The web: fantastic value for unions

It's easy to forget the fantastic value the web offers unions to build networks of support. Mark McGrath, Social Change Online's Labour Sector Consultant takes a step back to look at the opportunities the web offers to unions.

Firstly...a reality check

Recently, there's been some doubting of the web's capacity as a campaign resource for unions. The flaw in this argument is the assumption that the web, on its own, is able to turnaround the decline in the activity and membership of unions.

This is a simplistic and unfair benchmark to place upon the web. A union's content and services online can only ever be as good as the content and services a union offers offline. If a union isn't providing good organising support and services to members then a website has precious little chance of succeeding on its own.

Another factor that can limit a website's performance is its marketing. If you build it and don't do anything else they will not come. If you build it and tell people about it they will come and see if your site is worth revisiting.

Too many unions spend a significant amount of money building a website and then spend little effort marketing it. The result being a good website that nobody knows about and precious dollars wasted on web development.

Spending 5% of your web budget on promotion is a benchmark I recommend to my clients. There are some effective strategies you can employ that shouldn't cost too much, like:

• including your website URL on all of your print material
• running website advertisements in your journal
• Advertising on Google with their Adwords service
• Undertaking an email campaign to request reciprocal links from sites that are within your audience's community of interest
• producing print material that promote your website, like monitor stickers, brochures, wallet cards, t-shirts and mousepads

A powerful medium that offers extraordinary value

It's important to remember, and not take for granted, what the web can bring to the union movement:

• Instant 24-hour access to union information and services
• The ability to spread a union's message faster and cheaper than traditional methods
• The ability to recruit new members and collect payments
• The ability to mobilise people to support campaigns

Howard Dean raised $40 million dollars and recruited thousands of supporters through his web strategy. Sure, he didn't win the Democratic nomination but there were reasons for this other than his web strategy. In Australia, the NSW Teachers Federation has signed up over 1,000 new members and collected over $100,000 in membership fees in the last 12 months with their secure online payments facility.¹

Unions such as the AWU, NSW Teachers Federation, CPSU, HSU, LHMU and the Labor Council of NSW are now effectively using e-protest forms, which have seen thousands of workers send protest messages to employers and politicians in support of union campaigns.

Compare how easy it is for a worker to send a protest message with one of these e-protest forms to asking them to sit down, write out and post a letter to a politician or employer.

And this e-protest strategy works. If you send a message with one of these forms you'll get a formal letter back from a politician, just the same as you would if you sent a letter in hard-copy.

In 2003, the NSW Teachers Federation's e-protest forms generated over 100,000 submissions to the NSW Parliament² and received feedback from members of the ALP caucus that the message from these e-protest forms was getting through to the government.

The LHMU reports that their e-protest strategy was a significant factor in building pressure on the employer in their successful Hilton Hotel dispute. Their recent childcare workers wages campaign has had similar success, with over 5000 submissions being made to Federal Treasurer Peter Costello's office in support of higher wages for childcare workers.³

The web offers extraordinary value as medium to distribute content to members. Statistical analysis of union site traffic and serving costs that I've conducted shows that the average cost to deliver content via the web is less than 0.4 cents per page. This is more than 100 times cheaper than what it would cost to deliver the same amount of content in a journal via post.

A fantastic network builder

What differentiates the web from most other communication mediums is its ability to build networks, unhindered by time or distance. With little or no ongoing effort from site owners, websites can self-generate networks of like-minded people. The meetup.com site successfully used by Howard Dean is probably the best example of applying this attribute of the web for political ends. The web presents an opportunity for unions to put workers in touch with each other to build solidarity and campaign support.

Spam: a Temporary but Avoidable Threat

Email is the preferred method of communication for most organisations nowadays and unions are no exception. So the recent avalanche of spam hitting people's inboxes is not just inconvenient; it's a serious threat to a union's effectiveness.

The latest estimates are that on average, 63% of email people receive in their inbox is spam.⁴ There are also reports that the overwhelming majority of spam originates from a small number of unscrupulous e-marketing companies.

Whilst spam has reduced the usability of email, email is still the fastest and cheapest communication available. Business and government have too much to lose by letting spam erode the usefulness of email. So I don't think we'll have to wait too long before spammers are largely put out of business. We are already seeing ant-spam legislation being passed by several nations, including Australia, and successful prosecutions being made against spammers in foreign countries.

But in the meantime there are some effective measures a union can take to reduce spam that are easy to do and shouldn't cost much.

One measure is installing a spam filter on your mail server. This should be standard practice for your ISP that serves your email.

A second measure is getting an email client that has intelligent spam filtering built-in. I can recommend Mozilla, but there are many other effective products out there. Mozilla's email client comes as part of its browser package or as the stand-alone email client (Mozilla Thunderbird). Mozilla is free, easy to install and gets smarter the more you use it. It captured 70% of my spam first go and is now automatically detecting and deleting over 90% of my spam.

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 Labour Sector Consultant for Social Change Online and a Director of Social Change Media.

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