Look For The Union Web Site Label
By L.M. Sixel, Interactive Week

Marcus Courtney is a typical union organizer taking an uncommon  path to organizing labor. During the past year, he has gone to bat  on behalf of more than 6,000 contract employees, winning benefits  for them such as guaranteed time off for vacation, minimum  health- care coverage and an annual $500 training benefit.

Not bad, considering that Courtney is helping to break new ground for labor groups that are finding ways to transform the Internet into the world's largest union hall. Providing both a resource for collecting information and a forum for swapping worker stories, unions are going online in a way that is beginning to revolutionize the way labor groups organize themselves and wield their powers.

As co-founder and organizer of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, Courtney is using the Internet against even Microsoft, organizing workers who were faced with losing overtime pay. The state of Washington, at the request of the software industry, exempted "highly paid" computer professionals who earned more than $27.63 per hour from the right to receive overtime pay.

"Before WashTech, there was absolutely no discussion of the problems contract employees were having," Courtney says. "People were whispering in the offices, but they felt they couldn't complain. WashTech changed that."

"Higher-paid" computer programmers, designers and software engineers discovered it takes more than a few strongly worded e- mails to attract the attention of employers. Much like railroad workers a century ago and auto workers throughout the 1900s, computer professionals are finding that collaborative bargaining efforts are the best path to achieving gains in the workplace, Courtney says.

Online union organizing activity extends far beyond the reach of Redmond, Wash., though. Today, the high-tech approach has also become popular with many other unions in the country, ranging from laborers and steelworkers to service workers and sheet metal workers.

Reaching Out Online

Union leaders are discovering that using the Internet to organize makes it easier to reach a large number of workers more efficiently. And some employers, still expecting the traditional union approach of recruiting employees one by one by going to their homes or meeting during work breaks, are having a difficult time responding to this new breed of quick Internet assault.

The Internet has made workers who were once inaccessible easy to reach. For example, the Laborers' International Union of North America started a campaign two years ago to organize the 400 technicians across the country who dispose of unexploded ordinances such as bombs, bullets and land mines.

Before the Internet organizing drive began, getting the workers together would have been a logistical nightmare. The workers toil on secure military bases in remote locations such as Adak, Alaska, and No Mans Island off the coast of Massachusetts. They also tend to live in hotels and leave town on the weekends. It was impossible to find them and talk to the "nomad bullet pickers," says Patti Devlin, assistant director of organizing at the LIUNA in Washington, D.C.

But the workers, who are ex-military employees, are all connected to the Web because that's the way they maintain their military relationships. So Devlin, who says she was skeptical at first because she came of age when union organizers went from door to door, began contacting the workers through a Web site. E-mail lists grew and, so far, the union has won eight of nine elections in the past 15 months of the organizing campaign.

Think of it as a big virtual union hall: Unions are having an easier time building relationships with each other because of the Internet, says Laurie Clements, director of the Labor Center at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. And the United Steelworkers of America, which isn't typically considered on the cutting edge of technology, is doing more than most unions, he says.

During a recent strike against Continental General Tire in Charlotte, N.C., for instance, the USWA targeted the tire distributors, which included Wal-Mart Stores. To let shoppers know about its strike, the USWA posted its signs, brochures and fliers online -- in four languages -- so any union could download the material and use it. 

The unions didn't have to go to the printer and didn't have to ship the literature; it was easily available at the touch of a button. Suddenly, there were simultaneous demonstrations hitting distributors, helping the union gain more leverage by increasing pressure on target companies, Clements says.

Union members around the country also downloaded the literature to picket Ford Motor dealerships, because Ford uses Continental General tires on its new cars, says Marco Trbovich, assistant to the president of the USWA in Pittsburgh. The unions told the dealers they wouldn't stop protesting until the dealers asked Ford to find another supplier.

Trbovich didn't think the easy-to-obtain signs were such an exciting development. But to employers they're a big worry.

"You go into the computer, hit an attachment and, boom, you have a little banner there," says Susan M. Connelly, client services department representative at PTI Labor Research, a Houston-based firm that researches union activities on behalf of management clients that fight union drives. The banners that appeared frequently during the recent Boeing strike made it appear to the community that the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace had a lot of support, Connelly says.

