The Globalisation of Labour Counter-Coordination and Unionism on the Internet 9781845447359, 9781845441425

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critical perspectives on international business The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet Guest Editors: Margaret Grieco, John Hogan and Miguel Martínez Lucio

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critical perspectives on international business

ISSN 1742-2043 Volume 1 Number 2/3 2005

The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet Guest Editors Margaret Grieco, John Hogan and Miguel Martı´nez Lucio

Access this journal online _________________________

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Editorial advisory board __________________________

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Foreword ________________________________________

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Introduction ______________________________________

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The advent of open source unionism? Richard B. Freeman ____________________________________________

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Union renewal, union strategy and technology Sandra Cockfield _______________________________________________

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Globalisation, collective action and counter-coordination: the use of the new information communication technology by the Malaysian labour movement Margaret Grieco and Mhinder Bhopal______________________________

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Recovering experience, confirming identity, voicing resistance: the Braceros, the internet and counter-coordination Stephen Little and Stewart Clegg __________________________________

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CONTENTS

CONTENTS continued

The networked union? The internet as a challenge to trade union identity and roles Miguel Martı´nez Lucio and Steve Walker ___________________________

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ICTs, distributed discourse and the territorialisation of labour: the case of Balkan trade unionism Andreja Zivkovic and John Hogan _________________________________

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Information and communications technology use in British unions Jack Fiorito and M. Todd Royle___________________________________

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Unions and cyber-activism in South Africa Charley Lewis _________________________________________________

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Epilogue _________________________________________

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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Dr John Armitage Northumbria University, UK

Dr Miguel Imas Kingston University, UK

Professor Kwaku Atuahene-Gima City University, Hong Kong

Professor Richard Le Heron University of Auckland, New Zealand

Professor Bobby Banerjee University of South Australia, Australia

Professor Hugo Letiche University for Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands Professor David Levy University of Massachusetts, USA Professor Stephen Linstead University of Durham, UK Professor Miguel Martı´nez Lucio Bradford University School of Management, UK

Professor David Boje New Mexico State University, USA Dr Adrian Carr University of Western Sydney, Australia Professor Sylvia Chant London School of Economics, UK Professor Lorraine Eden Texas A&M University, USA Professor Bent Flyvbjerg Aalborg University, Denmark Professor Phil Graham University of Waterloo, Canada and University of Queensland, Australia

Professor Brendan McSweeney University of London, UK Associate Professor Ali Mir William Paterson University, USA

Dr Christopher Grey University of Cambridge, UK

Associate Professor Raza Mir William Paterson University, USA

Professor Margaret Grieco Napier University, UK

Professor Martin Parker University of Leicester, UK

Professor Bob Grimshaw University of West of England, UK Professor Heather Ho¨pfl University of Essex, UK

Professor Nigel Thrift University of Oxford, UK

Professor Grazia Ietto-Gillies London South Bank University, The Open University, and King’s College London, UK.

critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 p. 76 # Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043

Professor Robert McChesney University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Associate Professor Henry Wai-chung Yeung National University of Singapore, Singapore

Foreword Empirical studies demonstrate that access to the internet should no longer be regarded as the sole preserve of small or e´lite groups. While there is evidence of digital divides in workplaces, knowledge of information technology and the use of computer skills at home is substantial. The capacity for internet-based labour organising fits clearly with the broader call for a more expansive and imaginative re-conceptualisation of solidarity. The analysis of the implications of information communication technologies (ICTs), in particular the internet, for the politics and processes of labour has now generated a substantial literature. Much of the debate has been driven by activists in the trade union world. They have been concerned with finding ways of building more effective forms in the face of the widespread and global “crises” of trade unionism, while taking inspiration from the innovative counter-coordination of workers who have already demonstrated the potentialities of new ICTs, for example the Liverpool dockers. In their 1995-1998 unofficial dispute, the dockers revealed the capacity for the internet to be used for the generation of widespread international solidarity action (see www. labournet.net/docks2/other/archive.html). Traditional union structures have begun to respond. The developments in union presence on the internet, the routine use of electronic communications and the sponsorship of practitioner and academic reflection on the possibilities and “perils” provide clear indication of future possibilities. Recognition that ICTs are an important set of tools for labour has been slow in coming. The technologies available are increasingly sophisticated, with ever greater storage and processing power, capable of being used for the receipt, manipulation, retention, generation and diffusion of written, spoken and visual information, at low and distributed cost on a global scale. Through intervention into these communicative spaces visibility is greatly enhanced, allowing for the auditing of the performance of individuals and institutions. The retention of memories and traditions that hitherto had so easily been broken or lost is also placed within grasp as never before. This drive to innovation can also be internalised within labour institutions by the adoption of servicing and organising facilities which specifically address the need to operate outside of the disciplinary constraints of hostile workplaces, and which recognise that the captured market of the occupationally concentrated community is no more. This special issue brings together the latest considerations on ICTs and the potentialities for labour. The papers presented represent contributions from leading researchers from every continent. Taken together they reveal sensitivity to local, national and global institutional settings. John Hogan University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK Peter Nolan ESRC Future of Work Programme, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Foreword

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critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 p. 77 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043

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Introduction About the Guest Editors Margaret Grieco is Professor of Transport and Society, Transport Research Institute, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK. John Hogan is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. Miguel Martı´nez Lucio is Professor, Bradford University School of Management, Bradford, UK.

The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet Traditional trade union structures have been slow to realise the capabilities and capacities of the new information technology in respect of the globalisation of labour. Yet the coordinative capabilities of international labour with the advent of the internet are radically enhanced as the actions of workers in the international transport sector demonstrate. The Liverpool Dockers and the Wharfies of Australia demonstrate through their internet-based campaigns the power of labour in counter-coordination in respect of global capital. Other labour-organised internet-based campaigns are found throughout the developing and developed world. This special issue documents the emergence of these new globalised labour communication strategies in the context of a globalising world of commerce, business and governance. The articles presented in this special issue take a variety of forms and reflect the variations in communication intensities and activities which are a product of the unevenness in globalisation itself. Within the pages of the special issue are contained the product of the researches of field leaders such as Freeman, Fiorito and Cockfield whose researches have focused primarily on connectivity within the wealthy West. As important, from the perspective of this special issue, are the accounts provided by other contributors of changing communication practices within South Africa, Malaysia, Mexico and the Balkans. There is great variation in patterns and the reader will no doubt have to work along with the authors to encompass the complexities of counter-coordination in both its more developed and its emerging forms, but the journey is worth the effort. The hyperlinks provided in the articles should be visited and weighed in the knowledge that sites are frequently changing and archiving practices that provide the stability of the printed world have yet to be widely adopted. Each article is a request to join a journey and its printed typeface is only one level of experience. We hope that, within this space of a special issue, we have provided sufficient stimulation to attract other scholars and activists to the recording, reviewing and relaying of counter-coordination. Margaret Grieco, John Hogan and Miguel Martı´nez Lucio critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 p. 78 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043

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The advent of open source unionism?

The advent of open source unionism?

Richard B. Freeman National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

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Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine innovative union use of the internet in the 2000s and to see whether the major union innovations in the USA and UK mark the advent of “open source” union structures. Design/methodology/approach – Reviews two important innovations, www.workingamerica.org and www.unionreps.org.uk Examines how they may fit with the open source union design. Findings – Both the AFL-CIO and US union efforts to develop open source union forms and the TUC and UK union efforts to improve services to workers and members through the internet mark the advent of the open source union form. The two countries have different approaches to this innovation, which reflect the differing problems faced by unions in the USA and UK. In both countries, unions will have to find the appropriate mix of on-line and off-line activities to create stable open source organizations. Originality/value – No other paper has examined union use of the internet in terms of creating the new open source union form. Keywords Innovation, Internet, Trade unions, United States of America, United Kingdom Paper type Viewpoint

So I am asking you to authorize SEIU to create Purple Ocean, the world’s first “open source”, virtual union – with a goal of uniting one million more people who want to join our campaigns for justice (Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union, San Francisco, California, June 21, 2004, www.seiu2004.org/press/keynote.cfm).

In the 2000s, unions in the USA and UK began to use the internet to provide union services to members, to form activist networks, and to develop on-line locals and organizations. Innovative internet activities created a new excitement and ferment in the union movement. Some unionists and academics began to argue that the internet could fundamentally alter how unions operate and create a new “open source” (OS) form better suited to the modern economy than the industrial or craft forms of the past century. This essay examines the extent to which the major internet-based innovations introduced by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and some of their affiliates fit the OS model laid out by Freeman and Rogers (2001a, b) and the potential for these innovations to change union effectiveness and membership. Unions in the USA and UK use the internet in ways that reflect the specific problems facing the two union movements, but in both countries the innovations go sufficiently beyond simple modernizing to answer the title question in the affirmative: yes, we are seeing the advent of a new union form. I argue that the advent of the new form arguably This paper has been supported by ESRC e-society grant.

critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 pp. 79-92 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043 DOI 10.1108/17422040510595609

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represents the best chance for unions to expand membership and influence and to improve their contribution to the economy in recent decades. The OS union form To begin, what exactly is an OS union, and how does it differ from existing union structures? Building on the work of various analysts (Shostak, 1999; Lee, 1996; Darlington, 2000; Diamond and Freeman, 2002) Freeman and Rogers (2002a, b) define the OS form as a union organization that makes extensive use of the internet to provide information and services to members, to connect activists across different sites, and to provide union services to workers outside of collective bargaining arrangements. The OS union’s web site is a virtual union hall where supporters and activists exchange information and views rather than a signpost that the union exists. Members of an OS union include workers/supporters in workplaces without union recognition and subscribers to its web services who pay little or no dues as well as dues-paying members covered by collective bargaining contracts. Ideally, the OS union uses the interactive features of the internet to improve union democracy (Hogan and Grieco, 2000); and combines on-line internet communities with off-line activities in local areas to give clout to members with limited possibilities of winning protests at the workplace by themselves. Table I provides a capsule summary of the differences between the OS form and traditional unionism. The main activity or business of an OS union is to provide workers with representation and services regardless of whether it bargains collectively for them. To accomplish this, the OS union delivers services over the web in addition

Activities Primary business

Traditional

Open source

Collective bargaining

Support of joint committees/local groups Individual representation and advice, absent collective bargaining

Delivery of services

Workplaces Outcomes depend on collective bargain with employer Basis of services Reps rely on union hierarchy for direction Source of power/method Control over local supply of dispute Strikes Membership Location criteria Free-rider problems Table I. Open source vs traditional unions

Internal democracy

Workplace-based Dependent on employer recognition Collective bargain creates incentive to free ride Elected leaders and bureaucracy

Source: Author’s assessment

Web Services provided directly to workers Activists use digital artificial intelligence; internet Breadth of community support Web communication Cyber picketing Independent of workplace; differentiated, depending on services Customized services to members only Decentralized; internet plebiscites Activists operate independently

to/instead of at workplaces, depending on the circumstances. The OS union uses digital technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) expert systems, bulletin boards, e-mail newsletters and the like, to respond to members’ problems rapidly. It defines membership in a broader and fuzzier way than traditional unions. It includes subscribers at virtual union sites who join on-line, but pay little or no dues as well as dues-paying members at recognized sites as union members, and regards non-member visitors to its web site as part of its potential community. What distinguishes members without collective contracts from visitors or subscribers is that members provide detailed information about their work situation to the OS union so that it can customize services to them. Non- members receive general information. Members participate in decision making and bring “the wisdom of the collective” to bear on union policies through the interactive features of the internet, while non-members have a more passive relation to the organization.

Historic precedent A labor historian may notice that many features of the OS form resemble those of the defunct Knights of Labor, which dominated US unionism in the mid-1880s (Voss, 1993; Weir, 1996). The Knights recruited all working people (with some exceptions such as lawyers, bankers, liquor dealers, and professional gamblers) rather than limiting membership to specific workplaces or crafts. The Knights sought not only to improve wages and working conditions, but also to reform society in ways that required political action more than collective bargaining. They campaigned for abolition of child labor, regulation of trusts, government ownership of public utilities, equal pay for women, and eventual abolition of the wage system. While some of the organization’s local “assemblies” were craft unions who bargained with employers, most assemblies contained workers from different occupations and professions, including farmers, and some had women and black members, something rarely found in the US craft unions of the day. Given its membership structure, the Knights favored boycotts rather than strikes to penalize employers with whom its members had disputes. The Knights grew spectacularly from about 100,000 members in mid-1885 to 700,000 members in mid-1886 in the USA, but collapsed after its railroad unions lost the Missouri Pacific strike in 1886 and the Haymarket riot in 1887 turned the public against it. By 1893, the Knights had only about 75,000 members nationally, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was effectively defunct. The lesson that union leaders such as Sam Gompers and other founders of the American Federation of Labor drew from this experience, with which labor historians generally concur, is that a union open to all lacks the structure, worker commitment, and steady dues income to be viable. AFL opposition to industrial unionism in the 1930s stemmed in part from its interpretation of the collapse of the Knights. From the days of the Knights until the internet, the judgment that a trade union needed strong presence at a worksite, with employer recognition and a collective bargaining contract, and substantial dues through check-off, seemed valid. While US labor law protects any workers engaged in concerted action, unions ignore workers who fail to gain majority status at their firm and eschew recruiting at sites whose dues would not cover union services. With no inexpensive way to contact diverse members nor to provide services across sites, these were rational decisions.

