Web Trends that Unions Need to Know About

The take-up of the web and the viability of providing web services has been changing of late. Mark McGrath, Social Change Online's Labour Sector Consultant, looks at what these changes mean for unions.

Even Lower Paid Workers are Online and More are On the Way

There's now no excuse for unions not to take the web seriously. Even blue-collar workers are getting online. Plus the union members of tomorrow, young people between the ages of 14-18 are the biggest users of the web.

A common response from blue-collar based unions has been that it's not important to have a good website because most of their members aren't online. Well that may have been the case some years ago but the facts are that most of their members are online. Consider the following statistics:

• 65% of workers earning between $30,000 and $39,999 pa accessed the Net in the last month
• 58% of workers earning between $25,000 and $29,999 pa accessed the Net in the last month
• 64% of workers with a trade, diploma or certificate accessed the Net in the last month¹

Even those workers without a trade or certificate and only a lower secondary education are online in significant numbers: 41% accessing the Net in the last month.²

If there's any doubt that the Net will become a universal medium you only have to look at the take-up of the net amongst the young: 82% of people aged between 14-17 used the Net in the last month.³

E-commerce is Now Viable

In previous years most unions have dismissed the idea of a secure online payment service on a cost-benefit basis: it would be too expensive to implement and too few people would use the service. This situation has now changed: setting up a secure online payment service is relatively inexpensive and there is a significant and growing number of Australians purchasing goods and services online.

Most unions should be able to set up a secure online payments facility for less than $5,000 with typical ongoing costs in the region of $600 per annum. The cost will tend to vary according to how many different type of membership you wish to offer and how many transactions per year you will process. Assuming $300 per membership, at the above costs a 100% return on investment would be achieved by signing up just 20 new members in the first year.

To put this in perspective, the NSW Teachers Federation is currently averaging about 800 new members a year with their online payment service.⁴ Even if a blue-collar union is only 10% as successful as the Teachers Federation that's still 80 new members a year and 4 times the break-even rate.

Out in the wider web population there is increasing confidence in online payment services. In June 2003 over 960,000 Australians purchased goods or services over the Internet.⁵ That's the equivalent of over half the entire union movement purchasing online in one month.

Integrated Web Services are Now Emerging

If someone asked me to nominate the next big thing on the Net I would say integrated web services (or just "web services" as they are becoming to be known as). Web services are sophisticated transactional services that are integrated into a provider's back-end office systems.

As websites have become more interactive, the problem of collecting the data from website submissions and importing this data into back-end office systems for processing has arisen. Web services are a solution to this problem. They use standardised methods to transfer data between back-end office systems and a website.

An example of a web service would be a facility where members could update their own contact details online with these change of details directly updating a union's database.

The real value of a web service is not so much in the service itself, but it's ability to remove the costly exercise of manually exporting data from one system and importing to another. In our example above there is no need for the union to extract transactional data from the web server and import it into their database. A web service does this for you automatically, saving time and money.

So what other Web Services could Unions Offer?

• Online payments
• Requests for workplace assistance
• Smart self-help services ("what are my minimum conditions?")
• Workplace surveys
• Voting on agreements

In each of these cases the transactions associated with the web service would be handled much more efficiently than a non-integrated web service or paper-based version of these services, saving a union valuable time and money.

To run a web service though you need a membership management system that is web-enabled: which is effectively some "middleware" that enables your website to talk to your membership system.

Security Concerns

Whenever remote access is granted to any part of an organisation's internal IT system via a public network, there are usually concerns raised about the issue of security. These concerns are legitimate and should be raised, as an organisation should never compromise the security of their IT systems.

You can resolve these security concerns by purchasing a digital certificate for your web server and employing Secure Socket Layer that uses 128-bit encryption. This is the highest level of security available on the web and it's what the major banks use for their net banking services. Verisign, the world leader in this technology reports that 128-bit SSL encryption has never been broken: according to RSA Labs, it would take a trillion trillion years to crack using this technology.

This article is an extract from a paper that was orginally presented by Mark McGrath at the ACTU's Union Media & Communications Conference held on 22&23 April 2004.

Mark McGrath is the Union Sector Consultant for Social Change Online and a Director of Social Change Media.

References