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Look For The Union Web Site Label
By L.M. Sixel, Inter@ctive Week
Marcus Courtney is a typical union organizer taking an uncommon
path to organizing labor. During the past year, he has gone to bat
on behalf of more than 6,000 contract employees, winning benefits
for them such as guaranteed time off for vacation, minimum health-
care coverage and an annual $500 training benefit.
Not bad, considering that Courtney is helping to break new ground for
labor groups that are finding ways to transform the Internet
into the world's largest union hall. Providing both a resource for
collecting information and a forum for swapping worker stories, unions
are going online in a way that is beginning to revolutionize the way
labor groups organize themselves and wield
their powers.
As co-founder and organizer of the Washington Alliance of Technology
Workers (www.washtech.org),
Courtney is using the Internet against even Microsoft, organizing
workers who were faced with losing overtime pay. The state of
Washington, at the request of the software industry, exempted
"highly paid" computer professionals who earned more than
$27.63 per hour from the right to receive overtime pay.
"Before WashTech, there was absolutely no discussion of the
problems contract employees were having," Courtney says.
"People were whispering in the offices, but they felt they couldn't
complain. WashTech changed that."
"Higher-paid" computer programmers, designers and software
engineers discovered it takes more than a few strongly worded e- mails
to attract the attention of employers. Much like railroad workers a
century ago and auto workers throughout the 1900s, computer
professionals are finding that collaborative bargaining efforts are the
best path to achieving gains in the workplace, Courtney says.
Online union organizing activity extends far beyond the reach of
Redmond, Wash., though. Today, the high-tech approach has also become
popular with many other unions in the country, ranging from laborers and
steelworkers to service workers and sheet metal
workers.
Reaching out online
Union leaders are discovering that using the Internet to organize makes
it easier to reach a large number of workers more efficiently. And some
employers, still expecting the traditional union approach of recruiting
employees one by one by going to their homes or meeting during work
breaks, are having a difficult time responding to this new breed of
quick Internet assault.
The Internet has made workers who were once inaccessible easy to reach.
For example, the Laborers' International Union of North America (www.liuna.org)
started a campaign two years ago to organize the 400 technicians across
the country who dispose of unexploded ordinances such as bombs, bullets
and land mines.
Before the Internet organizing drive began, getting the workers together
would have been a logistical nightmare. The workers toil on secure
military bases in remote locations such as Adak, Alaska, and No Mans
Island off the coast of Massachusetts. They also tend to live in hotels
and leave town on the weekends. It was impossible to find them and talk
to the "nomad bullet pickers," says Patti Devlin, assistant
director of organizing at the LIUNA in Washington, D.C.
But the workers, who are ex-military employees, are all connected to the
Web because that's the way they maintain their military relationships.
So Devlin, who says she was skeptical at first because she came of age
when union organizers went from door to door, began contacting the
workers through a Web site. E-mail lists grew and, so far, the union has
won eight of nine elections in the past 15 months of the organizing
campaign.
Think of it as a big virtual union hall: Unions are having an easier
time building relationships with each other because of the
Internet, says Laurie Clements, director of the Labor Center at the
University of Iowa in Iowa City. And the United Steelworkers
of America, which isn't
typically considered on the cutting edge of technology, is doing more
than most unions, he
says.
During a recent strike against Continental General Tire in Charlotte,
N.C., for instance, the USWA targeted the tire
distributors, which included Wal-Mart Stores. To let shoppers know about
its strike, the USWA posted its signs, brochures and fliers online -- in
four languages -- so any union could download the material and use it.
The unions didn't have to go to the printer
and didn't have to ship the literature; it was easily available at the
touch of a button. Suddenly, there were simultaneous
demonstrations hitting distributors, helping the union gain more
leverage by increasing pressure on target companies, Clements
says.
Union members around the country also downloaded the literature to
picket Ford Motor dealerships, because Ford uses Continental General
tires on its new cars, says Marco Trbovich, assistant to the president
of the USWA in Pittsburgh. The unions told the dealers they wouldn't
stop protesting until the dealers asked Ford
to find another supplier.
Trbovich didn't think the easy-to-obtain signs were such an exciting
development. But to employers they're a big worry.
"You go into the computer, hit an attachment and, boom, you have a
little banner there," says Susan M. Connelly, client services
department representative at PTI Labor Research (www.ptilaborresearch.com),
a Houston-based firm that researches
union activities on behalf of management clients that fight union
drives. The banners that appeared frequently during the recent
Boeing strike made it appear to the community that the Society of
Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (www.speea.org)
had a lot of support, Connelly says.