The advent of open source unionism? 81

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Internet technology changes this calculation. The ease of providing information on the internet allows unions to aid workers anywhere, at low cost, to reach and interact with workers immediately, and to bring its expertise to workplaces with few members or supporters as well as to union strongholds. Unions in the USA and UK have increasingly come to recognize that the technical constraints that had doomed to failure any large non-workplace-based union resembling the Knights of Labor are no longer operative. By itself, however, lifting the technological constraint does not guarantee success for the OS union form. For the form to succeed, workers must want the services that the form can deliver; and unions must create OS organizations that can deliver these services at low cost. What workers want: USA In the USA a huge number of non-union workers want some organization speaking to their everyday concerns at work, and to help them with workplace problems. The 1995 US Workplace Representation and Participation Survey (WRPS) estimated that 32 percent of non-union non-supervisory workers would vote for a trade union in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election if it was the only option available; that in a choice among forms of representation 20 percent of workers favored a union over other modes of representation or participation; while 29 percent favored “employee organisations that negotiate or bargain with management” – a union without the appellation (Freeman and Rogers, 1999). A 2002 survey by Peter Hart and Associates suggests that worker desire for unions has increased since the WRPS survey. In 2002 50 percent of US workers said that they would have voted union in an NLRB election in that year – the highest proportion ever obtained in the survey (Peter Hart and Associates, 2002). The WRPS probed what workers want in representation and participation and found that in addition to “bread and butter” issues of pay and benefits, they were concerned about enforcement of statutory rights, employee say in the organization of work and use of new technology, access to training or other career assistance, information on the company – on which an OS union could be particularly helpful. A majority of employees preferred joint committees that met and discussed with management, rather than collective bargaining. Such committees would benefit greatly from information from outside their workplace. In addition, most workers, union as well as non-union, preferred organizations that established cooperative arrangements with management rather than union/management conflict. What differentiates the USA from most other advanced countries is that management has near veto power over the formation of unions in the private sector, with the result that many workers with high opinions of unions are not organized nor likely to be so in the future. The 2000 National Election Studies asked Americans to rate unions (and other institutions) using a thermometer scale, which ranges from a minimum of 0 (for the coldest) to maximum of 100. Of the respondents, 73 percent (non-workers as well as workers) who rated unions at 100 on the thermometer scale and 80 percent of those who rated unions from 80-99 on the scale were not members, even though members rated unions higher than non-members, on average (Freeman, 2003). Unfortunately, US surveys have not asked whether these or other workers would be receptive to internet provision of union services outside of collective bargaining. Still,

the statistics show that unions could grow massively if even a small proportion of persons with pro-union proclivities signed up for such a group. If just 10 percent of those who said that they wanted an organization at work or who reported the highest opinions of unions joined an organization, private sector unions would have their greatest organizing success since the union spurt associated with the Great Depression.

The advent of open source unionism?

What workers want: UK The 2001 British Workplace Representation and Participation Survey (Diamond and Freeman, 2002) asked workers about workplace problems or needs where employee participation or representation might improve their situation. Non-union British workers expressed less desire for unions than non-union American workers did, reflecting the fact that management in the UK does not seek to suppress organization. Non-union workers gave a diverse set of reasons for not joining unions, including too high fees, union weakness, the ability to free-ride on the union, and never having been asked to join. Union members cite getting better treatment when they have problems at work and the greater effectiveness of a union when it has more members as reasons for joining. Most British workers were favorably inclined to legislated works councils and wanted to see regular meetings of elected employee representatives with management. While union members saw unions and works councils as complementary, many non-union members wanted a works council on its own, and a third wanted a works council and union, while very few wanted a union by itself. On the basis of this study, Diamond and Freeman (2002) concluded that British workplaces offered unions substantial opportunities to expand membership and provide representation and services, but required the unions to improve their services to convince non-union workers that unions were the best vehicle for delivering what they wanted. Unlike the US WRPS, the BWRPS asked workers with web access if they would find “personally useful” employment-related information or communication over the internet. Table II summarizes the results. It shows that a substantial proportion of union and non-union workers would find various information over the internet very useful. The item that obtained the highest proportion of very useful responses was advice about rights at work. The item that was least popular was a discussion forum for people at their workplace or for similar workers elsewhere. In all but one of the specified areas of information union members responded more positively to obtaining information than non-members did. The exception is information about salaries for people in their line of work, presumably because such information is available at workplaces with collective bargaining. While this survey did not ask whether workers would respond favorably to union provision of the relevant information, nor whether workers would join an organization that provided such information over the internet, the results suggest the value of union experiments in these areas.

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Union responses The AFL-CIO and the TUC, the central federations of the USA and UK, along with some major constituent unions, have responded to the opportunities to deliver what workers want over the internet. Both federations have made innovative use of the internet to reach out to non-union workers, and to reach union activists across union lines. The TUC innovation to reach non-union workers is www.worksmart.org.uk Its

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Table II. Percentage of workers who would find “personally useful” services on the web

Very useful Quite useful Not useful/DK (%) (%) (%) Advice about your rights at work Union members Non-members

37 39

48 40

15 21

Information and reviews about employers Union members Non-members

34 37

46 49

10 14

Advice about pensions and personal finance Union members Non-members

36 30

39 44

25 26

36 36

34 40

40 34

26 22

42 40

32 38

Information about salaries for people in your line of work Union members Non-members Discussion forums for people at your workplace or doing your type of work Union members Non-members Source: Derived from Diamond and Freeman (2002)

innovation to reach union activists across union lines is www.unionrepresentatives. org.uk The AFL-CIO innovation to reach non-union workers is www.americaworks. org Its innovation to reach union activists is the Working Families Network, www. unionvoice.org. In addition, some constituent unions have formed on-line OS locals and regularly recruit members on-line, which also “break out of the box” of traditional union forms. Table III describes the TUC and AFL-CIO initiatives along several dimensions: the audiences they target, whether they sign up members or not, their interactivity, use of e-mail, and so on. Reflecting the need of British unions to convince non-members to form unions at non-union workplaces and to improve services at union workplaces, www.worksmart.org.uk provides non-union workers with information on workplace rights while www.unionrepresentatives.org.uk links union representatives around the country so that they can share experiences and improve their representative duties. Reflecting the need of US unions, to connect with pro-union workers outside of collective bargaining, the AFL-CIO’s www.workingamerica.org signs up workers without collective bargaining affiliation. The AFL-CIO’s Working Families Network is a mass e-mail list that allows the federation to muster huge numbers of people in internet-originated protests. I describe next each of these internet-based innovations in turn. Information to workers: the TUC’s workSMART In a world where people rely on the internet to obtain information, unions need a strong web presence to demonstrate to non-members their expertise in labor issues (Bibby, 2004). If the web sites of commercial job boards, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies, or employment law firms offered easier access, better information, and superior advice about workplace problems than union web sites did,

No No

No No No No No 30,000-40,000 visitors per month

400,000 non-union workers with 16 million union members a problem each month

Yes No No No 5,000 subscribers 230,000 union representatives

Yes No Some experiments 2 million e-mail addresses

Activists No No

20 million pro-union non-organized workers

Not yet No Neighborhood 400,000

Some No

Non-union workers Yes Yes

AFL-CIO innovations Working Families Network (www.unionvoice.org) www.americaworks.org

Activists/representatives Non-union workers Subscribers No Yes Yes

www.worksmart.org.uk

Source: Based on case investigations of each innovation, as reported in the text

Target Members Provides information on request Personalized responses Interactive features bulletin board E-mail used for campaigns Workplace organization Community structure No. of members/subscribers/visitors Maximum population

www.unionreps.org.uk

TUC innovations

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Table III. Characteristics of four central federation internet innovations

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non-union workers would readily see unions as irrelevant to their needs. Union workers might wonder about the value of their subscriptions. By contrast, if union web sites provide workers with the best information and advice about workplace problems, workers will see unions as helpful institutions and presumably be more likely to join the and support their campaigns. The information-laden union web site advertises union expertise to workers and shows how they can help workers with specific problems, as well as directly aiding those workers. In 2002 the TUC developed www.worksmart.org.uk, “to be a one-stop shop for everything to do with your working life”. This site contains information about workplace problems and worker rights and links to other sources of information and advice. The site views non-union workers as its primary audience. Its content is, however, limited. It lacks a sophisticated artificial intelligence program that would allow an AI “workplace expert” to answer detailed questions about problems; it provides neither labor market news nor career or salary information, nor is there a discussion forum, or information on particular employers which many workers report that they would find useful on a web site. It does not give career information of the form that many internet recruitment sites provide. Most importantly, it has no membership and does not ask for e-mail addresses. The site specializes in telling workers about their rights at work; a Google search for “workplace rights, UK” places the site tenth on the list of relevant sites. As of June 2004 workSMART was not well-linked to other sites: it had just 157 other web site links compared to 2,440 links to the TUC web site. The TUC’s strategy is to syndicate the site to commercial sites and search engines as the marquee site with workplace information. The Tiscali internet service provider (the fourth largest in the UK) made workSMART its site for workplace information. In 2004, the TUC estimated that about 15 percent of users come from that source. In its first year the site reported 20,000 monthly visitors; in its second year it reached 40,000 visitors in peak months. Enrolling members: the AFL-CIO’s Working America To enroll non-union workers who would join a union if it existed at their workplace and other citizens with a strong pro-union attitude, the AFL-CIO developed Working America (www.workingamerica.org), a membership-based organization that it describes as a community affiliate. In summer 2004, Working America had offices in ten cities in five states, with 400 staff knocking on doors daily (Greenhouse, 2004). Most of the initial organizing was done via door-to-door canvassing in neighborhoods with many union members, where non-members could be expected to have pro-union attitudes. By September 2004, Working America had signed up some 500,000 members. The AFL-CIO anticipates having one million members by 2005. In contrast to the abortive associate membership scheme that the AFL-CIO encouraged affiliates to try prior to the internet, Working America stresses participation in a social movement rather than financial savings by purchasing insurance or vacation packages with a large group. The organization focuses on community and national issues rather than problems at specific workplaces, which affiliated unions might view as encroaching on their territory. Working America gathers the e-mail addresses of members’, and centers’ activities around its web site. It promises members that they will help determine

policy through on-line ballots. In summer 2004, when the Bush administration changed the administrative rules governing overtime, Working America showed what it could do on the web. Almost immediately, it added a page “Is your overtime pay at risk?” to its web site, with an FAQ about the new regulations. The site highlighted a young lawyer who would respond to questions and posted questions and responses – an indication of possible future services that concerned workers could not otherwise readily obtain. As a result of this activity, the organization began attracting over 2,000 members per week via the internet – a conversion rate of visitors to the site of 7 percent – which is about as high as any site can get. Strengthening union representatives: www.unionrepresentatives.org.uk Upwards of 40 percent of workers at sites with recognized unions do not join the union, even though many of them say that their workplace would be worse off without it. If unions could convince these free riders to join their organization, they would greatly increase membership and bargaining strength. To do this, British unions have to improve the services they deliver to members. Since the services are delivered by union representatives – normal workers whose job is to deal with problems at local workplaces – one way to improve services is to upgrade the skills of representatives. This is a massive task. In 2004 there were approximately 230,000 representatives in the UK, largely elected by fellow workers, some specialists in health and safety, skill training, as well as in defending workers against ill treatment by management. The TUC runs short training sessions for workplace representatives around the country, which improve their skills, but which leave them to their own devices thereafter. The www.unionrepresentatives.org.uk site provides a place for representatives to share their problems and solutions and to learn about diverse issues that might affect their work. The most innovative feature of the new site is a bulletin board through which representatives can pose problems and seek advice from other representatives. To the extent that advice from a group of knowledgeable persons improves decisions, as social psychology research suggests (Surowiecki, 2004), the site has the potential for harnessing the collective wisdom inherent in union organizations. In the autumn of 2004 the site reached 5,000 users – or between 2 and 3 percent of its potential audience. The vast majority of users of the site rated the bulletin board the most attractive feature and wanted greater development of that part of the site. To see how union representatives make use of the internet in their work, in 2003-2004 Marit Rehavi and I (Freeman and Rehavi, forthcoming) surveyed some 900 union representatives who had undergone classroom training for representative duties and 300 users of the www.unionrepresentatives.org site. The sample of representatives who underwent classroom training had no special internet experience and thus are essentially a random group of local representatives for the purposes of assessing readiness for OS unionism. The users of the www.unionrepresentatives.org.uk site are a highly selective group, who potentially constitute the union representatives of the future. Table IV summarizes the results of our survey. The column “regular representatives” gives the responses of persons in the sample undergoing TUC

