Linda Church works as an assistant district counsel for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service amid the neon lights and Latin-jazz beat of Miami. Her other INS colleagues toil in cities as diverse as edgy downtown Manhattan, near the graceful Spanish-style arches of San Antonio and amid the balmy tropics of Hawaii. Although dispersed across the country, the professional staff of the INS general counsel office—attorneys, accountants, statisticians and engineers—became aware that some managers applied vacation and attendance policies differently than others. "We wanted equity for everyone," says Church, who spearheaded a union organizing drive with AFGE. Because the 500 workers all reported to the same general counsel, they decided to organize as a national unit. "Organizing each office individually would not have given us the clout we wanted," says Church.
The far-flung workforce posed a challenge to organizers. They could not leaflet at a plant gate or hold a membership meeting at a nearby diner. So Church turned to a technology that enabled her to spread the union message instantaneously to hundreds of people across the country: e-mail. "Over five time zones, there's really no other way to communicate effectively," she says. "E-mail was our lifeblood."
Church wrote organizing updates on her home computer and set up an interactive website. The effort culminated in a September 1999 vote to join AFGE. Electronic communications remained a crucial tool during contract negotiations as the new AFGE Local 511 members received and filled out contract surveys via e-mail. They now are negotiating a contract that will include clauses allowing the local to use e-mail for union representation and to post its own virtual bulletin board on the INS website. "Now I have a relationship with people all over the country whom I've never met," says Church, interim president of Local 511. More and more workers are buying ever-more affordable computers, getting online, surfing the World Wide Web and communicating through sophisticated electronic gadgets. And unions are utilizing the power of these technologies to step up organizing, political activism and solidarity during strikes. For many unions, technology is proving to be a crucial complement to the core strategy of building union strength: worker-to-worker contact.
Union Privilege is working to ensure that union leaders have the technology they need to help them bring a voice to working families. It is providing state federations and central labor councils that are part of the New Alliance, the union movement's restructuring and revitalizing initiative, with computers and Internet access. The union groups will have their own listservs and other specially tailored electronic communications systems to help them share information.
"Cyberunions" will allow "unprecedented access of everyone in labor to everyone else," says Art Shostak, a sociology professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia and author of CyberUnion: Empowering Labor Through Computer Technology.
"America's new cyberunions will show the world that unionism does ‘compute' in our age of information."
New technologies "are the most accessible ways to reach employees," says Charles Craver, a labor law professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. "If unions are going to survive, they are going to have to organize health care, high-tech and service workers," he says, "and unions are going to have to reach these sectors and these workers with e-mail and new technologies." Some 60 percent of union members have computers, according to a poll by Peter D. Hart Research Inc. conducted in January 2000. The survey also found that 74 percent of union members with computers have Internet access.
Organizing by e-mail is one of many "e-strategies" union members are employing in their efforts to strengthen the union movement and enable workers to have a voice at work. Here are examples of other union "e-action."
| | |  | | | | | | Truckin': When your office is a truck, online organizing is the road to success, as proved by these IBEW Local 21 members in Illinois. | |  | | |
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The 150 workers who install and repair alarms at SecurityLink from Ameritech in suburban Chicago work out of company trucks in which they drive to different job sites directly from their homes each day. As with the organizing effort of INS lawyers, forming a union took a leap into cyberspace.
"This was a very difficult group to organize, because they were not all in one place," says Tom Hopper, business agent for Electrical Workers Local 21. Although they lost elections in 1996 and 1997, the workers were undaunted. They published a webpage with an online newsletter written by workers, with submissions coming in via e-mail. Electronic communications helped the workers build enough cyber-solidarity that in October 1998, they won their efforts to get a voice on the job—even after the company fired organizing committee members days before the election—and today have a strong contract.
Eager to ensure their struggle would help other workers, union leaders set up "meta-tags" on their website, an index entry for a website that makes it easier for Internet surfers to find what they want and for websites to publicize their contents. The foresight paid off when workers at an Ameritech subsidiary in central Illinois found Local 21's website and subsequently organized workers throughout the state via e-mail: "No big phone bills," says Al Morrison, who galvanized his co-workers at the Peoria subsidiary.
Other organizing campaigns are using e-mail and websites to mobilize far-flung workers, such as the ongoing effort among 20,000 flight attendants at Delta Air Lines to form a union with the Flight Attendants. But plenty of centralized or concentrated workplaces have benefited as well, such as the 163 high-tech workers at Tektronix outside Portland, Ore., who make color printers and sought to organize with UNITE. Because the Tektronix workers have access to computers with Internet service in their break room for personal use, union organizers could visit workers during their breaks, point the computer browser to www.uniteatxerox.org and enable workers to get information about UNITE and read words of encouragement from already-unionized workers at other Xerox-owned companies. Last May, the workers won their bid to join a union and in November, another unit of 107 temporary workers also joined UNITE Local 14-Z.
