Unions and the internet: prospects for renewal?

A report presented to the September 2001 conference of the UK Trades Union Congress recommends that unions should develop new internet services as a recruitment and organising tool. This feature looks at the debate regarding trade unions' use of new information and communication technologies, focusing on the potential benefits and the obstacles that will need to be overcome.

Many people in the labour movement believe that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) must be harnessed to provide trade unions with new methods of dealing with current recruitment, retention and participation problems. This primarily involves use of the internet, including such features as e-mail, websites, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and on-line application and voting mechanisms. At the September 2001 conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) (UK0110104N), a report on Reaching the missing millions, drawn up by the TUC's task group on promoting trade unionism, recommended the more systematic use of web-based services to boost union recruitment.

This feature reviews some of the main debates within the trade union movement about the wider use of ICTs as part of recruitment and organising strategies. In particular it draws on: the proceedings of a two-day conference held by the TUC in May 2001 on 'Unions and the internet'; a survey, Trade unionists and their use of the internet, conducted by the UK internet service provider Poptel in conjunction with the conference; and a number of research articles on the subject.

Potential benefits of new ICTs

The advocates of exploiting the new ICTs believe that they offer benefits to unions in four main areas.

Recruitment

The targeting of new recruitment sectors has been a priority area for the TUC; indeed, this is a major feature of the recommendations regarding the internet emerging from the report Reaching the missing millions. In particular, unions need to target workers in growth areas of the economy, most notably in services and amongst those working 'non-standard' hours, including graduates, workers in the technology ('new economy') sectors, and those on temporary and casual contracts. Women and young workers are a particularly important target group because of their increased share of these growth areas.

Workplaces where union density is high have often been characterised by relations between unions and members that have been built up over a long period of time based on close physical proximity. The dispersed and flexible work patterns of much of the modern labour market do not match these characteristics. ICTs can provide features of close-knit community relationships over a much more dispersed organisational base through websites, chat rooms and bulletin boards. Additionally, achieving close physical proximity of union representatives to members is very expensive. The use of ICTs changes recruitment frontiers because they enable organisation on the basis of informal resources, which is less costly to organise - websites can be set up and managed relatively inexpensively. Furthermore, 24-hour access to an internet site, for example, offers the potential of better enabling those workers who are 'time-poor' (such as workers with care responsibilities) to rapidly view recruitment web pages and to weigh the advantages of union membership. Participants at the 'Unions and the internet' conference cited many examples of successful on-line recruitment drives and web-based recognition campaigns, particularly within the technology and publishing sectors.

Democracy

In order to make unions more attractive to non-members and increase the participation of existing members, there have been calls for union structures and leaderships to be more accountable and more representative, particularly of those members traditionally under-represented such as women, ethnic minority and young workers. The proximity of union members to on-line trade union resources, through 24-hour access to the internet, greatly increases the number of people who have access to information that was previously exclusive to those in the official hierarchy. At the touch of a button, the individual union member can access and marshal a range of relevant materials that would have been almost impossible for the individual citizen to identify and collect together in the past. Indeed, 300 out of 382 respondents in the Poptel survey ranked the information and resource capabilities of the new ICTs as the most important aspect of the internet for trade unions.

Through on-line balloting and auditing capabilities, the new ICTs can provide increased possibilities of measuring the preferences of members and fine tuning policy to meet these requirements. In addition, the behaviour of union officials is more transparent as, through a well-constructed archive of events, members can track the unfolding of developments and form independent assessments of the performance of officials. Examples of websites set up by lay activists presented at the 'Unions and the internet' conference provide an indication of the way in which the internet can provide space for members to have their voices heard, with some UK unions' official websites even hosting members' own web pages (see http://www.geocities.com/e_collectivism/scos2001.html).

Participation

Advocates of the use of ICTs also argue that it can allow the time and space considerations of conventional trade union participation and activism to be reconfigured. Those members who were traditionally separated from their branch organisation or other union members by the physical barriers of distance are now highly proximate electronically - they are in daily reach and range of one another through virtual means, which may have important consequences for enhanced solidarity. The internet can enhance membership loyalty to collective action by providing for more rapid and frequent communication between leaders and those they lead.

