Inside LabourStart

I’ve just returned from the joint European Metalworkers Federation – International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt.  Trade union communicators from every continent participated, and I had the chance to talk with activists from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

My only formal role was to participate in a panel discussion of new media with colleagues from the IAM (North America) and CNM-CUT (Brazil). I was very impressed with the latter — a website rich in content, including lots of video.

But a key part of this conference, as with any event of this kind, is what happens in between sessions, in the corridors, during the coffee breaks, at dinner.  Obviously you get to exchange a lot of business cards and talk about ways to work together.  But as I listened to the various panels and talked informally with people, I had a few thoughts about online campaigning.

Here is the main one:

It became clear, especially when discussing the IMF’s efforts to mobilize its own affiliate unions to support important global campaigns, that the message was not always getting through.  In some cases, the trade unionists present urged the IMF to simply send copies of any solidarity requests to an additional person — in other words, to consider supplementing the copy sent to the International Department of a union with one to the Communications Department.

I think the problem runs deeper than that.  Because as I heard this discussion, I thought that in a sense, this is no different from how a global union operated a century ago.  Back in 1909, if the IMF (which already existed) had a solidarity request, it would send it by post (or perhaps telegraph) to the office of an affiliate union, and if they were lucky, that affiliate union might respond.

But in 2009, we can do so much more — the new technology allows us to do so much more.

Instead of sending out a couple of hundred requests to union offices — or rather, in addition to doing so — a global union like the IMF can now reach union members directly in their tens of thousands, through email.  Campaigns become, by definition, larger and their velocity (the speed at which messages reach the target) increases as there are no delays in union offices.

But more than that, as we’ve learned with LabourStart, when you send out regular emailings to an activist list, over time that has an educational effect.  People who previously knew little about unions outside their own country — in many cases, outside their own workplace — over time learn about heroic struggles in Korea and horrific persecution in Iran, about two-faced companies that are nice to workers where unions are powerful (Europe) but nasty in countries with weak unions, and most important: about how the issues we face in our workplace and our country are the same as those faced by workers on the other side of the world.

The IMF’s general secretary opened the conference by speaking frankly about the need to raise the profile of this global union and this is where we come in.  Because LabourStart, and LabourStart alone, has built a global network of union activists across all sectors who can be informed and mobilized — a network that exists to serve the global union federations and others.  Because of LabourStart, tens of thousands of workers who never heard of federations like the IMF, IUF, ITF, ICEM, PSI, UNI, BWI or the Education International have now heard of them, and participate regularly in their campaigns.

And we’ve had this success, and have built this network, because we take advantage of tools that did not exist in 1909.

We should never underestimate the importance of what we are doing, or the unique role we play.  If LabourStart did not exist, it would need to be invented.  It has become indispensable for the international trade union movement and we should be proud of what we’ve done so far, and look forward to doing much more in the future.