The Web has also allowed union locals to stay in better contact with each other, Clements notes. In the case of Continental General, unions around the world began to get involved in the North Carolina labor dispute, in which the company had 1,450 striking workers. Workers at the South African plant, for example, went on a wildcat strike. 

Other union locals picketed the German consulates and embassies about the labor practices at the German- based company, creating real pressure back at home, Clements says.

The cyber campaign also focused on getting tire customers to e-mail Continental General, Clements adds. The union provided the company's e-mail on each brochure.

After nearly a year on strike, the employees won a six-year contract with pension improvements, wage increases across the board and a cost-of-living increase that's worth about $3,000 per employee per year.

The company seemed surprised that one local union in Charlotte, N.C., could win a strike against a big international company, according to Trbovich.

Michael Polovick, director of corporate human resources at Continental General, disputed the notion that the union's use of the Internet, including the creation of a site dedicated to the strike, brought any pressure to bear. 

It's no different than posting a sign on a bulletin board or publishing a newsletter, he says. The Web site may have served to buoy the strikers' spirits, Polovick says, but he adds that he isn't aware of a customer of any magnitude that told Continental General officials that they better settle the dispute or it was buying its tires elsewhere. It was little more than a nuisance for the dealers.

The Viral Effect

Maybe so, but union organizers also are finding ways to use the Internet to make labor action a reality for huge groups of workers across multiple employers.

Orell Fitzsimmons, state director at the Service Employees International Union Local 100 in Houston, who has his sights set on organizing a big group of nurses, says the first thing he does when he begins an organizing campaign is collect e- mail addresses. That way, he can send out messages every day. It's fast, easy and unobtrusive. "That way you don't have to go to the parking lot," he says. "Or stand out in the sleet and rain and get harassed by security."

But electronic organizing doesn't work for all groups, because some people don't have a computer. Nursing home workers, for instance, don't generally have computers, so they still have to be contacted the old-fashioned way.

Nurses, in contrast, tend to be online, and they like a lot of information. The SEIU, therefore, set up chat rooms so it could talk to nurses who are already represented by the union. But Fitzsimmons says the questions are screened because the union has had some trouble with managers "mucking up" the chat room by posing as unhappy union nurses.

Internet organizing has also opened up a new range of electronic activism, says Jeffrey Fisher, co-chairman of the Chicago local of the National Writers Union. The union sends out notices to its members on important pieces of legislation, such as
ergonomics and free-lance writer rights, to encourage members to contact their senators and representatives.

And the link to the Web has opened the door to many more new members. Matt Westendorf, membership development director in New York City, estimates that one-third to one-half of new members come from its site these days. 

The NWU's Webmaster, a technical writer, has linked the site to a lot of sites typically visited by writers, Westendorf says. Consequently, the union has grown to 5,700 members, an increase of about 2,000 in the past five years.

Traditionally, unions have been organized around a single employer. But unions have been sprouting up recently -- such as the NWU and WashTech --- that are representing people who work for a variety of employers. While the Internet has made that kind of organizing easier, organizing outside of a traditional collective bargaining contract also creates another challenge: how to collect
dues.

The NWU solves that problem by providing many of its services, such as compensation survey results, strictly to members. Members need an access code to get that salary information from the union's Internet site.

WashTech affiliated with the Communication Workers of America a year ago and is now receiving financial support from the large union. Courtney says he believes the site eventually will be self-sustaining through voluntary memberships, akin to the way the Sierra Club raises money. It's clear that members need to feel as if they're getting value-added benefits, so Courtney is thinking about offering low-cost training programs that will allow members to keep up-to-date in a cost-effective way.

Research Made Simple

The Internet has also made it easier for a union such as WashTech to do some old-fashioned detective work. The site discovered that Microsoft had secretly rated its contract workers and directed its members to the site. 

After Microsoft cut off access, Courtney petitioned the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (www.wa.gov/lni) to allow the contractors access, because the state allows employees to see their personnel records. An agency official agreed that the workers do indeed have a right to access, but Microsoft is fighting that initial ruling because it believes the contractors should not be classified as its employees.

Microsoft collects routine customer feedback about its contractors much like restaurant patrons are asked to comment about the food and service they receive, says Dan Leach, a Microsoft spokesman. But they're not Microsoft employees, he says, so it's not a personnel file.