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Table IV. Percentage of union representatives who use the internet and how they use it for representative work, regular representatives and users of unionreps.org

Regular representatives Unionrepresentatives.org (%) (%) Internet usage Use internet dailya Use internet oftena For representative duties Regular job How they use the internet for their union representative duties To find out about Training possibilities Worker rights and legislation Pay/working conditions elsewhere To inform workers of union/activities To communicate with workers they represent To keep in touch/exchange information with Union officials Other union reps Other unions/worker organizations

45

87

32 30

63 43

61 82 43 60 NA

78 96 60 76 69

56 59 38

72 80 60

Note: a Often is more than three times a week; rarely or never is once a month or less Source: Tabulated from union representatives survey, 2003-2004 (Freeman and Rehavi, forthcoming)

training. The column “unionrepresentatives.org” gives the responses of persons from the sample of site users. The lines under internet usage show that nearly half of regular representatives use the internet daily whereas nearly 90 percent of the unionrepresentatives.org users use the internet regularly. In addition, however, 20 percent of the regular representatives report using the internet two to three times a week; and just 20 percent said that they either never used it or used it at most once a month. Union representatives are internet-ready in the UK. We asked the union representatives how often they used the internet for their representative duties and, for comparison, how often they used the internet for their regular job. The table shows that the regular representatives use the internet about equally for their representative duties and for their job whereas the unionrepresentatives.org representatives use the web more often for their representative activity. We also asked union representatives who used the internet for representative duties what specific uses they made of the internet. Table IV shows that the most cited use was finding out about worker rights and employment legislation, while the least cited were keeping in touch with other unions and finding out about pay and conditions elsewhere. Most representatives used the internet for more than one purpose: the average number of items cited was four. These data show that the unionrepresentatives.org sample of users differs in one important way from other union representatives: they make more extensive use of the internet for their work. A total of 69 percent of the unionrep.org sample said that they used the internet to communicate with workers. Their extensive use of the internet makes them the representatives of the OS form.

Linking union activists: AFL-CIO’s Working Family Networks www.unionvoice.org E-mail addresses offer a low-cost way to contact people and engage them in union or other campaigns, so that one might expect that unions would quickly develop e-mail directories of members. In fact, few unions have complete lists, and many have no e-mail databases at all. In the UK, local unions have subscription lists but most do not have e-mail databases. In the USA, local unions will often guard their lists from national unions, and the nationals guard their lists of members from the AFL-CIO, because the ability to contact members is a source of their power. In addition, locals or nationals may misreport members to higher-level union groups for strategic reasons (to obtain more votes at a convention or to reduce tariffs to the higher organization). In 2002-2003 the AFL-CIO developed a massive e-mail list of union members and activists – the Working Families Network. To put together the list the Federation had to convince member unions that they would not be surrendering power to the central organization, and had to have a mechanism for deciding on which issues to e-mail people for support. The AFL-CIO was sensitive to the desire of constituent organizations to remain gatekeepers controlling access to members. A year or so earlier the Federation had rejected a multimillion dollar offer by a liberal group to gather e-mail addresses from local unions and affiliates around the country. The AFL-CIO system gives individual unions control over usage of their own e-mail list. If the Federation was campaigning against a trade agreement, and a particular union favored the agreement, it could refuse the AFL-CIO permission to e-mail its members. If a union was e-mailing its list as part of a campaign and feared that members would suffer from on-line campaign fatigue from AFL-CIO messages, it could also veto the AFL-CIO appeal. By 2004 the AFL-CIO had over 28 participating national unions, 84 geographically-defined State Federations and City Labor Councils, and over 400 local unions and other union organizations involved with its Family Network, with more than 600 local administrators taking responsibility for particular lists. The overall network included over two million records of union “eActivists”. This large number gave the AFL-CIO the option of e-mailing small proportions of the list and engaging large numbers of persons, and of localizing its appeals to particular areas. During the 2003 Safeway strike in California, the AFL-CIO directly raised nearly $350,000 for the Safeway grocery workers via two e-mails to 400,000 people on their main activist list. In addition, it successfully linked its on-line appeal to off-line activity on the ground. To pressure management, the AFL-CIO e-mailed people in the District of Columbia and asked them to join teams that would confront their local Safeway stores, even though those stores were not on strike. Those who responded were split by their addresses to create local teams, and each person on the team then got the e-mail address and telephone number of all the other people on their team (their neighbors), plus the local store information. The success of this activity led the AFL-CIO to experiment further with recruiting thousands of volunteers from the eActivist list to go door-to-door in targeted areas to talk to union members about the issues related to the 2004 election – tapping a big network of activists who otherwise would not be involved in local mobilization efforts. Trades unions innovations In the USA individual trades unions have experimented with the OS union form. Diamond and Freeman described three US unions with OS forms: [email protected], an

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affiliate of the Communication Workers Union organized as a minority union within IBM; www.washtech.org/wt, another communications workers’ affiliate based on IT workers in Northern California and Washington; and the National Writers Union, an affiliate of the United Automobile Workers, that organizes freelance writers around the country (www. nwu.org). Since then the Communication Workers has expanded its effort to connect IT workers (www.techsunite.org) and developed a five city organizing campaign associated with this web site. In addition, other unions have adopted the OS form. In November 2003, the Machinists established Cyberlodge (www.cyberlodge.org) an internet-based union for IT workers. The IAM describes the organization as having a guild-like structure where workers retain their traditional employee-employer relationship while enjoying benefits normally reserved for employees with collective bargaining agreements. In 2004, the Steelworkers also initiated a “new form of individual membership – open to anyone regardless of employment” that gave some services at modest dues, but the Steelworkers have not yet developed a separate web site for this group of workers, although it has on-line enrolment. In a more far-reaching effort to expand its influence, in summer 2004, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) made the announcement at the introduction to this essay: that it was forming an OS union, www.purpleocean.org with the goal of enlisting 1 million members in the near future (Strope, 2004). Since SEIU is one of the most successful and innovative unions in the USA, increasing membership in the 1980-1990s through smart organizing campaigns, its decision to develop an OS form could have immense spillover effects on the entire US labor movement. In the UK, UNISON has been a leader in using the internet innovatively. It was the first UK union with its own web site and developed the www.troubleatwork.org.uk site with the National Union of Students to give students information about their rights at work (see Diamond and Freeman, 2002). This site inspired the TUC workSMART site. To help workers who have problems at their workplace UNISON has an on-line members enquiry form that promises rapid response to problems, either through the internet or through a telephone call (www.unison.org.uk/help/index.asp), which should provide service to members who either do not have union representatives at their worksite, or whose representatives are unable to deal with their problem. Conclusion: what will grow from the beginnings? Both the AFL-CIO and US union efforts to develop OS union forms and the TUC and UK union efforts to improve services to workers and members through the internet mark the advent of the OS union form. Experimentation with the form reflects both the opportunities that the internet offers labor for delivering services and connecting people and the failure of standard modes of organizing or delivering services to gain members. These efforts will expand in breadth and depth. In the UK the formation of works councils will induce the TUC and member unions to provide on-line services to councils, many of whom may be majority non-union. In the USA, the AFL-CIO will have to decide whether America Works will offer members advice about problems at their workplace along the lines of the UNISON on-line members enquiry; whether to develop bulletin boards or chat rooms for workers to connect in the same firm; and how to brings its community and on-line activities into workplaces. Member unions will have to decide whether to support such initiatives or to oppose them as infringements on their terrain, and how much resources to put into their own OS initiatives. In both

countries, unions will have to find the appropriate mix of on- and off-line activities to create stable OS organizations and avoid any Knights of Labor-type collapse. Historically, unionism has never developed smoothly. In virtually all advanced economies, growth in membership has occurred in great spurts, with new union forms and new groups of workers leading the way. Whether the OS form will produce a “killer application” service to workers that will create a new union spurt is uncertain, but the advent of the new form arguably represents the best chance for unions to expand membership and influence and to improve their contribution to the economy in recent decades. References Bibby, A. (2004), “Building up an International Trade Union community in the net”, available at: www.andrewbibby.com Darlington, R. (2000), “The creation of the e-union: the use of ICT by British Unions”, paper presented at the Internet Economy Conference, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, November 7, available at: http://members.tripod.co.uk/rogerdarlington/E-union.html Diamond, W. and Freeman, R.B. (2002), “Will unionism prosper in cyber-space? The promise of the internet for employee organization”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 40, September. Freeman, R. and Rehavi, M. (forthcoming), Future Unionism Today: How Union Representatives Use the Web, LSE, London. Freeman, R.B. and Rogers, J. (1999), What Workers Want, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Freeman, R.B. and Rogers, J. (2002a), “Open source unionism”, WorkingUSA, Spring. Freeman, R.B. and Rogers, J. (2002b), “A proposal to American labor”, The Nation, June 24. Greenhouse, S. (2004), “Labor federation looks beyond unions”, New York Times, July 11. Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2000), “Trade unions on line: technology, transparency and bargaining power”, FuTUre: Working Together for Change, Proceedings of the 2nd Scottish Trade Union Research Network Conference, June. Lee, E. (1996), The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism, Pluto Press, London. Peter Hart and Associates (2002), Labor Day 2002. Survey among 900 Adults Nationwide, Including Oversample of 100 Non-managerial Workers. Conducted August 10-13, for AFL-CIO, Peter Hart and Associates, Washington, DC. Shostak, A. (1999), Empowering Labor through Computer Technology, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY. Strope, L. (2004), “Labor’s fight for its future takes to the internet”, Albany Times Union, July 6. Surowiecki, J. (2004), The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday, New York, NY. Voss, K. (1993), The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Weir, R.E. (1996), Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA. Further reading Greene, A.M. and Kirton, G. (2003), “Possibilities for remote participation in trade unions: mobilising women activists”, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 319-33.

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Greene, A.M., Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2003), “Commentary: e-collectivism and distributed discourse: new opportunities for trade union democracy”, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 34 No. 4. Hogan, J. and Greene, A.M. (2002), “E-collectivism: on-line action and on-line mobilisation”, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (Eds), Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse, Ashgate, Aldershot. Trades Unions Congress (n.d.), “Workers of the world-wide-web, unite!”, available at: www.tuc. org.uk/organisation/tuc-6803.f0.cfm (Richard B. Freeman is Ascherman Professor in Economics at Harvard University, Labor Studies Program Director at NBER, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE. His research interests include the job market for scientists and engineers; the growth and decline of unions; employee involvement programs; international labor markets, restructuring European welfare states; income distribution and equity in the marketplace, the effects of immigration and trade on inequality; international labor standards; Chinese labor markets; transitional economies; and the effects of the internet on labor markets, social behavior and the economy. E-mail: [email protected])

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Union renewal, union strategy and technology

Union renewal, strategy and technology

Sandra Cockfield Department of Management, Monash University, Frankston, Australia

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Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to examine the relationship between union renewal strategies and the adoption and implementation of information and communication technologies by trade unions. Design/methodology/approach – The research centres on a case study of an Australian trade union, exploring the fit between recent changes to the industrial strategy and information technology strategy. It involved interviews with union officials and a review of union documentation. Findings – Information and communication technologies have the potential to promote union renewal by enabling new forms of participation and activism. However, to achieve these outcomes the technologies must be part of an integrated union renewal strategy. The internal political processes of the union will shape both the union renewal strategies and the role and use of technology in implementing these strategies. Research limitations/implications – The research is based on a single trade union, thus limiting the generality of the conclusions drawn. Originality/value – The paper concerns a relatively new research area on trade unions and offers a critical perspective on the use of information and communication technologies by trade unions. Keywords Trades unions, Communication technologies, Management strategy, Australia Paper type Research paper

Introduction With trade union movements in decline across most Western industrialised countries there is an urgent need to find a solution that will reverse this decline. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been presented as one solution. The literature is characterised by an optimism about the transformative capacity of the technologies. It has been argued that ICTs offer unions new ways of mobilising and engaging with members and potential members, and that they create opportunities for strengthening the union movement on an international scale (Diamond and Freeman, 2002). This early literature attributed to ICTs certain powers that, if harnessed correctly by unions, could generate renewal. The terms “e-union” (Darlington, 2000) and “cyberunion” (Shostak, 1999) were used to describe the new form of unions that would arise as a result of this technological revolution. While unions have embraced ICTs, and in some cases used the technologies innovatively, we have yet to see the genuine e-union or cyberunion. This does not mean that ICTs cannot or will not have a positive effect on union renewal. To understand how this can occur we need to move to a more complex understanding of the relationship between unions and ICTs. Whether ICTs will spark union renewal requires an understanding of both ICTs and the antecedents of union renewal. Hogan and Greene (2002) introduce a theoretical basis for the benefits of ICTs by demonstrating the connection between ICTs and union renewal strategies. This is an important move forward as it links the discussion of unions and ICTs to a particular strategy, or set of strategies, and allows the performance of ICTs to be assessed against these strategies. What is missing is an