The Web has also allowed union locals to stay in better contact with
each other, Clements notes. In the case of Continental
General, unions around the world began to get involved in the North
Carolina labor dispute, in which the company had 1,450 striking workers.
Workers at the South African plant, for example, went on a wildcat
strike. Other union locals picketed the German consulates and embassies
about the labor practices at the German- based company, creating real
pressure back at home, Clements says.
The cybercampaign also focused on getting tire customers to e-mail
Continental General, Clements adds. The union provided the
company's e-mail on each brochure.
After nearly a year on strike, the employees won a six-year contract
with pension improvements, wage increases across the
board and a cost-of-living increase that's worth about $3,000 per
employee per year.
The company seemed surprised that one local union in Charlotte, N.C.,
could win a strike against a big international company,
according to Trbovich.
Michael Polovick, director of corporate human resources at Continental
General, disputed the notion that the union's use of
the Internet, including the creation of a site dedicated to the strike,
brought any pressure to bear. It's no different than
posting a sign on a bulletin board or publishing a newsletter, he says.
The Web site may have served to buoy the strikers' spirits,
Polovick says, but he adds that he isn't aware of a customer of any
magnitude that told Continental General officials that they
better settle the dispute or it was buying its tires elsewhere. It was
little more than a nuisance for the dealers.
The viral effect
Maybe so, but union organizers also are finding ways to use the Internet
to make labor action a reality for huge groups of workers
across multiple employers.
Orell Fitzsimmons, state director at the Service Employees International
Union (www.seiu.org) Local 100 in
Houston, who has
his sights set on organizing a big group of nurses, says the first thing
he does when he begins an organizing campaign is collect e- mail
addresses. That way, he can send out messages every day. It's fast, easy
and unobtrusive. "That way you don't have to go to the parking
lot," he says. "Or stand out in the sleet and rain and get
harassed by security."
But electronic organizing doesn't work for all groups, because some
people don't have a computer. Nursing home workers, for
instance, don't generally have computers, so they still have to be
contacted the old-fashioned way.
Nurses, in contrast, tend to be online, and they like a lot of
information. The SEIU, therefore, set up chat rooms so it could
talk to nurses who are already represented by the union. But Fitzsimmons
says the questions are screened because the union has had some trouble
with managers "mucking up" the chat room by posing as unhappy
union nurses.
Internet organizing has also opened up a new range of electronic
activism, says Jeffrey Fisher, co-chairman of the Chicago local of
the National Writers Union (www.nwu.org).
The union sends out notices to its members on important pieces of
legislation, such as
ergonomics and free-lance writer rights, to encourage members to contact
their senators and representatives.
And the link to the Web has opened the door to many more new members.
Matt Westendorf, membership development director in New York City,
estimates that one-third to one-half of new members come from its site
these days. The NWU's Webmaster, a technical writer, has linked the site
to a lot of sites typically visited by writers, Westendorf says.
Consequently, the union has grown to 5,700 members, an increase of about
2,000 in the past five years.
Traditionally, unions have been organized around a single employer. But
unions have been sprouting up recently -- such as the NWU and WashTech
--- that are representing people who work for a variety of employers.
While the Internet has made that kind of organizing easier, organizing
outside of a traditional collective bargaining contract also creates
another challenge: how to collect
dues.
The NWU solves that problem by providing many of its services, such as
compensation survey results, strictly to members. Members need an access
code to get that salary information from the union's Internet site.
WashTech affiliated with the Communication Workers of America (www.cwa-union.org)
a year ago and is now receiving financial
support from the large union. Courtney says he believes the site
eventually will be self-sustaining through voluntary memberships, akin
to the way the Sierra Club raises money. It's clear that members need to
feel as if they're getting value-added benefits, so Courtney is thinking
about offering low-cost training programs that will allow members to
keep up-to-date in a cost-effective way.
Research made simple
The Internet has also made it easier for a union such as WashTech to do
some old-fashioned detective work. The site discovered that Microsoft
had secretly rated its contract workers and directed its members to the
site. After Microsoft cut off access, Courtney petitioned the Washington
State Department of Labor and Industries (www.wa.gov/lni) to allow the
contractors access, because the state allows employees to see their
personnel records. An agency official agreed that the workers do indeed
have a right to access, but Microsoft is fighting that initial ruling
because it believes the contractors should not be classified as its
employees.
Microsoft collects routine customer feedback about its contractors much
like restaurant patrons are asked to comment about the food and service
they receive, says Dan Leach, a Microsoft spokesman. But they're not
Microsoft employees, he says, so it's not a
personnel file.