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From America@work, March 2001. |
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During the 1998 election season, the Nevada State AFL-CIO was using what at the time was state-of-the-art technology. Activists identified pro-union voters they contacted through phone banks and precinct walks on paper printouts with supermarket-style bar codes next to voters' names. They scanned the bar codes and responses into a database. But Danny Thompson, the state federation's executive secretary-treasurer, was frustrated with the process. It took hundreds of volunteer-hours to do the tedious scanning—hours that could be spent talking with voters—while producing piles of lists that quickly became obsolete. A self-described "techno-phile," Thompson vowed to find a better way. He arrived at a solution after he bought Palm Pilots for his staff, who used the compact, hand-held computers for office management. Thompson knew the devices had the potential to do much more, and hired a computer expert to develop a program to track voter contacts, creating a virtually paperless means of getting out the vote.
During the 2000 election, volunteers looked up voters' addresses on their Palm Pilots and recorded responses directly into the computer with a pen-like stylus. They walked to the next house on their list with the help of directions generated by the computer program. At the end of a precinct walk, the valuable data describing which voters planned to vote for pro-worker candidates was directly downloaded—"hot-synced" in Palm Pilot parlance—into a database spreadsheet. No maps, no bar codes, no waiting for printouts. "It frees the volunteers to do the worker-to-worker contact," he says. "We talked to more voters because we weren't spending time making up packets of maps and lists and scanning bar codes."
One candidate who benefited from the unions' newfound techno-savvy is John Oceguera, a member of Fire Fighters Local 1607, who won his bid for a state assembly seat: "The Palm Pilot allowed us to send people into the field with the whole district in their hands." Oceguera won by a slim margin, a victory he credits to unions' get-out-the-vote campaign. "The technology will change the face of politics in Nevada—and it was neat to be part of it."
Unions are harnessing the power of technology to advance a working family agenda not only during elections, but in off- election years as well. Texas AFL-CIO Communications Director Ed Sills sends out a daily e-mail newsletter with alerts for rallies and news from unions. But the newsletter's biggest impact comes during the Lone Star State's legislative session. "When there is a fast-developing action in the legislature, our activists know about it," says Sills. Two years ago, after a legislator filed a paycheck deception bill to limit unions' ability to raise money to get their message out, the state federation e-mailed information about the author, the text of the bill and the arguments against it. Within days, the legislator who sponsored it had received so many opposition e-mails he decided not to proceed. "Instead of just lobbyists, there were rank-and-file members contacting legislators," Sills says. "When we get everyone involved, it has a real impact."
| | | | | | | | Multimedia: Actress Julianna Margulies appeared on a video clip on the AFL-CIO website in support of last year's SAG/AFTRA strike. | | | | |
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When Julianna Margulies appears on screen, she typically has played the spirited nurse Carol Hathaway on the television hospital drama ER. But after members of the Screen Actors and Television and Radio Artists went on strike against advertisers last year, Margulies began appearing on a video portraying a union member—and this time she wasn't acting. A video clip of Margulies was among several on the AFL-CIO website in support of the actors' strike. Activists logging on could view their favorite celebrities talking about the importance of joining together in a union and such key issues in the strike as demands for wage cuts by corporate advertisers, and they could e-mail the video clips to friends.
The actors encouraged supporters to boycott products made by Procter & Gamble Co., an influential advertiser involved in the strike. Visitors to the site could e-mail P&G's CEO Alan G. Lafley, telling him they were part of the boycott. To draw union members to the site, union webmasters sent e-mails to activists who, in turn, generated 40,000 e-mails to advertisers in three weeks. The strategy was so effective that P&G board Chairman John Pepper wrote a letter to union leaders when the boycott ended, making a special request to them to take the link off their webpages. In October, SAG and AFTRA won improved compensation for actors on TV and radio commercials. And, keeping their eyes on future technological advances, they won jurisdiction over commercials made specifically for the Internet.
Similarly, the Teamsters send regular, tailored e-mail campaign updates to Bed, Bath & Beyond and Wal-Mart customers of Overnite Inc., a company that flagrantly violates workers' right to a voice on the job.
| | | | | | | | Plugged in: Canvassing door-to-door during the 2000 elections was a lot easier in Nevada, where the state federation equipped union activists with Palm Pilots. | | | | |
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The Web and e-mail boycott campaign was one technological component of SAG's strike technology strategy. Another was posting photos and reports from picket lines and demonstrations across the country on the union's website. "Part of the reason actors stuck together was because people didn't feel isolated," says Greg Krizman, SAG spokesman. "The advertisers checked out the website daily, too, and they realized they couldn't run from New York, Los Angeles and Chicago to tape commercials and expect to be in for an easy ride."
Visually linking workers together in a cyber-picket line also contributed to the success of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace/ International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 2001. During the six-week strike at Boeing Co., Wayne Schwisow, the union's webmaster, published a daily summary of members picketing throughout the country at the Seattle-based aircraft maker's many locations. "Workers could see an immense list and it let them know they were having an effect," he says. Union members also could register on the site with their home e-mail addresses to receive notices of rallies and news. The resulting e-solidarity helped the workers win a strong contract in January 2000.
At Boeing, as with all successful campaigns involving e-strategies, the Internet is just one part of a larger effort to communicate the desires of workers to come together into unions to improve their lives, strengthen their families and build their communities. The core of building union strength has been workers always talking to each other, one on one. Such technologies as e-mail and Palm Pilots help amplify workers' voices "to be successful in organizing and to save money," says IBEW's Hopper. "But you have to balance it with face-to-face contact, which is the best way to communicate with workers."