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understanding of how union renewal strategies require unions to change both their structure and culture and the implications of these for the renewal potential of ICTs. Martı´nez Lucio (2003) argues that a union’s existing communication strategies and the organisational context will influence how it uses the internet, a point largely ignored by the e-union literature. This is an important oversight, for it suggests some organisational contexts may be more likely to encourage union renewal outcomes than others. The paper examines the relationship between union renewal strategies and the adoption and implementation of technology by trade unions. It is argued that appropriate renewal strategies must be in place before ICTs can have a transformative impact on unions. The various forms of technology in themselves do not constitute renewal strategies. The paper begins by reviewing the union renewal thesis before turning to the arguments advanced in support of ICTs and some of the limitations of this literature. These limitations are explored further by examining recent developments in technology within an Australian union, the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (LHMU). Union decline and renewal A major problem arising in contemporary trade union studies is how to halt the decline in membership and influence in Western industrialised countries. The decline has been most pronounced in English-speaking countries, but continental European countries have not been exempt. In Australia, union density has been declining since the early 1980s, falling from 49 per cent in 1982 to 23 per cent in 2003 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004; Griffin, 2002). Union renewal debates focus on how unions can reverse this decline, with much attention focused on the need to rejuvenate the union movement by increasing the participation and activism of members. Union decline has occurred in a context of global capital expansion and the rise and domination of a neoliberal policy agenda. Under the guise of free trade, countries are restructuring their economies and regulatory environment in favour of international capital. Unions struggle to survive in this environment as their traditional industries slowly disappear and are replaced by a service sector characterised by part-time and casual employment. Unions also confront capital strengthened by its enhanced international mobility and in a less regulated labour market. The new management offensive may oscillate between high commitment human resource strategies and aggressive anti-unionism, but the end result is the same: a less favourable environment for union organising (Clawson and Clawson, 1999; Le´vesque and Murray, 2002). In Australia, the neoliberal policy agenda has dominated for 20 years. Privatisation, tariff reductions, and deregulation of finance and labour markets have changed the Australian economy considerably and wrought challenges for unions. The move to decentralised bargaining has been particularly problematic for Australian unions. In the absence of a strong tradition of workplace organisation it has stretched the resources of unions and almost certainly contributed to union decline (Griffin and Svensen, 1996; Peetz, 1998). Much of union research in the last ten years has focused on how to reverse union decline. Some have seen opportunities for renewal in the changed economic and political environment. Fosh (1993) and Fairbrother and Waddington (1990) see avenues for union renewal at the workplace through the development of delegates and activists.

Others point to the increased opportunities for international cooperation between unions and the need to build alliances with other social movements (Moody, 1997; Waterman, 1998). Much attention has focused on new organising strategies that emphasise developing the participation and activism of the membership largely through building workplace organisation and improving grassroots democracy. Importantly, workplace leadership is seen as an antecedent in building commitment and participation and providing opportunities for members to participate (Darlington, 2002, p. 107; Heery et al., 2000; Snape et al., 2000: 224; Voss and Sherman, 2000). This approach is captured in the “organising model” which has its origins in the USA. Associated with the organising model is a set of techniques to organise workers in unionised and non-unionised workplaces. These include: workplace mapping (locating member and non-member areas and identifying activists and delegates); identifying issues and grievances around which to organise; establishing organising committees to develop workplace campaigns; and identifying possible levers in the media and community against the employer. Attention has also been given to organising external to the workplace using techniques like home visits (Heery, 2002, p. 27; Heery et al., 2000, pp. 39-40). Some notable successes (Bronfenbrenner et al., 1998) have led to interest in other countries where union decline is reaching crisis levels. In Australia the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is a strong supporter of “organising”. It established the Organising Works program to train organisers in 1994 and furthered its commitment by establishing the Organising Unit in 1997 to assist unions’ shift to an organising approach (Cooper, 2003). The release of the Unions@work report (Australian Council of Trade Unions, 1999) and Future Strategies (Australian Council of Trade Unions, 2003) reflects the ACTU’s continued support. Generating union renewal with ICTs Advocates of both the organising model and the e-union concept have a shared vision of how a union should operate and the path to union renewal (Hogan and Greene, 2002). Both talk of reviving unions through mobilising workers and increasing member participation – that is, moving from a passive to active membership and making unions more dynamic and democratic. Moreover, a survey of US unions by Fiorito et al. (2002) found evidence to support a link between a union’s use of ICTs and organising effectiveness. At a practical level unions have acknowledged the role of ICTs in generating union renewal. For example, the ACTU’s Unions@work (Australian Council of Trade Unions, 1999) organising report identifies technology as one of four key areas unions must focus on to achieve strength and growth. It is both the information and communication aspects of the technologies that supporters see as transforming and renewing unions. Technology helps generate union renewal through the way it can enhance the gathering and processing of information. While the web has become a useful source of information for unions, information technology (IT) also assists in organising data into useful information (Shostak, 1999; Lucore, 2002). By maintaining various relational databases a union can produce and manipulate data sourced from various locations into relevant and timely information and knowledge. Information about members, grievances, employers, collective agreements and the like can be cross-checked to produce a wealth of information about, in particular, workplaces and the membership density and level of activism, nature of grievances, expiry date of agreements, and much more. Such a tool is

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valuable for workplace mapping and planning organising activities, and assists with tracking delegates and workplace activists and identifying issues to mobilise around. Central to the e-union concept is the way technology can be used to transform communication within and between unions (Greene et al., 2003). Internal communications can be improved through e-mail and intranets to allow union officials and staff to keep in touch and exchange information more easily. External communication with members is enhanced by web sites and e-mails that allow information to be delivered in a timely and less costly manner than the traditional newsletter and mail-out, and also allow members to communicate more easily with officials. Most importantly, proponents point to the potential of internet tools to connect members. Unlike traditional forms of communication that focus on one-to-one communication or one-to-many communication flows, internet tools, such as discussion boards, chat rooms and discussion lists, allow many-to-many communications and allow those who are time poor or geographically dispersed to participate (Greene and Kirton, 2003). The upshot is better-informed members who are more able to participate in union forums. This will, it is argued, increase the transparency of union behaviour and the accountability of union officials and thus enhance democracy within unions (Hogan and Greene, 2002). A further outcome is the building of networks, nationally and internationally, with other unions, community groups and social movements (Lee, 1996). In this area, unions can learn from internet campaigns of global resistance movements, such as the protests against meetings of the World Trade Organisation. The use of the internet by the Zapatista movement in Mexico to highlight the plight of the indigenous land owners is another example (Cleaver, 1999). In contrast to global union federations, which are seen as hierarchical and bureaucratic, the internet offers an opportunity to develop more fluid and dynamic networks that are closer to the workplace. Several examples exist of workers and unions using the internet to globalise disputes and draw support and solidarity action from around the world (Hodkinson, 2001; Walker, 2002). This can be particularly effective in multinational organisations where unified campaigns and solidarity action across the organisation can create leverage on individual operations. Limitations of the e-union model The power of ICTs to transform work and civil society was a popular topic throughout the 1990s. Similar claims were also made in political studies and organisational studies about the transformative powers of ICTs. Enthusiastic exponents spoke of new forms of direct democracy challenging the passive, representative democracy that dominates today. In the workplace, technology was going to usher in greater participation and democracy by challenging traditional hierarchical communication processes and the control of information. Sceptics point to the failure of this nirvana to appear and to the continuity with the past. Over time more rigorous studies exploring the impact of ICTs have appeared (Greene and Kirton, 2003; Hogan and Greene, 2002; Ward and Lusoli, 2003). These studies have situated the analysis of ICTs within a political, economic and social context. Social informatics and organisational studies begin from the proposition that technology is, in part, socially constructed in the workplace. Choices of technologies and how they are to be used and implemented are not neutral, technical decisions, although they may operate within technical constraints. Equally, technology is not

received passively. How the technology is used will be the result of ongoing negotiation, implicit or explicit (Kling, 2000; Orlikowski and Barley, 2001). These insights should be familiar to industrial relations academics through labour process studies. Braverman’s (1974) seminal work identified how technology was used in the development of monopoly capitalism. A large body of work has built on this to further our understanding of technology in the workplace. Insights from these studies need to be included in the e-union literature. The e-union literature has largely focused on technology and paid insufficient attention to the organisational context in which ICTs are introduced and used. The exception is Martı´nez Lucio’s (2003) study comparing computer-mediated communications in Spanish union federations. The study examined how the internal dynamics of each union – union identity, existing communication strategies, democratic structures and processes, and specific organisational contingencies – shaped their use of the internet. This recognition of the political nature of unions is an important step forward. Additionally, unions are made more complex by their democratic and branch structures. There is not necessarily a single union identity, but rather each branch and even each workplace may have a separate identity. Branches may vary according to their politics, level of resources, size of membership and so on. Technology offers the potential to develop these distinctive identities, but also to suppress them to a dominant identity. The power relationship between branches and the centre will depend on the union structure but also on many of these internal dynamics, and as these change so will the relationship between the centre and branches. This complexity must be incorporated into the analysis of unions and their use of ICTs. In this context access to and control of information and the communication channels for distributing and receiving information is a source of power. Sharing information involves making decisions about what information is worth sharing and who needs it. While ICTs may allow information to be more widely dispersed, this assumes that all information can be transmitted and communicating electronically. This ignores the importance of informal information in developing networks and relationships (Symon, 2000). Members may indeed receive more information, but it may not be of the type they value or want. And importantly, sending information does not mean information is received or processed. For example, e-mail can increase the speed, volume and breadth of communication but how people read and respond to e-mail is as much a political issue as traditional forms of communication such as attendance at meetings. Unsolicited or non-work related e-mails are often the first deleted, in many cases without being opened (Symon, 2000). People approach the technology with different skills sets, not just in relation to written and oral communication skills, but also their knowledge of the union, its processes and key participants. It is not surprising that Greene and Kirton (2003) found that experienced rank and file activists were more able to establish and maintain e-forms of communication. In this sense, ICTs may merely replicated existing hierarchical barriers. The potential for unions to transform into democratic organisations driven by active members will depend on far more widespread changes than the introduction of technology. Pape (1999, p. 7) argues: A labour movement is far more than an effective communication system, particularly a labour movement committed to building a “new international”. At the core of such a working

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class organisation is a clear vision and the ability to inspire membership into collective action. Collective action grows out of mass mobilisation, out of forging a programme of ideas and action, out of building an organisational culture, out of creating a myriad of powerful human relationships which bring people together and convince them that their organisation is worth living for and even worth dying for.

The potential of ICTs to assist renewal can only occur if unions integrate technology into a broader strategy of union renewal that involves structural and cultural changes to encourage and support active members. While the organising model has garnered widespread support from unions in English speaking countries, the application of the organising model varies greatly in terms of its form and extent of application. Studies have found a number of constraints. The organising model requires unions to make significant changes to their values and organisational structure and practices (Fairbrother and Yates, 2003). Cooper’s (2001) study of organising in a white-collar union highlights the barriers created by the existing organisational culture. Heery et al. (2000) note that resistance may come from within the union due to mismatched skills and resentment over the transfer of resources. In this environment, leadership support is essential. The national context also affects the success of organising. Carter and Cooper (2002, p. 733) note that even though there is strong leadership support in Australia through the ACTU, the absence of a strong tradition of workplace organisation in many industries and sectors may make it more difficult for Australian unions to organise than their UK counterparts. Lack of resources is another problem. A study of organising workers in an electronics plant in Scotland by Findlay and McKinlay (2003) found the strategy successful, but it heightened expectations leading the small group of activists to rely heavily on the union organisers. In the short term at least, organising did not produce independent activists. These internal constraints reflect larger political issues that unions must address. Increasing the activism of the rank and file is not unproblematic. An ongoing tension, documented in many union histories, has existed between union leaders and the rank and file (see, for example, Hinton, 1973; Price, 1980). Hyman (1989) notes the tension between rank and file control and the tendency towards bureaucracy. According to Hyman, unions need rank and file activism and bureaucracy to give shape and direction to activism. Similarly, Kelly (1998) notes the importance of leadership in mobilising workers to take collective action. Unions, by necessity, must impose some constraints on the rank and file in pursuit of unity. As Turner (1979, p. xvii) has argued, unions are “. . . the institutional method by which the masses transform themselves from passive to active elements in society, from weights to be pushed around to social levers in their own right”. The democracy versus bureaucracy thesis that permeates the e-union literature does not capture the complexity of these tensions. As a union moves toward an organising approach that emphasises the rank and file delegates and the empowerment of members, it will confront these tensions. How a union responds, how it employs ICTs and the outcomes produced will be shaped by power struggles within the union. Not surprisingly, surveys by Greer (2002) and Ward and Lusoli (2003) of US and UK web sites found union democracy and e-voice issues largely neglected. Morris and Fosh (2000) identify four different models of union democracy. The form of democracy envisaged within the organising model and e-unions – grass roots activism – is only one model. It is debatable whether either union officials or members of a particular union share this conception of democracy.