Besides, Leach says, the Department of Labor and Industries has never
notified the Redmond, Wash., software company that it
considers the records to be employee personnel files. Leach adds that it
isn't Microsoft's place to have an opinion about whether
its contractors should join a union.
As for the new minimum standards for the contracting companies that do
business with Microsoft, Leach says they were put into
place to ensure contractors have good benefits so the companies can
attract the very best workers.
But the phenomenon of online organizing has Microsoft, which has seen
its stock market value swell thanks to the growth of the
Internet, and other employers like it pulling out their hair.
The Web has made it so much easier for employees to find a union to
represent them that all a disgruntled worker has to do is check the Web,
and nearly every union along with many locals has its own site, says Rob
Leinwand, an employment lawyer at Littler Mendelson (www.littler.com), a
San Francisco-based law firm that fights union campaigns for its client
companies.
That's right, says the SEIU's Fitzsimmons, who adds that he gets a lot
of leads from angry employees surfing the Web -- including a
recent one from a Houston Museum of Fine Arts employee who was shopping
for union representation.
The very workers whom unions are targeting -- young, low-wage earners --
are exactly the people who are tied into the Internet
culture, Leinwand says. In San Francisco, for example, the International
Longshoremen's Association (www.ila2000.org)
is using the Internet to organize bicycle messengers.
In addition, PTI recently produced a video for employers called The
State of the Unions</I>, in which it chronicles the AFL-CIO's (www.aflcio.org)
goal of putting a computer into every union home in America by offering
low-cost hardware and inexpensive monthly Internet access. That way, the
video explains in a somber tone, union members can be mobilized
overnight to participate in
protests and boycotts. PTI showed the video at a human resources
conference recently.
It's that shift in organizing tactics that has made employers nervous.
The rise of electronic organizing poses some murky legal questions that
likely will end up being decided by the National Labor
Relations Board (www.nlrb.gov).
Federal labor laws allow a union to solicit during breaks and nonworking
hours. But it's a complicated matter when it comes to e-mail. After all,
the computers belong to the companies, which have a right to regulate
their use. However, unlike a personal visit from a union representative
that can be easily tracked, it's not clear whether employees were at
work or at home when they read their e-mail messages from the union,
according to Leinwand.
And to further complicate the situation, many companies have policies
that allow employees to send and receive personal e-mail. Under those
circumstances, a company can't stop employees from receiving e-mail from
a union any more than it can stop employees from receiving e-mail from
their relatives.
And the Internet also opens up another interesting legal issue: Can
managers snoop around on union organizing sites?
IBM employees, who are trying to organize with the help of the CWA, put
a notice on one of their sites -- the IBM Union Home Page
(www.ibmunion.com) -- that the site is a union meeting place and federal
labor law forbids managers from spying on union meetings. A roomful of
management lawyers got a big laugh when they saw the unfair labor
practice warning, PTI's Connelly says. But notices such as that may
discourage some employers from looking.
It doesn't scare the managers at IBM, according to Ginny Roara baugh,
the IBM Union Home Page's Webmaster. She says that after posting the
times and locations for signups in the IBM parking lots, security
officers would close the gates and security vehicles would be parked
around the signup site.
Roarabaugh says in the early days, when she didn't use her name on the
Web site, her manager told her he knew she was behind it,
because another manager had investigated who had purchased the site.
There wasn't much the union could do to keep managers off
the site or even tell whether they were looking, Roara baugh says, who
used to work for IBM as a performance analyst, but still owns the site.
Sometimes it wasn't so bad to have the managers looking, because they
might be tempted to provide secret information.
The theory behind discouraging spying on union gatherings is to prevent
managers from finding out which employees may be union
supporters, says Patrick Flynn, an employment lawyer in Houston who
represents unions. But if the site doesn't require a password to enter
and there is no indication of who is a union supporter, it would be a
stretch to call management cruising a union site an
unfair labor practice, he says.
A two-way street
The Internet hasn't been all bad for employers. Sometimes, that's where
they can get some good information themselves.
Unions that have had troubled pasts and have vowed to clean themselves
up, such as the LIUNA and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (www.teamster.org),
sometimes post examples of transgressions on "reform" Web
sites, Connelly says.
For example, one of the reform sites discussed how a union official was
found with his hand in the cookie jar, so to speak,
by spending members' dues on fancy sports cars and exotic vacations. The
sites also routinely discuss some embezzlement
problems at their local unions.
PTI downloads the details, files them and then hauls them out when that
union begins an organizing drive at one of PTI's clients. WashTech's
Courtney hopes he never has union problems like that.