Besides, Leach says, the Department of Labor and Industries has never notified the Redmond, Wash., software company that it considers the records to be employee personnel files. Leach adds that it isn't Microsoft's place to have an opinion about whether
its contractors should join a union.

As for the new minimum standards for the contracting companies that do business with Microsoft, Leach says they were put into place to ensure contractors have good benefits so the companies can attract the very best workers.

But the phenomenon of online organizing has Microsoft, which has seen its stock market value swell thanks to the growth of the Internet, and other employers like it pulling out their hair.

The Web has made it so much easier for employees to find a union to represent them that all a disgruntled worker has to do is check the Web, and nearly every union along with many locals has its own site, says Rob Leinwand, an employment lawyer at Littler Mendelson, a San Francisco-based law firm that fights union campaigns for its client companies.

That's right, says the SEIU's Fitzsimmons, who adds that he gets a lot of leads from angry employees surfing the Web -- including a recent one from a Houston Museum of Fine Arts employee who was shopping for union representation.

The very workers whom unions are targeting -- young, low-wage earners -- are exactly the people who are tied into the Internet culture, Leinwand says. In San Francisco, for example, the International Longshoremen's Association is using the Internet to organize bicycle messengers.

In addition, PTI recently produced a video for employers called The State of the Unions in which it chronicles the AFL-CIO's goal of putting a computer into every union home in America by offering low-cost hardware and inexpensive monthly Internet access. That way, the video explains in a somber tone, union members can be mobilized overnight to participate in protests and boycotts. PTI showed the video at a human resources conference recently.

It's that shift in organizing tactics that has made employers nervous.

The rise of electronic organizing poses some murky legal questions that likely will end up being decided by the National Labor Relations Board.

Federal labor laws allow a union to solicit during breaks and nonworking hours. But it's a complicated matter when it comes to e-mail. After all, the computers belong to the companies, which have a right to regulate their use. However, unlike a personal visit from a union representative that can be easily tracked, it's not clear whether employees were at work or at home when they read their e-mail messages from the union, according to Leinwand.

And to further complicate the situation, many companies have policies that allow employees to send and receive personal e-mail. Under those circumstances, a company can't stop employees from receiving e-mail from a union any more than it can stop employees from receiving e-mail from their relatives.

And the Internet also opens up another interesting legal issue: Can managers snoop around on union organizing sites?

IBM employees, who are trying to organize with the help of the CWA, put a notice on one of their sites -- the IBM Union Home Page (www.ibmunion.com) -- that the site is a union meeting place and federal labor law forbids managers from spying on union meetings. A roomful of management lawyers got a big laugh when they saw the unfair labor practice warning, PTI's Connelly says. But notices such as that may discourage some employers from looking.

It doesn't scare the managers at IBM, according to Ginny Roara baugh, the IBM Union Home Page's Webmaster. She says that after posting the times and locations for signups in the IBM parking lots, security officers would close the gates and security vehicles would be parked around the signup site.

Roarabaugh says in the early days, when she didn't use her name on the Web site, her manager told her he knew she was behind it, because another manager had investigated who had purchased the site. There wasn't much the union could do to keep managers off the site or even tell whether they were looking, Roara baugh says, who used to work for IBM as a performance analyst, but still owns the site. Sometimes it wasn't so bad to have the managers looking, because they might be tempted to provide secret information.

The theory behind discouraging spying on union gatherings is to prevent managers from finding out which employees may be union supporters, says Patrick Flynn, an employment lawyer in Houston who represents unions. But if the site doesn't require a password to enter and there is no indication of who is a union supporter, it would be a stretch to call management cruising a union site an unfair labor practice, he says.

A Two-Way Street

The Internet hasn't been all bad for employers. Sometimes, that's where they can get some good information themselves.

Unions that have had troubled pasts and have vowed to clean themselves up, such as the LIUNA and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, sometimes post examples of transgressions on "reform" Web sites, Connelly says.

For example, one of the reform sites discussed how a union official was found with his hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, by spending members' dues on fancy sports cars and exotic vacations. The sites also routinely discuss some embezzlement problems at their local unions.

PTI downloads the details, files them and then hauls them out when that union begins an organizing drive at one of PTI's clients. WashTech's Courtney hopes he never has union problems like that.