Indeed, the model of democracy adopted may change over time, reflecting changes in the political alliances within the union. There is no guarantee that ICTs will be used to support the development of a grass roots activism model rather than an alternative model of union democracy. Setting the discussion of e-unionism within a framework that acknowledges the organisational and political context of unions provides a starting point for an explanation of the different ways that unions approach ICTs and the limitations and obstacles faced. The following section draws on these insights to examine some of problems confronting an Australian union. New technology and the LHMU This section reports on the approach to ICTs by the LHMU. LHMU is a national union with branches in each state and territory. The national office plays a coordinating role, with organising and case work handled at the branch level. In the last five years the union has undergone significant change with the formal adoption of an “organising” approach. With respect to ICTs the national office recently reviewed the union’s IT capacities and developed an IT strategy. They are now in the process of implementing the main aspects of the review. In addition, the national office maintains responsibility for the union’s web site. The following section examines the relationship between the union’s use of ICTs and the adoption of the organising model. The research is based on discussions and interviews with key individuals in the national office and a review of relevant documents. Membership of LHMU, as the name suggests, is diverse and covers a wide range of industries and occupations. The four main industry groups are: hospitality and leisure; property services (e.g. cleaners, gardeners, security guards); community and health (e.g. childcare and aged care workers, ambulance officers, teachers aides and enrolled nurses) and manufacturing and mining (e.g. paint, plastics, chemicals, wineries and breweries). Job insecurity and low wages characterise much of the LHMU’s membership, with part-time employment common. Around 60 per cent of members are female and over half are from non-English speaking backgrounds (Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union, 2004). Membership is dispersed across a large number of employers ranging from large multinational hotel chains to small, family-run businesses. Organising in this climate is difficult. While many of the industry sectors the union operates in are growing, the contingent nature of work and dispersed workforce make organising difficult. Density varies considerably across occupational groups and worksites, but overall, by the late 1990s, the LHMU’s membership had dropped to crisis levels. LHMU: an “organising” union It was the crisis in membership that prompted National Executive to propose the full scale adoption of the “organising model”. In 1999 the National Council endorsed the strategy paper “LHMU – organising for the future’. This document identified the need for greater membership participation and activism to improve the strength of the union and grow the union. The key principles of organising identified were member involvement, development of delegate networks and workplace organisers, cross-workplace activities, community links and developing the capacity for external organising. The union’s commitment to organising was demonstrated through the

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establishment of the National Organising Fund to assist branches to implement the organising approach, especially developing delegate structures, with the amount allocated to the fund being trebled in 2002. Importantly, the strategy recognised the importance of planning, setting targets and monitoring and evaluating performance. The shift to organising involves restructuring the way the union operates and what staff do. The new model calls for the separation of servicing and organising. This is being done through the creation of internal organisers, who focus exclusively on member’s grievances and issues. Organising is split between field organisers, who develop delegate and activists’ networks, and growth organisers, who focus on specific campaigns. Assigning organisers to industries rather than to a “patch” (geographical region) builds teamwork and cooperation. Central to these changes is the appointment of lead organisers who are responsible for planning and coordinating organising teams. Delegates also play a role in the restructure, with branches holding delegate conventions to allow activists to be part of branch debates concerning change. While this is a national strategy, the exact form organising takes and the timing of implementation varies across branches. Most branches have moved toward industry organisers, five out of eight branches have internal organisers and all except the smallest branch have appointed lead organisers. Differences across branches reflect differences in the size and diversity of membership and internal politics. The 2003 Organising Report to National Council summed up the progress of the union: We’re not breaking through yet – we’re on our way – but have a long way to go – rating for union’s progress 4/6 out of 10.

Organising with IT Technology garnered only a small place in “Organising for the future”. The union’s investment in IT was noted, along with the improvements this generated in information transfer, and the need to build on this was stated. Also noted was the need to give more importance to the web site as a means of providing up-to-date information, including activist resource materials, as well as developing its interactive capability. Despite a review of IT in 1994, the union had no planning processes for IT. Users of the membership system – UNISON – complained about access problems and the lack of functionality. Organisers complained of delays in membership forms being processed and problems getting membership statistics and lists, particularly by establishment. Mostly the system was accessed by administrative staff, and the reports passed on to organisers. The IT infrastructure was lacking in other areas as well. Several varieties of software were in use, with some becoming obsolete and/or incompatible with UNISON and network capabilities were in need of improvement. The e-mail system did not read html formatting and was incompatible with UNISON, which meant group e-mails were difficult and time-consuming to send. Nor was it available remotely, which excluded regional and out-of-office organisers. IT was also a major cost to branches, yet there was no planning occurring to assist budget allocations. It was this last point that led to a review of IT in 2003. The review focused specifically on whether IT was supporting the organising strategy. Out of the review came major changes involving an overhaul of network infrastructure, hardware and software. Important changes in the context of organising centred on the

membership system and the upgrade to e-mail. Less central to the review was the operation of the LHMU web site, although it nevertheless remains important in the context of organising. The review included surveys of delegates and organisers regarding communication and IT use and a skills audit of LHMU officials and employees. The audit revealed a serious IT skills deficit, particularly among organisers. Organisers were the most likely to struggle with various IT applications and just over half could use UNISON. The surveys were small and not representative of delegates or organisers, making the information gathered less useful. Nevertheless, they yielded interesting observations. Only 25 per cent of organisers surveyed knew there was an LHMU intranet and only 5 per cent had visited it. This probably reflected the inability to access the intranet remotely and the quality of information available. Despite this, the organisers saw an intranet as a useful way of accessing resources. The surveys of delegates looked at their access to ICTs and their preferences for different types of communication. While access to the e-mail was higher than expected, with 70 per cent having access either at home or at work, face-to-face communications, phone and printed material were all rated more highly than e-mail. Only 60 per cent of delegates with e-mail said it was a moderately important way of communicating with the organiser. This may reflect the access problems organisers encountered with the old e-mail system. Interestingly, male delegates were far more likely than female delegates to have access to e-mail and the internet at work. This suggests that visions of using ICTs to facilitate the participation of women may be limited by existing gender inequities in the workplace. Overall the survey and skills audit painted a picture of limited use of IT within the union. Mobilising members through planning A number of the initiatives of LHMU have the potential to assist greatly in mobilising members. The most significant is the recent upgrade to UNISON, the membership system. The recent upgrades to UNISON are designed specifically to facilitate organising. There are two main parts to the database: membership and employer/establishment sites. The membership section records standard member information, including the employer, and flags the level and type of activism of the member. Members’ grievances and issues are also recorded. By linking grievances to members and establishments the union is able to derive reports on the range and types of grievances dealt with and break these down by establishment, industry or geographic zone, as well as track how grievances are dealt with and in what time-frame. Now a field organiser can prepare for a visit to a worksite by calling up all the grievances at the particular site, as well as the list of members and delegates. There is a range of added features including a campaigns section to record information on specific campaigns and the capacity to record non-members if they make contact with the union or an organiser. The employer section will also record detailed information such as the expiry date of agreements, number of employees, size and ownership of buildings, and so on. In short, the database will facilitate planning of organising activities and setting targets as well reviewing and assessing performance. While the database will be an important tool for planning purposes and day-to-day organising, implementation is encountering problems. The most prominent concern is the inability of organisers to use the system properly to assist their planning and day-to-day activities. The skills audit suggests many organisers simply do not have

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the technical skill required, which could be overcome with training. Training has been limited due to an absence of in-house skills at the branch level and a reluctance to invest in external training that is often seen as less effective. This dilemma over training reflects a broader problem. Planning of organising activities is essential in order to work out what information you need from the database. There is a reluctance to invest in training when key structural and organisational changes have not been put in place and branches have not undertaken the necessary planning to determine what they want from the system. The system also challenges an organiser’s control over their work practices. Workload becomes more transparent and performance can be tracked and assessed, increasing the likelihood of resistance from organisers. Equally concerning, though less acknowledged as an issue, is the quality of the information that organisers enter into the system. The information that comes out will only be as good as that put in, making the cooperation and support of organisers vital. Breaking down the resistance of organisers and shifting to a culture of “organising” are prerequisites for utilising the database effectively. A mutually reinforcing relationship exists between the database and the transformation to an organising culture. While the database will assist organising, its real effectiveness will only be seen when organising dominates the union’s culture. Encouraging participation on the web While the database improves the union’s internal efficiencies and capacities to mobilise, the web site seeks to mobilise members and workers more directly by increasing their participation in the union. Fosh (1993) distinguishes between informal participation, such as reading newsletters, and formal participation, such as attending meetings and voting in elections. The LHMU web site encourages both. The web site provides information about the union and its campaigns and activities to a broad audience. It consists of a national section and off this hangs the branch sub-pages and four industry sub-pages. The site is coordinated by the National Media and Campaigns Officer, and there is a common design and structure although the branches and industry groups have control of their own sections. A web site puts information into the public realm, but the challenge is to get members, community activists and other interested parties to visit it and to make return visits. There are a number of techniques used to encourage visitors. Updating the web site is the most important. News about disputes, campaigns and other issues of relevance to LHMU members are posted to the national, branch and industry sections of the web site. Aside from the national web site, only two branches and one industry site carry up-to-date news. Provision of content is clearly a problem and reflects tensions between branches and the national office. Organisers and industrial officers do not see the web as part of their role and a few of the organisers surveyed for the IT review felt they were not encouraged to submit stories. Most branches have not yet taken ownership of their web site and still see it as a job for the national office. The branch that is most advanced has an individual who has taken on a leadership and coordination role in the area of IT and the web. It has also made the most progress in changing to an organising focus. Up-to-date and relevant information that will attract and interest members and other visitors is most likely to come from organisers and workplace delegates. Until these groups contribute to it on a regular basis it is difficult to see the web site expanding further.

E-mail newsletters, which contain headlines and brief summaries hyperlinked to the full story on the web site, are the most important drivers of web site traffic. While anyone who visits the web site may subscribe, members who provide an e-mail address are automatically added to the list of subscribers, and although they may unsubscribe the majority have not. Politicians and journalists are also added to the list to give the news further reach. The LHMU has a general newsletter with over 9,000 subscribers and industry newsletters for childcare (2,000 subscribers) and casinos (600 subscribers). Most of these are members who have been added to the list. The success of these strategies for increasing awareness and encouraging participation has seen the LHMU web site enter the top ten political sites for web hits. While this is fairly passive participation, it does have a flow-on effect to a more active form of participation. The web site includes several discussion forums that allow any visitor to post a message. These forums are linked to the industry sub-pages. Most postings to the forums occur during specific campaigns or are a response to a specific news story and there can be long spells between postings. While it does more than many other union web sites in respect to interactive participation, there is still a long way to go. Neither members nor non-members are racing to voice their views or raise issues in these forums. There are two obvious areas where the web site could be improved. First, it does little to encourage the participation of atypical activists. While over half the membership is from a non-English speaking background, the web site is only in English. Nor does it establish separate spaces for these groups to participate. Second, despite the centrality of delegates to the organising strategy there is limited information for delegates on the web site. Again, separate discussion forums could be used and access to the intranet provided. In both cases this requires cooperation from the branches to cope with the resource implications. Building networks The internet allows unions to develop informal and fluid networks that link activists rather than organisations and bureaucracies. Through the internet, LHMU uses its formal networks with peak union bodies and Global Union Federations to establish less formal connections. Through syndicating LHMU news on these organisation’s web sites and other political web sites such as LabourStart, the union creates a wider presence. This is a two-way process, with the LHMU web site carrying news about disputes involving other unions. This fosters collaboration. For example, the childcare section of the LHMU web site carried a story asking for support for Scottish childcare workers who were in dispute. Around 15 to 20 members sent solidarity messages. The Scottish workers latter reciprocated with support during a dispute in Australia. Through these networks LHMU creates an identity as an active union and in the process builds goodwill with other unions. The union has launched several e-mail campaigns to tap into these broad-based networks to increase pressure on the employer. One notable success was the campaign against the mass sackings of staff at the Sydney Hilton brought about by the temporary closure of the hotel for refurbishment. The campaign encouraged supporters to send an e-mail through the LHMU web site to the chief executive in Australia. Over 3,000 e-mails were sent, jamming the e-mail system of the Hilton. International support was pivotal in achieving a positive outcome for the Hilton

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workers. A Canadian union holding its annual convention at a hotel in the Hilton chain threatened the local management with moving future conventions to another location, prompting local management to contact the Sydney Hilton. Support from academics and others responsible for conference organisation had a similar impact. Syndication of the news story was essential to the success of the campaign. Around 15 other web sites, both national and international in origin, carried the story. The e-mail campaign was part of a broader media campaign, but the successful outcome was due in large part to the broadening of the dispute internationally. A dispute with a contract company demonstrates another way the network capabilities of the web can provide leverage against an employer. Potential clients of the contract company were accessing news about the dispute on the LHMU web site during routine web searches about prospective clients. This created a negative perception of the company and deterred the potential clients. As a result, the company approached the union and agreed to pay outstanding money provided the news articles were removed from the web site. Both campaigns demonstrate the capacity of the internet to support organising by raising the profile and reach of a campaign and finding points of leverage outside of the workplace. Enhancing democracy The internet has certainly helped the LHMU build participation and develop networks. The third tier of the e-union argument – enhanced democracy – is more difficult to determine. Proponents argue that the internet allows more information to be distributed in a timely manner and this will increase the transparency and accountability of union officials. This is premised on unions making the decisions of governance and management structures more widely available and e-mail opening up direct communication between members and officials, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. In these terms the LHMU web site does not enhance democracy. There are moves for the National Secretary to have a “blog” (weblog) on the web site which would provide some transparency, but at present there is limited information about governance structures and decision making and only a single e-mail address is supplied for each branch. This is not necessarily incompatible with the organising approach adopted by the union. Governance information is probably more appropriate to representative forms of democracy rather than a grass roots model. A core principle of “Organising for the future” involves empowering members. This is based on members being involved and active in all aspects of the union and entails pursuing issues that are important to members. To encourage workplace activists to broaden their involvement the union recently expanded the number of delegates to National Council. In this sense democracy comes through devolving some responsibilities to delegates and members. The most obvious problem with the web site, and one that limits its democratic possibilities the most, is the over-reliance on one person, to keep it up-to-date. The Media and Campaigns Officer joined the National office in the late 1990s with an expressed goal of transforming the union’s web site from a “brochure” to a dynamic and interactive communication tool that would enhance the profile of the union. While this has been achieved in part, to function properly the web site needs officials, organisers and delegates to become more involved, and to see communication via the web as part of their role.

