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The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism

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Back to Solinet
26 March 1998

There may be 17,000,000 trade unionists online today

(How many of them know about your website?)

by Eric Lee

1. How many trade unionists are online?

According to one recent report, there are just under 113 million people online today.

Most of these live in the United States and Canada (70 million) and another 20 million are in Europe. The remaining 23 million are mostly in Asia, with a smattering in South America and barely 1 million in all of Africa.

How many of these 113 million people are trade unionists?

The answer is, of course, that no one knows.

But let us begin with some assumptions. The average income of trade union members in the US -- and perhaps elsewhere -- has traditionally been higher than the average income in the country as a whole. Meaning that trade unionists are more likely than average people to, perhaps, own a computer. Or be connected to the net.

Therefore, one would expect the percentage of people online who are trade unionists to equal -- or exceed -- the percentage of the general population who belong to unions.

In the United States, where trade union membership is roughly 15% of the adult working population, one would therefore expect something like 9 million trade unionists to be online (out of an estimated 62 million Americans online). In Canada, where trade union density is even higher, it would not be surprising to find between one and two million trade unionists online (out of 8 million Canadians who are believed to be connected to the net).

In North America alone, there are perhaps eleven million trade unionists online today.

In the rest of the world, where there are an estimated 42 million people online, even presuming the low rate of 15% trade union density (in European countries, particularly Nordic countries with their large number of Internet users, it is actually much higher), there are probably something like 6 million more trade unionists online.

Therefore it is not unreasonable to guess that there are possibly 17,000,000 trade union members online today.

But there is no evidence of their presence in the numbers of people participating in online mailing lists, or in hits to labour websites.

2. The bad news: Mailing lists

The veteran US and Canadian labour mailing list -- Labor-L -- has slightly more than 500 names -- that's one trade unionist per every 20,000 online in North America. Or put another way, 19,999 out of every 20,000 trade unionists who are already online do not subscribe to Labor-L.

The Campaign for Labor Rights sends out its announcements to about 1,000 people.

Even the most popular labour-related mailing list -- H-Labor, which is aimed at labour historians -- reaches only about 1,400 people, many of whom are not themselves members of trade unions.

The AFL-CIO maintains a mailing list of those members of US unions who subscribe to Labornet on Compuserve. It includes about 3,000 names -- not a vast improvement over the independent Labor-L.

The European scene is not much better -- the Union-D mailing list has fewer than 300 participants. Yet in Britain alone there are estimated to be some six million people online, more than 10 percent of the population. (The TUC claims to represent some 6.7 million people; at least 700,000 of these should be online.)

In Australia, where Internet use is quite high (one estimate is 1,210,000), or 4.38% of the population, there is a trade union movement with some 2.5 million members. Statistically speaking, some 100,000 of them should be online. Yet the very popular and successful Australian Left-Link mailing list, has little more than 300 subscribers. Where are the other 99,700 Australian trade unionists?

By contrast, AnchorDesk, a computer newsletter published by ZDNet, has 1,500,000 email subscribers. CNET has more than 2,000,000 registered subscribers.

3. The bad news: Websites

It is hard to come by accurate statistics for visits to trade union websites. Some of the things I know, I was told "off the record". For example, one major labour website -- one of the best-known in the world -- was reporting about 3,000 hits per day to all its pages. That means, at most, a few hundred visitors on a regular basis.

Another site, representing dozens of trade unions in more than 100 countries with tens of millions of members, was pulling in only about 50 hits per day to its main page, with dozens more to other pages.

And if I can break the taboo and openly report statistics, I will confess that after two weeks, LabourStart is pulling in 270 visitors per day while the mailing list linked to this site has about 180 members at this moment. (Both of these numbers are growing rapidly at the present time; LabourStart was averaging 180 visitors per day a week ago, and the mailing list will be larger than 200 by the time most of you read this article.)

By contrast, Matt Drudge's website, which broke the Monica Lewinsky story to the Web, gets 300,000 hits a day.

Trade unionists by their millions are coming online, but they are visiting Yahoo, Microsoft, Netscape, Excite, CNN, Disney, and so on.

Though all our websites are reporting growth -- and it would be interesting if we were to share some of those statistics, perhaps in the Labour Webmasters' Forum -- but none of us, I believe, are coming close to reaching the millions of trade unionists now online.

What this means is that there a huge potential -- we can with a click of the mouse -- mobilize hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of trade unionists.

Imagine if we were to do so, for example, in support of the Korean labour demand that the recent amnesty of political prisoners be extended to include all prisoners. My guess is that Korean President Kim Dae Jung received at best a few dozen letters as a result of our efforts so far. But what if we could have reached even one percent of the trade unionists online? (For those without calculators handy, that's probably something like 170,000 people!)

4. Reaching out

How do we begin the process of reaching our members who are already online? (Later, we can talk about reaching the two or three billion adults on this planet who are not yet online. But for now, let's focus on the millions of trade unionists who already send and receive email and surf the Web.)

  • One important way is by using off-line tools, like our newspapers and magazines. This is probably the most important thing we can do to build traffic to labour websites today.

  • Another is by buying publicity online -- and this means spending money. It means buying banner ads on high-traffic sites.

  • We can also improve the quality of our sites, making them content-rich, dynamic, with vitally-important information not easily available elsewhere. The vast majority of the 1,500 trade union websites listed in the Cyber Picket Line are examples of "brochureware" -- they're little more than online pamphlets about the union.

Any other suggestions?

Anyone else want to step forward and tell us how many visitors actually come to our websites?

Comments on this article? Please post them to the Labour Webmasters' Forum.