Web Conferences and Labor Education: An After-Action Report

Abstract

Union officers, staff, and members attending labor education courses, union conferences, or out-of-town meetings are increasingly confronted by significant expenses: higher travel costs, travel delays, lost wages, and lost work time (Lund 2003). Labor education programs directly suffer from this cost squeeze: it impacts enrollment and cost recovery at a time when they increasingly rely on program revenue. Increasing costs also impact unions whose operating incomes are directly related to dues and per capita tax, incomes that decline as membership does. Reacting to these cost pressures, labor educators and unions alike have responded in a variety of ways, including relying more on technology such as online courses or teleconferencing. While these alternatives are imperfect substitutes for face-to-face meetings or “live” instruction, they allow limited financial resources to be stretched further and obviate the need for travel. But both alternatives obviously fall short: online courses seldom permit real-time dialogue between participants and instructors, and teleconferencing makes it extremely difficult to present, discuss, analyze, and revise text, graphics, and data. A third alternative, web conferencing, effectively combines the strengths of both online courses and teleconferencing, and minimizes their inherent weaknesses. This paper presents a case study of web conferencing and assesses how it was used to facilitate nationwide meetings of union officers and employees to learn about proposed changes by the U.S. Department of Labor in the LM-30, the “Union Officer/Employee Report,” and to formulate suggestions for changes to the proposed form. Following a discussion defining web conferencing and how it works, the paper reviews how the web conference was set up, how the audience was selected and prepared, and how the conference Innovations