Nov
29
2010

Turkey: Report from two-day visit to Istanbul

I’ve just gotten back from a couple of days in Turkey where I spoke at Saturday’s conference on unions and new media, held in Istanbul and organized by TAREM, a pro-union NGO.

I had the opportunity to also meet with the general secretary of TUMTIS, the union currently in a fight with UPS over union recognition, as well as a comrade from the metalworkers union.  We’ve done online campaigns on behalf of both unions.

I also had the chance for extensive discussions with the international affairs person at DISK, the country’s more left-wing national trade union center.  Among other things, he told me that every time he meets trade unionists from elsewhere in the world and mentions he’s from Turkey, they tell him they know about Turkish unions and their struggles from LabourStart.  While I was there, he met up with two representatives of KMU, the leftist union center in the Philippines, and when the heard he was meeting with me, they sent regards and mentioned LabourStart’s support for their campaigns.  All confirmation of the effectiveness of the work we do, especially our campaigns.

I also discussed continuing cooperation with TAREM – including the possibility of holding our 2012 Global Solidarity Conference in Istanbul.  They welcomed this idea with enthusiasm.

Notes for my talk follow:

LabourStart and UnionBook: Ten lessons learned from more than a decade of online activism

Presentation to TAREM conference
Istanbul, 27 November 2010

by Eric Lee

Introductory comments –

How long we have been at this
Email, BBS first used in the 1980s
First labour websites – early 1990s
My book on labour and the internet published in 1996
LabourStart launched in 1998

What have we learned in these last few years?

Here are ten lessons.

1. The rise of the Internet doesn’t mean that face-to-face meetings in the real world become irrelevant.  To the contrary, the new technology is helping to globalize our movement, and is forcing us to travel to world, to meet comrades and build networks.  In other words, we’re having more face-to-face meetings, not fewer.

2. There are over 6,000 spoken languages in the world – and the international labour movement must learn to speak as many of those as possible in order to communicate directly with the working class. We can no longer rely on a handful of European languages – unless we only want to speak with a small elite inside the labour movement instead of with masses of workers.  (Compare the ITUC site with its 3 languages to LabourStart with nearly 30 – including Turkish.)

3. Working together in an open and transparent way is much more effective than working as individuals or small, closed groups.  LabourStart’s decision in 1999 to allow individuals to sign up as correspondents in their hundreds has made the project into the success it has become.  Open projects, based on volunteers, are more agile and nimble – and effective – than traditional bureaucratized trade union structures, which of course still have their place.

4. Sharing information is critical to what we do, and we should not over-emphasize the importance of people visiting a particular website or reading a particular print publication.  The important thing is to get the information out there, into the hands of workers and activists. This is where RSS and JavaScript news feeds have proven so useful.

5. We cannot ignore the rise of social networks even if we personally don’t enjoy them or understand them.  With 500 million people using Facebook, a trade union that chooses to ignore this is making a colossal mistake.  But we need to be aware of alternatives to Facebook, including our own social networks based on other platforms such as Ning, Elgg and BuddyPress.  UnionBook is a Ning alternative to Facebook with well over 2,000 users.

6. More than 25 years have passed since the invention of electronic mail, and yet it still remains the killer app.  Our experience promoting campaigns shows that nothing else works quite as well, even now with all the alternatives.  Unions that build fancy websites but neglect to collect and use the email addresses of their members are making a colossal mistake.

7. The last decade has been an intensive learning experience for anyone engaged in online labour activism.  There are more than 200 countries in the world with complex histories, and understanding local struggles requires study and openness.  For example – for thousands of trade unionists around the world, Turkey is now seen as a country with a mixed record on workers’ rights, where trade unionists are often jailed – which may not have been the case a decade ago.

8. Online campaigns work.  Give examples.  (See appendix.)

9. We have learned that there is a difference between effective new technologies – such as email, SMS text messaging, and the web – and fads like Second Life.  Unions cannot waste scare resources on nonsense and should focus their attention on using the tools that work.

10. Nevertheless, we cannot know what works unless we try things out.  Which is why LabourStart has pioneered the use of many new tools some of which work very well (such as social networks, email lists, online campaigns, Google ad campaigns, Skype) and others which failed (radio).

-end-

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |

1 Comment »

  • A conference in Turkey would be quite a coup for us I think. And a chance to connect with unions we would normally not have direct contact with. Well done.

    Comment | November 29, 2010

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