Conclusion The contribution of ICTs to union renewal should not be dismissed. The potential noted by Hogan and Greene (2002) and Diamond and Freeman (2002) to enable new forms of participation and activism is evident. However, for ICTs to have this effect they must be part of an integrated union renewal strategy. Union renewal is a difficult and slow process for unions and involves considerable internal change. It requires a renegotiation of roles within the union that will challenge established positions. How these issues are dealt with through the internal political processes of the union will shape the role and use of ICTs with that union. LHMU has introduced a number of promising initiatives in respect of ICTs. There is a clear fit between the union’s organising strategy and the IT and internet communication strategies. The database has been developed to support the organising approach of the union, changes are being made to the e-mail system and the web site has been redeveloped in recent years to make it a dynamic and interactive communication tool. There are, however, serious limitations that impede the effective use of ICTs. The most significant restraint is the absence of a culture of renewal. While the development of ICTs has occurred at the national level of the union, implementation impacts mostly at the branch level and requires branch cooperation and support. With respect to both the database and the web site, developments at the branch level have not kept pace with the national agenda. All branches are moving toward an organising approach and making the necessary structural changes, but the pace of change varies across branches and an organising culture is still some way away. The variation reflects membership diversity and internal politics within each branch. The branch that has made the most progress towards shifting to an organising culture is also managing the database and the web site the most effectively. The internal politics and organisational context of unions cannot be ignored when considering the impact of ICTs on union renewal. The technology may facilitate a change in practices and behaviour, but these changes will not occur without a political struggle within the union. Mainstream management studies refer to organisations being both efficient and effective. Efficiency is “doing things right”, such as establishing a database, a web site and so on. But this means nothing without effectiveness, that is “doing the right things”. A renewal strategy must be in place and the union’s values and culture must support the strategy before ICTs will “do the right thing”. References Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004), Catalogue 6105.0 Australian Labour Market Statistics, ABS, Canberra, April. Australian Council of Trade Unions (1999), Unions@work: The Challenge for Unions in Creating a Just and Fair Society, ACTU, Melbourne. Australian Council of Trade Unions (2003), Future Strategies: Union Working for a Fairer Australia, ACTU, Melbourne. Braverman, H. (1974), Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, New York, NY. Bronfenbrenner, K., Friedman, S., Hurd, R., Oswald, R. and Seeter, R. (Eds) (1998), Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies, ILR Press, Ithaca, NY.

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Heery, E., Simms, M., Simpson, D., Delbridge, R. and Salmon, J. (2000), “Organising unionism comes to the UK”, Employee Relations, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 38-57. Hinton, J. (1973), The First Shop Stewards Movement, Allen and Unwin, London. Hodkinson, S. (2001), “Reviving trade unionism: globalisation, internationalism and the internet”, paper presented to the 29th Joint Sessions of Workshops, Grenoble, April. Hogan, J. and Greene, A.M. (2000), “E-collectivism: on-line action and on-line mobilisation”, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (Eds), Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse, Ashgate, Aldershot. Hyman, R. (1989), The Political Economy of Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice in a Cold Climate, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Kelly, J. (1998), Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves, Routledge, New York, NY. Kling, R. (2000), “Learning about information technologies and social change: the contribution of social informatics”, The Information Society, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 217-32. Lee, E. (1996), The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism, Pluto Press, London. Le´vesque, C. and Murray, G. (2002), “Local versus global: activating local union power in the global economy”, Labor Studies Journal, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 39-65. Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (2004), “LHMU members”, LHMU, Haymarket, available at: www.lhmu.org.au/lhmu/union/members.html (accessed 21 September 2004). Lucore, R.E. (2002), “Challenges and opportunities: unions confront the new information technologies”, Journal of Labor Research, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 201-14. Martı´nez Lucio, M. (2003), “New communication systems and trade union politics: a case study of Spanish trade unions and the role of the internet”, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 334-47. Moody, K. (1997), Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, Verso, New York, NY. Morris, H. and Fosh, P. (2000), “Measuring trade union democracy: the case of the UK civil and public services association”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 38 No. 1, pp. 95-114. Orlikowski, W.J. and Barley, S.R. (2001), “Technology and institutions: what can research on information technology and research on organizations learn from each other?”, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 145-65. Pape, J. (1999), “Will the workers of the world unite in cyber space? Critical reflections on information technology and the labour movements of the south”, Working Paper No. 2, International Labour Resource and Information Group, Cape Town. Peetz, D. (1998), Unions in a Contrary World: The Future of the Australian Trade Union Movement, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Price, R. (1980), Masters, Unions and Men. Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour 1830-1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Shostak, A.B. (1999), CyberUnion: Empowering Labor through Computer Technology, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY.

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Snape, E., Redman, T. and Chan, A.W. (2000), “Commitment to the union: a survey of research and the implications for industrial relations and trade unions”, International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 205-30. Symon, G. (2000), “Information and communication technologies and the network organization: a critical analysis”, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 73, pp. 389-414. Turner, I. (1979), Industrial Labour and Politics. The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1990-1921, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney. Voss, K. and Sherman, R. (2000), “Breaking the iron law of oligarchy: union revitalization in the American labor movement”, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 106 No. 2, pp. 303-49. Walker, S. (2002), “To picket just click it! Social netwar and industrial conflict in a global economy”, School of Information Management Working Paper, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds. Ward, S. and Lusoli, W. (2003), “Dinosaurs in cyberspace? British trade unions and internet”, European Journal of Communication, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 147-79. Waterman, P. (1998), Globalization, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms, Mansell Publishing, London. (Sandra Cockfield is Lecturer in the Department of Management, Monash University. Her research interests include workplace industrial relations, industrial relations history, industrial relations theory and state regulation and industrial theory. E-mail: sandra.cockfield@buseco. monash.edu.au)

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Globalisation, collective action and counter-coordination The use of the new information communication technology by the Malaysian labour movement

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Margaret Grieco Transport Research Institute, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK and Institute for African Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, and

Mhinder Bhopal London Metropolitan University, London, UK Abstract Purpose – This article aims to explore the use of new information communication technology by the Malaysian labour movement. New information communication technologies are undoubtedly globalising, but these same technologies can also be used by labour to retrieve and re-achieve a more equitable balance between labour and capital. The low transaction costs of the new information communication technology, and the universal reach of these same technologies, provide the labour movement with a critical new tool for organising and bargaining. Malaysia provides us with a useful example of this new context. Design/methodology/approach – The authors e-interviewed Malaysian labour activists and reviewed Malaysian labour and human rights web sites to develop a framework in which the discussion of global counter-coordination by labour could be situated. This article provides case material from Malaysian web sites to demonstrate the importance of this technology in labour advocacy within Malaysia and in its connection with the outside world. These demonstrations of connectivity support the proposition of the paper that the new information technology affords the opportunity for the development of global union practices. Findings – The article finds that the Malaysian labour movement is aware of the power of global relay that the technology provides it with and harnesses this power in its interaction with the state. Research limitations/implications – The level of electronic activity by the labour movement may be under-recorded in this assessment, as the resources were not available to determine the volume of electronic mailing which takes place within the Malaysian labour relations environment. Practical implications – This article provides the international labour movement with a perspective of the new information communication technology, which can have practical consequences for action: meta-coordination structures are required at the level of information exchange. Originality/value – This article draws attention to the “power of global relay” as a new feature in the politics of labour. This insight requires further theorisation and should be of interest within a range of disciplines concerned with critical approaches to change and power. Keywords Communication technologies, Malaysia, Labour, Transaction costs Paper type Research paper

In writing this paper the authors have been in contact with Malaysian colleagues in the labour movement who directed them to key web sites on which the counter-coordination activities of labour are documented. Sites signalled as important by Malaysian colleagues are: www. malaysiakini.com; www.mediapekerja.org; www.tenaganita.net; and www.jerit.org

critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 pp. 109-122 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043 DOI 10.1108/17422040510595627

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Introduction: authoring the global statement – a new labour movement competence New information communication technologies are undoubtedly globalising, but these same technologies, which are central to the globalisation of capital, can also be used by labour to retrieve and re-achieve a more equitable balance between labour and capital. The low transaction costs of the new information communication technology, and the universal reach of these same technologies, provide the labour movement with a critical new tool for organising and bargaining: Malaysia provides us with a useful example of this new context. Although the Malaysian labour movement has not yet used the internet as a major tool in the mobilising of the grass roots base (although the tool is used in the open publicising of rallies: see www.mtuc.org.my/rally.htm), it has, however, made major use of the tool in policy “dialogue” with the government and with external global audiences and interests. In particular the internet has enabled previously “unheard” labour activist groups to express their voice at national and international level which, prior to the internet era, remained exclusively the domain of “e´lites”. Furthermore, the visibility of the internet voice has not only helped to broaden the discourse, but has also helped to protect the previously marginal and vulnerable. The internet is already used as a major advocacy tool within the Malaysia labour context and it is a major location within which the contestation of labour rights take place (see www.tenaganita. net; see also www.labourcentre.org). The use of the internet to display “soft policy tools” such as memoranda or perspectives on labour issued by the labour movement is a significant feature of the Malaysian industrial relations landscape. The use of the internet for these purposes has been given focus and direction by the heavy censorship practices operated by the Malaysian Government around the press, in a context where what the press can say is restricted owing to a history of suppression, ownership influence and the emergence of a culture of self-censorship. However, “prohibited discourse” can be carried on on the internet through network strategies of information display which range from the carrying of links to external sites to the development of uncontrollable (by the state) loci of display (e.g. shadow sites). The internet has gained an important place in the dialogue of labour with capital and government, and is buttressed very strongly by the development of the internet independent news portal – Malaysiakini – by ex-journalists and former labour movement researchers, which survived attempts by the government to seize their hardware not least owing to the existence of shadow sites and global exposure of such state tactics. Local comment recognises the importance of the phenomenon: Frustrated by official attempts to restrict and control news, more and more Malaysians have turned to the internet. They now use it for lively journalism and free public debate. We welcome the presence of internet-based media but we must be vigilant against any attempt to impose politically motivated controls in cyberspace (www.malaysia.net/aliran/charter/ charter2000.html (note that this site is available in Malay, Chinese and English)).

This same local censorship dynamic which pushes civil society to use the internet as the mechanism for local communication pushes the unions and labour movement to a web-based discourse which is immediately globalised, seeable, overhearable, and potentially interactive.

Recognising the scale of the reachable listening ear, the Malaysian labour movement has utilised the world wide web in its public reflection on globalisation, technology and the erosion of the public sector. For example, the Malaysian Trade Union Congress (MTUC) (www.mtuc.org.my) has already carried the following policy statements and perspective on its web site (www.mtuc.org.my/policy_mtuc.htm). On capital formation, it carried the following message: Undoubtedly Malaysia needs foreign capital for the purpose of industrialisation to generate economic progress and employment. For this purpose several incentives are offered to foreign capital such as pioneer status and unrestricted transfer of profit out of the country. MTUC is of the firm belief that pioneer status up to 15 years and transfer of the entire profit will defeat the very purpose of attracting foreign capital. It is therefore necessary that the pioneer status should be limited to 5 years for urban based industries and not more than 7 years for industries based in rural areas. As for the profit, not more than 50% of the profit should be allowed to be taken out of the country. The remaining portion should be utilised for re-investment. MTUC is also of the view that there should not be any legal restriction on collective bargaining rights in industries with pioneer status. The Government must take appropriate steps to retain and utilise local capital for the nation’s industrialisation programmes by offering necessary incentives, with a long term objective of enabling local capital controlling the economy of the country. It will invariably lead to more of our people’s participation in the development of industrialisation (www. mtuc.org.my/policy_mtuc.htm).