But PTI still has its antennas up and is watching unions such as WashTech because their influence is far greater than their membership rosters. WashTech may not have a union hall, host political confabs or even have many members -- 260 at last count - - but it's got clout. "Legislative aides call saying, 'What's the deal? We're getting hundreds of e-mail on this bill,' " Courtney recounts, after posting legislative alerts on the Web site.

That muscle gives WashTech the ability to shape policy, Courtney says. Legislators know the Web site speaks to a large constituency and they're paying attention to how WashTech weighs in on issues, he says.

For unions to be successful, they have to use technology, Courtney says. That's a lot more powerful than owning a union hall in a bad part of town.

Getting the Word Out Fast
By L.M. Sixel

When it comes to labor battles, union leaders sometimes prove that they know more about moving at Web speed than the managers they are fighting.

During an organizing drive at several Borders Books & Music stores, company officials took the old fashioned route and got their messages cleared through several channels, such as the legal department and human resources, before distributing them to the employees.

It wasn't fast enough to keep up with the lightning speed of electronic messages coming out of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which was trying to organize the workers.

The employees set up their own site so they could chat with other Borders' employees across the country about their problems, says Elizabeth Belan, public relations coordinator for the union's Local 881, in Oak Brook, Ill.

And then it didn't help that an internal memo from Borders' "Union Awareness Training for Borders Managers" found its way onto the organizing employees' site.

In the section "What can be done to avoid unionization in my store," the memo explained how managers can overcome employees' feelings of being underpaid and overqualified even though "in most cases they are," and how to tactfully bring up to employees exactly how much it would cost to join a union and other "negatives."

When the memo surfaced it fueled the drive to continue organizing, Belan says. The document crystallized for many employees a business reality -- that the company wasn't as much centered on family friendliness as it was on the bottom line, she says.

It was a surprise when the memo appeared on the Web, admits Ann Binkley, manager of public relations at Borders in Ann Arbor, Mich.. But that was about four years ago when the Internet was fairly new. Now, it wouldn't be such a shock, she says.

Indeed, this is a Web tale without a happy ending for the unions.

The organizing drive ended with four stores voting to join the union, but employees later dropped their union affiliation in "desertification" elections. There was so much turnover, Belan says, noting that nearly all the employees who had originally supported the union got frustrated and quit. The new employees didn't know the problems the employees had previously, so they decided to drop their union affiliation, she says.

Web Speeds up Union Networking
By L.M. Sixel
  
For union leaders, who you know sometimes isn't as important as what you know. An important part of any organizing drive is uncovering volumes of information about a company. Typically, a union sends in a "salt" posing as a regular employee to find out
the ownership structure, where the offices are located and the number of employees.

And now that information is easily available on the Web.

"Companies are proud of themselves, and they put it on the Internet," says E. Dale Wortham, president of the Harris County AFL-CIO in Houston.

Wortham says that while trying to organize the workers at Houston- based Quietflex Manufacturing, an air duct maker owned by Goodman Holding, he gleaned more company information in two days by searching the Web than he would have in two months by speaking with a salt. He says he uncovered such gems as the polo pony- playing habits of a top Goodman officer, the estimated wealth of the private company and the amount it gave in charitable donations.

That kind of detail is important in an organizing campaign, especially when the workers are paid low wages, he notes. "You can never have too much information," he says.

Wortham uncovered another important detail from his Web search: The Houston plant has a union-represented plant in Iowa. All it took was a call from the Sheet Metal Workers, the union leading the organizing drive, and the workers in Iowa began wearing buttons.

"We support the Quietflex workers," Wortham says. "It would have taken six months to find out about that union connection if he had to network the old-fashioned way."

Dan Daniel, president and chief executive of Quietflex, says he hasn't seen any direct impact on the company from the union's use of the Internet. But he is feeling some heat because of the information the union collected and turned over to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Agency officials, sitting at picnic tables in a park near the northwest Houston plant, recorded 83 grievances from Hispanic workers after the union notified the federal agency that the employees were complaining about natural origin discrimination and retaliation.

The Hispanic workers, objecting to their wages and working conditions, simultaneously walked off the job. Workers contended that Quietflex treated them like second-class citizens, making them do things not required of other ethnics -- such as clean the lunchroom on their own time.

Daniel read letters that union officials sent to Houston political leaders, thanking the EEOC for becoming involved. "It's extraordinary," he says.