Digital Solidarity or Complacent Clicktivism?

Abstract

24 | International Union Rights | 25/3 FOCUS | INDUSTRY 4.0 Nearly 7000 people supported the Turkish TÜMTIS union campaign.The company caved in to the union’s demands. But the workers on the picket line have to be given full credit for their victory Digital Solidarity or Complacent Clicktivism? ERIC LEE is the founding editor of LabourStart, the news and campaigning platform of the international trade union movement Trade unions have been using information technology to promote global solidarity for more than three decades. When I began researching and writing about this in the early 1990s, I found an already existing community of activists who had been using email and other online tools for years. In fact, by the early 1990s, they had already held a couple of international conferences to discuss what had been done and where to go next. So we’ve learned a lot, and we have decades of experience behind us. We’ve learned about some tools that work very well, and others that don’t. LabourStart has been a laboratory of sorts, where we’ve tried out many of the new technologies. What works, and what doesn’t Let me start by giving a couple of examples of things that did not work out very well. One was called ‘Second Life’ – an immersive, 3-D online environment which was all the rage a few years back. Some unions decided that this ‘virtual world’ was the next big thing and didn’t want to be left behind. Something called ‘Union Island’ was created to much fanfare. I tried to be supportive, and signed up to use ‘Second Life’ only to discover that I couldn’t figure out how to equip my online avatar with clothing. As a result, my unclothed character stood neck-deep in the sea surrounding ‘Union Island’ cheering on those few who had managed to get ashore with their clothes on. ‘Union Island’ quickly disappeared under the virtual waves and has not been heard of since. When Facebook took off, many of us realised some of its limitations – more on this in a moment – and thought it would be better to build a social network owned and controlled by unions. Thus UnionBook was born. Using a platform that replicated much of Facebook’s functionality, it struggled to get even 5000 trade unionists to sign up. The problem was a chicken-and-egg one: without vast numbers of trade unionists there, the network was useless. It limped along for several years until it was finally shut down. So, what does work? It turns out that two of the older technologies, which have been in use for a quarter century or more, remain potent tools for trade unions. One is email. As we have repeatedly learned, there is nothing more effective than a mass mailing in order to promote an online campaign. We see this all the time whenever we launch a new campaign on LabourStart. If we share it with our tens of thousands of followers on social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) we’ll get a small trickle of responses. But when we send out a message to our 130,000 email subscribers, we get a flood. This simple point is still not widely understood in unions. Often when we ask a union to give publicity to a campaign – even to a campaign which they requested – what we get is a posting on Facebook and Twitter which has little demonstrable effect on the campaign. Why is this the case? I think it’s because we treat our email inboxes differently from how we treat our Facebook news feeds or Twitter feeds. If a message comes into my inbox, it’s something I need to read, or act on, or delete. This is absolutely not the case with Twitter or Facebook; I can happily not visit social networks for days and no one necessarily expects me to be responding to their posts. The other tool that still works very well is the website. Though we live in an age of smartphones and apps, the reality is that websites remain incredibly powerful tools. Just ask Amazon. So we have found that the most potent...