In displaying this message globally, the MTUC is inviting other non-local agencies into the discussion of the appropriate strategies for Malaysia. In doing so it changes the pattern of bargaining relationships and the social space of bargaining. On technology, the MTUC sent out the following message: In this era of rapid development of technology, it is impossible to prevent its utilisation. The choice of technology must ensure that it fulfills the employment objective. As workers are seriously concerned over the introduction of technology, MTUC must seek representation on the National Committee which determines the choice of technology in Malaysia. Besides, management should, as a matter of procedure and policy, consult the workers or their trade unions, as the case may be, before introducing technology in their respective enterprises. Foreigners who invest in this country usually agree to transfer the technology which they bring in. However, seldom do they comply with the agreement. In the event they comply with this condition, they do so in an haphazard way. The Government should ensure that the foreign investors fulfill this important (role) of transfer of the technology in a satisfactory manner. MTUC is of the view that Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) should be given assistance by the Government and international bodies in introducing new technology (www. mtuc.org.my/policy_mtuc.htm).

Here the MTUC recognizes that technology can not be resisted but seeks to condition the terms on which it is introduced and operated. Its concern that there must be indigenous benefits is eloquently expressed. On multinational corporations, the MTUC delivers the following message: With the exit of colonialism, neo-colonialism has entered in many a developing countries in the name of multinational corporations. With their money power and political influence, they are in a position to dictate terms to the political e´lites. This in turn has created social and

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labour problems. These problems are no more national; they have assumed an international character. MTUC shall, therefore, continue to extend its full cooperation to the other countries’ national centres and international labour organisations to fight this growing menace. The Government should adopt the ILO Code of Conduct for MNE’s and ensure its compliance by MNEs. MNE’s terms and conditions should be in compliance with the core Labour standards of the ILO (www.mtuc.org.my/policy_mtuc.htm).

Here the MTUC provides us with an insightful understanding of the circumstances of neo-colonialism and the need for international coordination or counter-coordination by the labour movement. It provides an analysis which can be built on. On ownership of shares by workers, the MTUC sends the following message: It is a fashion these days that certain enterprises offer shares to their workers not exceeding 5%. It is in fact a gimmick. MTUC there(fore) rejects it. If ownership of share by workers is to be effective and meaningful, at least one third of the equity of the company should be with the workers. And MTUC shall therefore strive to achieve this objective (www.mtuc.org.my/ policy_mtuc.htm).

The MTUC delivers a very clear message on the difference between equity schemes and gimmicks. The clarity of the call for fundamental equity is well sent. On privatisation, the MTUC sends the following message: Privatisation has become the vogue of many capitalist countries, followed by several developing countries. Experience have disclosed several defects such as cutting corners, corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency. In Malaysia, privatisation is more a political patronage rather than an economic reorganisation. Nonetheless, the MTUC does not intend to oppose it totally. If the Government wants to privatise some others like the car park etc., MTUC would not oppose it, provided the serving employees are retained in their employment with no less favourable terms and conditions of service. But the MTUC will continue to oppose privatisation of institutions which render service to the people, such as medical, electricity, water supply, postal, railways, communications, tertiary education, etc. We also do not find any reason why revenue-earning services such as telecommunications were privatised under the pretext of improving efficiency and productivity. Employees of privatised and corporatised agencies should not be retrenched. In the event of privatisation, the ownership must be substantially shared by the workers and the people (www.mtuc.org.my/policy_mtuc.htm).

The MTUC critique of privatization is well delivered and has as clear a formulation as that offered by longer established and better resourced labour movements anywhere. We have carried these fulsome statements in this article recognising that the critical task of scholarship is not only about the analysing of voice, perspectives, world views, situations and environments, but is also about the relaying of voice to make it more visible and available for analysis by others. The clarity and quality of these statements by the MTUC, which reflect the common purpose of an otherwise politically-fragmented trade union organisation (Bhopal, 2001), is clear: they provide a visible and transparent critique of processes of privatisation and globalisation where sufficient safety nets to protect the local have not been invoked. The statements recognise the need to embrace technology with its globalising tendencies, but stress the need for the development of a set of appropriate local safeguards. The availability of the Malaysian Trade Union Congress statements in English reflects the impact of British colonialism in developing a common language and enables the sophistication of their communication strategy in respect of outside

audiences and interests. The absence of Chinese and Malay language translations on this page – though these are available elsewhere on the site – indicates both the intended audience for these statements and the relatively limited attention devoted to reaching the technologically-impoverished grass roots at home in terms of such policy statements. The shaping of such globally broadcast statements on globalisation no doubt has an awareness of the access this provides to international labour institutions such as the ILO and the global union institutions which have already sprung up around the accentuated associational and network capabilities afforded by the internet (go to www.global-unions.org/). The networking capacity of the internet, however, is also very much alive amongst other labour activists in Malaysia. The contrast between the location of the Labour resource centre in the poor Indian area of Brickfields in Kuala Lumpur, located on the fourth floor of a dilapidated and generally unlit building, and the intensive use made of its library and the office area equipped with a number of internet-ready computers by activists to organise is a stark, but significant one. Through e-mail and the mobile phone the activists have access to the strategic communications necessary for mobilisation within and without the state of Malaysia. The visible ease with which policy statements by the labour movement can be accessed through the world wide web is a key element of our argument: not only can labour access these policy views and aspirations, but so too can government and commerce (see also Holmes and Grieco, 2002), although the former is provided some protection because the latter are under domestic and international surveillance due to the ongoing concern over the social and economic impact of globalisation. Owning history: the management of social and political “archives” The public transparency of the various policy positions of labour movements and organisations, such as the Malaysian Trade Union Congress, Women and Workers Independent Media and Training Centre (WIMTEC), is a crucial component of counter-coordination: the continuous global display of directed and detailed messages autonomous and immune from external interference, and the ability to archive these both locally and in a distributed form, is a new competence of international labour. Records of events are no longer held in one primary location but may be held simultaneously at many locations: the destruction of a printing press or body of records about events no longer has the same fragmenting and de-historicising potential. The recorded history of events is no longer as vulnerable to eradication: and, indeed, the Malaysian labour movement has already routinely used the new information communication technologies for archiving, recording and securing the past (go to www.jerit.org). The use of the new information technology enables the representation of past victories, experiences and problems: it permits history to be re-integrated and not to be simply lost or fragmented by lack of access to the means of communication. Retaining the integrity of a history is important in achieving the solidarity for present rounds of bargaining. Within the materials placed on the web by the Malaysian labour movement, we witness detailed case accounts of legal victories which have meant little in material terms to those individuals who have “won” in the courts, but which clearly signal an institutional ground which can be more fully harnessed. Similarly, the history of past industrial action is reproduced and related to the present context:

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Case 1: archiving legal victories: the Rubber Tapper Thirty years ago[1] a Malaysian rubber tapper named Govinda Pillai sought justice from the legal system. He sought to claim his legal entitlement of a “living wage”, a case which eventually ended up in the court of Justice Harun Hashim Baradan Kuppusamy. This entitlement was laid down by the colonial government of Malaysia in recognition of the vagaries of the weather and the impact upon rubber tappers’ wages and employment conditions. Rubber tapping cannot be conducted when it rains and as the wages are paid on a daily basis the generates short fall in the earnings of the rubber tapper. The colonial legislation guaranteed the rubber tapper minimum number of days’ payment per month. “In June 1973 it rained a lot and Govinda Pillai, a rubber tapper in the former Kinrara estate in Puchong, was only able to go to work for 17 days that month. He was only paid for the 17 days and not a minimum of 24 days, as guaranteed by Sec 16. The estate owed him seven days wages. “Govinda Pillai decided to file a claim in the Kajang labour court for the balance seven days of wages amounting to RM22.40. Little did he realize that his claim would shake the entire plantation industry. “Sure enough, the Labour Court ruled in his favour and ordered Kinrara estate to pay Govinda Pillai RM22.40. End of the matter? No! “After realising that the claim and the subsequent award, no matter how paltry, would set a dangerous legal precedent, Kinrara estate, helped by the planters club, hired the best lawyers in the country and filed an appeal against the RM22.40 award in the High Court in Kuala Lumpur in 1974 (www.labourcentre.org/n_110703.htm).” The appeal came before Justice Harun Hashim in 1974. the sums involved were substantial. And from that date there was no action on the matter until a day before the judge’s retirement, in 1994, Harun Hashim delivered judgment and ruled in favour of Govinda Pillai. In the meantime, Govinda Pillai had died, as had his lawyer DP Xavier and the rubber estate had been sold redeveloped. The journalist who had documented this case study: “tracked down Govinda Pillai’s wife and grandchildren who were living in great poverty in a ramshackle hut in a ‘railway line’ squatter settlement near Jalan Ipoh. She was almost blind. I told her ‘Govinda Pillai has won the case!’ ‘He would have been happy had he been alive,’ she told me. During a later visit she said it would cost RM500 in legal fees to claim the RM22.40. She never did. It still rains and rubber tappers still don’t get their minimum 24 days wages a month.” (for direct extract go to www.labourcentre.org/n_110703.htm) Case 2: archiving the history of strikes: connecting with the past, connecting with the outside Back in Malaysia, 9,000 railway workers went on strike in December 1962. Their main demand was the conversion of daily rated wages to monthly salaries. The entire union movement under the Malayan Trades Union Congress rendered moral and material support to the 9,000 railway workers and their union. The strike lasted 22 days and the government eventually conceded to the workers’ demand. As a result of the successful strike, all other daily rated workers of the government were also converted to monthly status. There were several other strikes, including one by the teachers in 1967 – many of them successful in the past in Malaysia. Now the situation has changed. Seldom do we hear of strikes. Of course, the world has progressed and human rights have been enhanced. Workers in many countries have the freedom to strike, which in a strict sense means the workers’ right to withdraw their labour. Virtually impossible to strike But, in Malaysia the situation is different and difficult now. Several provisions have been enacted to make it virtually impossible for the unions to resort to strike action. Nowhere in the laws is it stated that workers have the right to withdraw their labour in pursuit of their

demands. The legal definition of the word “strike” is: “Any act or omission by a body of workers, which is intended or which does result in any limitation, restriction, reduction, dilatoriness in the performance of their (workers’) duties connected to their employment is also strike.” This means Work-to-Rule, and Go-Slow are also deemed as strikes. The laws further stipulate the punishment for those involved in “illegal strikes”, which is imprisonment and/or fine (reproduced from www.aliran.com/monthly/2004b/7h.html).

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These two case examples of the representation and recollection of Malaysian labour history indicate the ease with which both detail and overview can be readily retrieved within the new context of counter-coordination afforded by information technology. As of yet, the web has been little used in mobilising the grass roots within the Malaysian labour movement, although it is extensively used in activist coordination, nevertheless the archiving of past outcomes represents the emergence of a tool which could be used in current grass root contests and contentions. The case of the rubber tapper and the justice system provides a motivating story line in a context where plantation workers are currently experiencing increased hardship under the deluge of foreign vulnerable workers imported by the plantation owners and their recruitment agents. And a story line which has increased significance in a context where practices of labour ganging of vulnerable migrant workers are found not only within the plantation sectors of the economy of old colonies but are also found within the most advanced economies (see www.publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmenvfru/455/45505.htm, for the reappearance of the Parliamentary discussion of illegal gangmastering as a contemporary British industrial relations problem linked to international labour migration). Similarly, providing for an easily accessed relay of information on Malaysian industrial action history provides new generations of labour with access to the industrial relations of their own past and provides them in the present with alternatives to that present which are shaped in their own history. Part of this history is clearly the history of the struggle with old colonial forms of control: the identification of multinational activities and globalisation through such agencies as neocolonial forms has already been made by the MTUC in the text relayed earlier (www.mtuc.org.my/policy_mtuc.htm):

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With the exit of colonialism, neo-colonialism has entered in many developing countries in the name of multinational corporations. With their money power and political influence, they are in a position to dictate terms to the political e´lites. This in turn has created social and labour problems. These problems are no more national; they have assumed an international character. MTUC shall, therefore, continue to extend its full cooperation to the other countries’ national centres and international labour organisations to fight this growing menace.