This may have particular consequences for women union members and workers on non-standard hours who have relatively low union participation rates. This is often because traditional union activities such as meetings continue to be held at times and in locations which make it extremely difficult for those with care responsibilities or those working non-standard hours to attend. The use of on-line balloting could better enable increased participation amongst women and non-standard employees, while the use of ICTs offers new ways of delivering trade union activist and vocational education, enabling increased participation for those who are unable to attend physically. For example, the TUC has launched the Learnonline programme and many trade unions have already developed web-based courses.

Global links

The internet also provides opportunities for global links to be made. Use of the internet allows unions to highlight organisations which support their causes and interests through explicit links (see http://www.geocities.com/unionsonline/unionsonline.html). Global visibility can give impetus to local-level campaigns, while the development of UK websites such as the Cyber Picket Line indicates the benefits that the internet can bestow on groups with fewer resources than the large unions, providing information about local, national and international disputes and campaigns.

Obstacles to engagement with the new ICTs

It is obvious that the new ICTs do not offer a panacea to the particular membership recruitment, retention and participation challenges faced by British trade unions today. There is no suggestion that unions should eschew traditional forms of activism and organising. Some of the barriers to electronic participation and the potential dangers involved, along with possible ways of overcoming these, are discussed below.

Differential access to the technology and web skills

In practice, the use of new technology in any extended way has been limited to those unions organising in sectors that are computer literate and which are predominantly white-collar. On the other hand, it is undeniable that home computer access will increase exponentially over the next decade, particularly as costs fall. Effective utilisation of ICTs requires unions to consider the wider context of their membership and how use of ICTs can be encouraged in the lower-paid sectors of the economy. Many UK unions have begun to offer free internet service provision, while other union websites provide pointers to members on how to create web pages and develop their web skills (seehttp://www.geocities.com/e_collectivism/e_discourse.html).

Opposition to virtual participation

There is still a strong preference for traditional, face-to-face forms of participation within the UK union movement. Indeed, while respondents to the Poptel survey ranked most potential uses of the internet highly, they were much more equivocal about innovations such as on-line voting, which 115 out of 382 did not favour. Additionally, research indicates that many online courses are facing teething problems (see http://www.geocities.com/e_collectivism/e_learning.html). However, while at the current time personal physical presence and face-to-face interaction is most preferable, this denies many people the chance to participate in their trade unions, making use of electronic means invaluable.

Power and control issues

Many participants at the 'Unions and the internet' conference voiced concerns that a decentralised communication forum could easily become the setting for 'incoherence of message'. It is important to recognise that information on the internet can be misused and misrepresented. Some voiced the opinion that a central body was needed which would oversee the web presence and web activities of the UK trade union movement. However it is clear that traditional means of 'policing' are almost impossible within 'cyberspace' and that, like any other media form, users of the internet and e-mail will need to become adept at assessing the validity and usefulness of material provided.

Commentary

The use of new ICTs can potentially facilitate the wider dissemination of information and resources, offer increased possibilities of tracking and evaluating actions of union hierarchies, and facilitate participation and training opportunities for a wider group of members. This does not obviate the need for traditional trade union activities, but the new ICTs cannot be ignored. Despite barriers to engagement, there is no doubt that cyberspaces will become increasingly important in the future, as internet use increases and electronic forms of communication become more and more habitual. This is a direction in which modern unions are going to have to develop and those that do not are not likely to survive. More positively, electronic unionism has the potential to reconceptualise the meaning and domain of activism and the relationship between officials and members. Indeed, that many union leaders find the prospect of 'cyber-unions' unsettling is not surprising: as the internet offers the capability to distribute information and resources to many more people, its use also holds the more significant capability of changing the relationship between officials and ordinary members. (Anne-marie Greene, IRRU)