A few weeks ago I took a look at examples of unions using Facebook, partially inspired by Change to Win's Smack the CEO Facebook application.  Over the last few days, a mini-revolt of sorts has rolled through the Facebook labor activist community, and I've got good news: our side won!

The story begins with Derek Blackadder, a Canadian labor activist.  Blackadder tried using Facebook to organize a group of workers as his friend, and ran up against Facebook's friend limits.  Despite Derek's best efforts to stay within the bounds of Facebook's rules, he was eventually and summarily banned from the social network.  John Wood, an activist in London, sprang to Blackadder's defense, posting to his blog about the story and eventually starting a Facebook group to petition for reinstatement.  Eric Lee, who helps run LabourStart, sent an email to LabourStart readers encouraing them to join the group and email Facebook administrators.

The response was quick and effective.  Within eight hours of Lee's email, over 2,400 Facebook users signed up for the group (membership now stands at 2,683).  Within a day, Blackadder had been reinstated.

There's more...

In last weekend's series on different ways the labor movement can make use of the web, I discussed use of the web in organizing and contracting campaigns; finding new organizing opportunities; and mobilizing activists.  Today, I'll round off the series with a discussion of how the web can be useful in servicing members.

In most cases, the primary venue for servicing members online will be the union local's website.  For that reason, every union local should have its own website, and should have a space on that website for the various workplaces and worker groups represented by that local.  Whenever possible, internationals and local labor councils should make it easy for visitors to contact their local, in order to help workers whose local doesn't have a website.

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This weekend, I've been writing a series discussing what the labor movement can do to use the Internet more effectively.  On Friday, I wrote about using the internet to support ongoing union organizing and contracting campaigns.  Yesterday, I posted a longer piece, regarding attracting potential union members, and new organizing opportunities, online.  Today, I'm going to focus on a topic perhaps a bit nearer and dearer to MyDD readers: using the web to enlist progressive activists in support of labor unions.

In particular, I'm writing today about enlisting activists in support of union organizing efforts, as opposed to union poltiical efforts, like raising the minimum wage, electing a particular candidate, or passing the Employee Free Choice Act.  Certainly, there's nothing wrong with unions enlisting activist support in these cases; but, for the purpose of this series, I'm more interested in recruiting activists to increase the fundamental strength of unions - membership density.

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This weekend, I am writing a series on using the internet to strengthen labor unions, in honor of Labor Day weekend.  Yesterday, I looked at the kinds of things unions can do to use the internet to help out with organizing or contracting campaigns - to make a difference in persuading workers to support union campaigns, and to convert existing support among workers into volunteer power.

Today I will focus on using the internet to attract potential members, i.e., to communicate with workers who are not involved in an active campaign, and are not part of an existing union.  This group presents unions with a much greater challenge, for a variety of reasons.  First and most simply, this group is much larger and more diverse than the group of workers who are in the midst of a campaign, encompassing, as it does, about 90% of private sector workers and perhaps 65-70% of public sector workers.  Second, the kind of issues which these kinds of workers are likely to be concerned about are wide-ranging and difficult to imagine; that's in contrast to workers who are in the midst of a campaign, who tend to have very concrete concerns which come up repeatedly as a campaign progresses.

Nevertheless, these kinds of workers are an important potential source of new members.  Workers are already using the web to communicate with one another about their workplace, and some of them are likely to be interested in joining a union.  Below, I'll describe some of the tools unions can use to reach out to these workers, and, perhaps, to convert these online interactions into offline bargaining units.

There's more...

In honor of Labor Day, I thought I'd dedicate this weekend to discussing a few ideas which might help strengthen the labor movement - in particular, I'm going to look at a number of ways labor can use the Internet.  I wrote up some of these ideas in a post in late June, when I wrote about some of the things the labor movement can do to organize workers while we wait for enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act.  This weekend, I'll provide a longer, more detailed discussion.

I've organized this series according to the various kinds of people who unions might expect to interact with online.  As a general rule, this is a useful approach to organizing a website, and I think it works well for this series as well.  Today's post is about using the web to communicate with workers who are being actively organized.

Workers who are being actively organized, as part of a campaign to create a new bargaining unit or to renew a contract, are probably the single most important online constituency for a labor union.  Opening up lines of communications with these workers is the key to a successful campaign; just as important is providing workers with updates on the campaign, the union's point of view on the various issues and events which come up in the course of any campaign, and providing workers with key facts.

There's more...