But PTI still has its antennas up and is watching unions such as
WashTech because their influence is far greater than their
membership rosters. WashTech may not have a union hall, host political
confabs or even have many members -- 260 at last count - - but it's got
clout. "Legislative aides call saying, 'What's the deal? We're
getting hundreds of e-mail on this bill,' " Courtney
recounts, after posting legislative alerts on the Web site.
That muscle gives WashTech the ability to shape policy, Courtney says.
Legislators know the Web site speaks to a large constituency and they're
paying attention to how WashTech weighs in on issues,
he says.
For unions to be successful, they have to use technology, Courtney says.
That's a lot more powerful than owning a union hall in a bad part of
town.
Getting the word out fast
By L.M. Sixel
When it comes to labor battles, union leaders sometimes prove that they
know more about moving at Web speed than the managers they are fighting.
During an organizing drive at several Borders Books & Music
(www.borders.com) stores, company officials took the old fashioned
route and got their messages cleared through several channels, such as
the legal department and human resources, before
distributing them to the employees.
It wasn't fast enough to keep up with the lightning speed of electronic
messages coming out of the United Food and Commercial
Workers Union, which was trying to organize the workers.
The employees set up their own site so they could chat with other
Borders' employees across the country about their problems, says
Elizabeth Belan, public relations coordinator for the union's Local 881,
in Oak Brook, Ill.
And then it didn't help that an internal memo from Borders' "Union
Awareness Training for Borders Managers" found its way onto the
organizing employees' site.
In the section "What can be done to avoid unionization in my
store," the memo explained how managers can overcome employees'
feelings of being underpaid and overqualified even though "in most
cases they are," and how to tactfully bring up to employees exactly
how much it would cost to join a union and other
"negatives."
When the memo surfaced it fueled the drive to continue organizing, Belan
says. The document crystallized for many employees a
business reality -- that the company wasn't as much centered on family
friendliness as it was on the bottom line, she says.
It was a surprise when the memo appeared on the Web, admits Ann Binkley,
manager of public relations at Borders in Ann Arbor,
Mich.. But that was about four years ago when the Internet was fairly
new. Now, it wouldn't be such a shock, she says.
Indeed, this is a Web tale without a happy ending forhe unions.
The organizing drive ended with four stores voting to join the union,
but employees later dropped their union affiliation in
"decertification" elections. There was so much turnover, Belan
says, noting that nearly all the employees who had originally supported
the union got frustrated and quit. The new employees didn't know the
problems the employees had previously, so they
decided to drop their union affiliation, she says.
Web speeds up union networking
By L.M. Sixel
For union leaders, who you know sometimes isn't as important as what you
know. An important part of any organizing drive is
uncovering volumes of information about a company. Typically, a union
sends in a "salt" posing as a regular employee to find out
the ownership structure, where the offices are located and the number of
employees.
And now that information is easily available on the Web.
"Companies are proud of themselves, and they put it on the
Internet," says E. Dale Wortham, president of the Harris County
AFL-CIO (www.aflcio.org) in Houston.
Wortham says that while trying to organize the workers at Houston- based
Quietflex Manufacturing, an air duct maker owned by Goodman Holding, he
gleaned more company information in two days by searching the Web than
he would have in two months by speaking with a salt. He says he
uncovered such gems as the polo pony- playing habits of a top Goodman
officer, the estimated wealth of the private company and the amount it
gave in charitable donations.
That kind of detail is important in an organizing campaign, especially
when the workers are paid low wages, he notes. "You can
never have too much information," he says.
Wortham uncovered another important detail from his Web search: The
Houston plant has a union-represented plant in Iowa. All it
took was a call from the Sheet Metal Workers, the union leading the
organizing drive, and the workers in Iowa began wearing
buttons.
"We support the Quietflex workers," Wortham says. "It
would have taken six months to find out about that union connection if
he had to network the old-fashioned way."
Dan Daniel, president and chief executive of Quietflex, says he hasn't
seen any direct impact on the company from the union's use
of the Internet. But he is feeling some heat because of the information
the union collected and turned over to the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (www.eeoc.gov).
Agency officials, sitting at picnic tables in a park near the northwest
Houston plant, recorded 83 grievances from Hispanic workers after the
union notified the federal agency that the employees were
complaining about natural origin discrimination and retaliation.
The Hispanic workers, objecting to their wages and working conditions,
simultaneously walked off the job. Workers contended
that Quietflex treated them like second-class citizens, making them do
things not required of other ethnics -- such as clean the
lunchroom on their own time.
Daniel read letters that union officials sent to Houston political
leaders, thanking the EEOC for becoming involved. "It's
extraordinary," he says.
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