversation between for instance Britain and Australia has been difficult. However, e-mail solves many of these problems.

• Clearly a major problem for unions – and other organisations – conducting international work is the use of many different languages by those concerned. However, there are now web sites which provide access to free translation software which will convert messages or other text from one language to another [see, for example, FreeTranslation.com click here]. Obviously, these facilities do not provide perfect or professional translation, but they are often adequate for enabling an understanding of the essence of an e-mail communication and increasingly the software will become more sophisticated.

• E-mail and the web can enable much more effective co-ordination between unions in different countries in the conduct of joint actions and joint campaigns. One successful instance of this was the co-operation between American and European trade unions to combat the proposed take-over of Sprint by MCI WorldCom, which would have created an anti-union telecommunications hegemoth.

• In the future, we may see some trade union internationals developing their own portals that will enable literally millions of members in hundreds of unions to access information and services on an international basis. The newly-formed Union Network International [click here] considered such a portal – dubbed eUNI - with an Australian company called World Networks, but abandoned the project as too ambitious.

OBSTACLES TO THE E-UNION

What are the obstacles to this kind of e-union? Obviously, there will be many obstacles to the kind of radical transformation which I have described in this presentation. Some of the main ones will be the following :

• Many members will not have access to an Internet terminal. In fact, one of the main bargaining demands of trade unions should be access at work to both the company’s Intranet and the wider Internet via company-provided terminals. In some countries, trade unions have gone further and, through their national trade union centre, negotiated special deals for the purchase of personal computers. This has happened in Australia [click here] and the USA [click here].

• It will be argued that the investments in ICT are too expensive. In fact, in many cases, substantial investments have already been made and what effectively we are talking about is beginning to get the maximum benefits from these investments. Real savings can be made by reducing the costs of printing, copying, circulating and posting paper documents.

• In many unions, there is no authoritative IT strategy. The transformation I have described will only happen if there is strong commitment from the leadership and the exercise is driven by someone with real authority.

• The e-union is not just abour hardware and software, but also about what the American academic Arthur Shostak calls "thoughtware". That is, to maximise the use of the technology, one needs fresh and imaginative thinking about how the technology can be used to do old things in new ways and to do truly new things.

• The e-union will present a challenge to existing power structures. In one union I know, the leadership (temporarily) closed down a discussion group because criticism from members was becoming too personal. In most unions today – as indeed in most organisations today – information and power is concentrated at the top of a hierarchical decision-making structure. However, in truly electronic organisations, information and power are dispersed to those most suited to make the decisions.

• In many British trade unions, there is a deeply rooted culture of conservatism. British trade unions are the oldest in the world and find radical change extremely difficult to contemplate.

WHY THE E-UNION WILL HAPPEN

Notwithstanding the obstacles that will be faced, the e-union will happen, in some instances sooner than others and more easily that others. Some of the compelling reasons that will bring it about include the following :

• We will see an explosion of Internet access. Such access will be not simply through personal computers, but through interactive television sets, mobile telephones, electronic game consoles and a whole variety of new terminals.

• We will see a collapsing of real costs of hardware, software and usage. Within a matter of years, costs will not really be a deterrent to Internet access; it will only be a matter of whether one has confidence in the use of the technology.

• The membership of trade unions will increasingly demand the levels of services which can only be provided by the type of e-union which I have described. Our members will find that, in dealing with other organisations, they are given increasingly speedy and personalised service on a 24 hour 7 day a week basis. They will expect no less from their trade union.

• The final reason why the e-union will happen is that, if it does not, then unions will face e-xtinction. In some countries, as diverse as France, Japan, the United States and Hong Kong, trade union membership is already down to 10-15%. Unless we use ICT to modernise and unless we recruit in the new companies and industries created by these technologies, we will have no right to e-xist.

CONCLUSION

I want to make it very clear that none of the proposals in this paper is intended to obviate the need for unions to continue to use traditional, face-to-face methods of organising and motivating their members. My appeal is for unions to become more flexible, more inventive, and frankly more modern in how we organise and serve each of our members.

The agenda which I have set out may seem formidable, even intimidating. However, I have sought to demonstrate that almost every item on that agenda is already in use somewhere – the challenge is to do it all in a systematic, pro-active way.

All unions are already in competition with employers and others to communicate a message and an image and the use of ICT can even up that contest. Indeed, as ICT technologies blur the divisions between industries and jobs, increasingly unions will be in competition with each other for members and services.

In a few years time, much of what I have described will seem commonplace and we will wonder why it took us so long to adopt these technologies and techniques. The time is now and the prize is great.

FURTHER READING

"Negotiating The Net: A Guide For Trade Unionists" by Labour Research Department (August 1998)
"How The Internet Empowers, Democratizes And Internationalizes Unions" by Eric Lee click here
“The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism” by Eric Lee (1997) click here
"The Internet Belongs To Everyone" by Eric Lee click here
"CyberUnion: Empowering Labor Through Computer Technology" edited by Art B. Shostak (1999)
"The CyberUnion Handbook: Transforming Labor Through Computer Technology" edited by Art B. Shostak (2002)
Web site of TUC Conference on "Unions And The Internet" click here

A really good resource for trade unionists wishing to start or develop a Web site is run by Union Network International click here

Some good practical examples of the e-union at work in Australia and New Zealand click here

ROGER DARLINGTON