The identity of the opponent is already available as an outcome of imperial and colonial history: the tools for refining and strengthening this identity lie in a strong part with the new technology. And there is evidence within a number of Malaysian labour activist organisations of the systematic documenting of present case evidence as well as substantial attempts to provide an archiving of the past, which promotes identity and enables counter-coordination. Present practices of interest resolution: vulnerable migrant labour and the documentation of conflicting perspectives Within the Malaysian web materials made available by the Malaysian labour movement, there is a strong discourse concerned with understanding the mobility of labour and with resisting the race to the bottom that the mobility of labour can

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introduce. Many discussions of capital and labour view capital as highly mobile while labour remains fixed, however, the Malaysian context is one in which there have been high levels of movement of vulnerable migrant workers into the economy. The Malaysian labour movement is both concerned to prevent illegal migration, and the manipulation of migrants by employers into illegal status in order to accentuate their vulnerability, because of the threat to Malaysian labour standards and concerned to protect illegal migrants as workers within the Malaysian economy. The concern that migrants are not used to displace local labour and weaken its terms of contract is clearly expressed, but so too is the concern that migrant workers should be better incorporated into the Malaysian labour force. The conventional union organisations have focused on the prospect of stopping the inflow of migrant labour, while the labour rights movement has focused on the widespread abuse of migrant labour, abuse which includes the routine whipping of apprehended illegal immigrants (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/ 2163440.stm), and the processes by which such labour is rendered further vulnerable. The case materials presented below provide a demonstration of this difference in focus and emphasis: Case 3: MTUC perspective on employers’ strategy of displacement of local labour by vulnerable workers Pengambilan pekerja asing secara besar-besaran dan tanpa had dalam semua sector telah mendorong majikan yang degil menolak kenaikan gaji: Manakala kebanyakan majikan pula menuntut untuk menyingkirkan kenaikan tahunan dan bonus tahunan yang terjamin sejak bertahun-tahun di bawah perjanjian bersama Massive and unrestricted recruitment of foreign workers in all sectors has encouraged unscrupulous employers to deny wage increases: Many are demanding to remove annual increments and annual bonuses secured through years of collective bargaining. (Note: this campaign statement is available in Malay and English on the same page (reproduced from www.mtuc.org.my/rally.htm)). Case 4: Palm Oil Mills, the MTUC and the freezing of foreign labour (reproduced from www.mtuc.org.my/Press%20Statement20July2004.htm) MTUC SEEKS GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION TO STOP INDISCRIMINATE DISMISSALS BY PLANTATION BOSSES MTUC is perturbed by the series of dismissals under the pretext of retrenchment. We urge the Government to urgently intervene to stop this widespread abuse. The All Malaysian Estates Staff Union (AMESU) reported that in recent years Palm Oil Mills under Malaysian Corporate giant Sime Darby has terminated 554 employees. Although the company and the group employs a large number of foreign workers they adamantly rejected union’s proposal to utilize permanent workers to replace foreign workers. Many of the 554 retrenched employees have worked with the Oil mills for more than 15 to 20 years and because of their age unable to find suitable alternative employment. Sime Darby Group’s action is clearly in contravention of the Code of Conduct for Industrial Harmony. More than 200 workers effected by Sime Darby Group’s unfair labour practice will gather at the Industrial Relations Dept, Kluang Johor (21 July) at 9.00am to highlight their plight and urge the Government to step in. It is obvious that Plantation bosses are taking advantage of Governments relaxed policy on recruitment of foreign workers. We urge the Government to freeze all applications for recruitment of foreign workers in the plantation sector until a detail study of their manpower requirement is carried out. (G.RAJASEKARAN) SECRETARY GENERAL.

Case 5: Tenaganita, documenting state torture of migrant workers and the use of the memorandum (reproduced with permission from www.tenaganita.net/t1/article. php?story ¼ 20040907022536671) Tenaganita explicitly identifies its goal and information strategy and places it on the web for relaying: Tenaganita wrote the memorandum as a way of documenting migrants’ experience of abuse, torture, exploitation and advocating for change. In short, the memorandum contains: † A critique of Malaysia’s industrialisation development strategy and its reliance on cheap, vulnerable and temporary labour. † An analysis of how migrant workers who enter the country legally end up becoming illegal and undocumented because of the unscrupulous dealings of employers and agents. † Camps based on the testimonies of ex-detainees including reports of deaths and abuse in the camps, an elaborate system of corruption among the camp staff, lack of proper facilities such as toilets, insufficient food, water that led to diseases such as beri-beri and lack of medical care. † A series of recommendations, including that the government establish an independent commission of inquiry to investigate the allegations and experiences of detained migrant workers and make public the findings for positive change. Tenaganita discusses the role that it views its information gathering and documentation playing in the policy process: THE MEMORANDUM IS ABOUT MORE THAN THE DETENTION CAMPS A memorandum has been a form of soft tool used by NGOs to communicate with the government in a comprehensive way on a specific issue of public concern. This has been the experience of Irene[2] who has been an activist for almost 30 years. NGO’s have carried out discussions and dialogues with various government agencies and a program of advocacy developed. Similarly, the objective of publishing the memorandum in this case was: † † †

†

To get the government to take actions to change the conditions in the camps To develop a comprehensive policy and legal framework for effective protection of migrant workers. To develop a monitoring mechanism so that complaints related to migrant workers, enforcement agencies, recruiting agents and detention camps could be effectively dealt with by the state. To propose recommendations for actions and information based on the overview and the analysis of migration process, recruitment and other related issues provided by the memorandum and arising from the information gathered by Tenaganita (www.tenganita. net/t1/article.php?story=20040907022536671).

From the perspective of indigenous labour, migrant workers have been used adversely to affect the terms enjoyed by local labour. Indigenous labour is documenting and globally displaying the undermining of achieved labour gains by this process. It discusses the influx of migrant workers in terms of both government and employer strategies and resists the advent of the industrialisation of Malaysia by means of foreign workers. From the perspective of migrant labour, many have arrived in Malaysia under arrangements organised by recruitment agents that were legal, or that they believed to be legal but have now found themselves inside the country with no valid work permit and no legal right to be there. This illegal status renders them particularly vulnerable:

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Under tough laws introduced two years ago, illegal immigrants face jail sentences of up to five years or fines of up to 10,000 ringgitdollars, or both, plus whipping (http://news.catcha. com/my/content.phtml?1&010&&afpnews.cgi&cat=malaysia&story=041021071734. g6h5z5fh.txt).

From the perspective of human and labour rights activists, as we have seen from the case evidence above, documenting the experiences of the migrant labour and displaying them in order to place pressure on the government is an acknowledged strategy. This strategy brings such organisations into conflict with the government, resulting in arrests and imprisonment which themselves are recorded, and brings in international agencies and interests to intervene for the release of the high profile labour rights organisers (see, for instance, the campaign to free Irene Fernandez of Tenaganita (www.tenaganita.net) and Tian Chua of the Labour Resource Centre (www.vthc.org.au/campaigns/20020221_tianchua.html)). From the perspective of employers, such vulnerability better sealed illegal labour into its very poor conditions of work and life. Such Draconian treatment if apprehended prevented illegal labour attempting to cross the borders to depart these terms and conditions. To leave Malaysia through legal channels exposes the illegality of the worker’s existing status and results in punishment. Illegal labour is caught in a Catch 22 situation. A recent amnesty for illegal Indonesian workers in Malaysia has been declared which provides a meeting point for the government, the union organisations and the labour rights activists (see http://news.catcha.com/my/content.phtml?1&010&& afpnews.cgi&cat=malaysia&story=041021071734.g6h5z5fh.txt). An important actor in the achieving of this amnesty appears to be the Indonesian Government: displaying the experience of foreign workers through global technology has consequences for the governments of workers’ origins as well as for host countries as the case evidence below indicates: Case 6: Malaysia pardons illegal Indonesian workers Malaysia has pardoned thousands of illegal Indonesian workers, allowing them to return home next month to celebrate Islam’s biggest festival of Eid al-Fitr, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said in remarks published Thursday. “We have decided to pardon them and those who surrender will not be fined. They need only to go through due process arranged by their government,” Abdullah was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times. . . The Malaysian government will also pick up the cost of transporting them home, Abdullah said. Under tough laws introduced two years ago, illegal immigrants face jail sentences of up to five years or fines of up to 10,000 ringgit dollars), or both, plus whipping. Malaysia in August delayed a deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal Indonesian workers after Jakarta warned that a crackdown before its September 20 presidential election could hurt relations. Eighteen thousand illegal immigrants have been whipped in Malaysian prisons in the past two years. There are an estimated 1.2 million illegal workers in the country. Most are from neighbouring Indonesia and the Philippines, drawn to relatively prosperous Malaysia by jobs in construction, plantation work and services (reproduced from http://news.catcha.com/my/ content.phtml?1&010&&afpnews.cgi&cat=malaysia&story=041021071734.g6h5z5fh.txt).

The Amnesty permits the Catch 22 to be broken: the issue remains whether, by creating such a Catch 22 situation, the Malaysian Government knowingly colluded with employer interests and sealed vulnerable labour into its abusive locations of employment. The visibility of the illegal immigrants has been achieved by the actions of the traditional unions, the labour rights organisations and the enforcement activities of the state as recorded by the labour rights organisations. Practices of enforcement have played a role in generating strategies of counter-coordination to the globalisation of vulnerable labour. Counter-coordination can happen through processes of interaction between opponents as these Malaysian case materials on migrant labour demonstrate. The respective contributions to the visibility of the vulnerability of migrant labour have generated a globalised discourse that raises issues about global labour standards. .

The implications of globalised voice: patterns of alliance and patterns of control The new information communication technologies generate a globalising of voice even where there is an interest in silence. The globalising of voice creates the prospect of being overheard. In this short article on the use of the internet within the Malaysian labour environment, we have witnessed how easily voice and message can be captured and related to one another without reference to authority, requirement of a warrant or need for a permission. In such a context patterns of alliance and patterns of control are rendered readily visible. The whipping of illegal migrants as part of a process of the construction of unfree labour jars with the image of Malaysian modernity and the futurism of Kuala Lumpur’s twin towers and electronic highway developments. But, these same electronic highway developments permit the monitoring of events and the marshalling of materials that permit the identification of patterns of control and enable the challenge to these same patterns (Holmes and Grieco, 2002). On a slightly different track, patterns of alliance no longer need to be physical or material to be effective. They can be electronic with the lower transaction costs and indeed and on occasion lower physical risks of seizure or personal danger that these possess. Within Malaysian use of the internet to discuss labour and other social and political issues, there is evidence of moral entrepreneurs developing web sites which direct others to key materials generated elsewhere through their patterns of hyperlinks (see www.mggpillai.com/). A geographically distributed alliance of actors sharing the same regional or institutional focus can generate a reliable and robust web presence to maintain an issue in the public, governmental and international view (see www. mediapekerja.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=95& mode=thread&order=0&thold=0&POSTNUKESID=a41b0f6065705a88023cb066 dfb99ff4). For labour movements and labour issues in Malaysia both national and regional networks of web-based alliances are present and active in their activities of updating and monitoring, but so too are the global union network structures which are now emerging and tightening their global coordination and counter-coordination against the negative aspects of globalisation (see www.icem.org/update/upd2003/upd03-14.html). The globalising of voice allows for new partnerships and wider campaigns that can embrace local issues within their broader programmatic agendas. The character of the new information communication technology makes the provision of advocacy space to

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others within an institution’s communication showcase a very low cost activity. However, the volume of other messages can also have a consequence for the visibility of the local on the global stage. The routine whipping of illegal migrants and the degradation of the incarcerated “illegal” migrants in detention camps should be a show stopper in any modern appreciation of industrial relations or analysis of the modern relations between labour and capital, however, the current alliances of advocacy of indigenous labour’s rights and entitlements provides little space for reflection on the topic as the labour mainstream maintain their “eye” on their prime constituency. Counter-coordination strategies designed to address globalisation and to develop a resistance of the race to the bottom may have to lift the universal rights of all labour to a higher location on the agenda. Our tale of counter-coordination in Malaysia provides the grounds for a more thorough reflection on the future agendas of global unions. Conclusion: new grounds for analysis In this article, we have argued that the new information technology which provides the grounds for the globalisation of capital, also provides the necessary tool for its counter-coordination by labour. We have explored these counter-coordination dynamics in the Malaysia context, but recognise that these dynamics will play out differently in different regional and institutional locations. We have shown that Malaysia is a context in which the internet is present but the regular media is heavily censored and that as a consequence Malaysia has moved to the use of the web in respect of political and labour movement journalism. We have shown that there is a range of labour movement organisations using this form, which stretch from the main union forums to more radical labour rights organisations. While the internet is used extensively for advocacy and contestation in respect of local labour movement issues, both the large union organisations and the labour rights movements representing severely abused migrant workers use this publication space to link to the outside world in the defence and promotion of their agendas and to bring institutions from the outside in. In terms of the international labour movement, there has already been an emergence of the development of links on the internet and the construction of networks of labour association within an emerging global unions frame. We can already view at the click of a button the labour movement itself recording its present and past experience of struggle, achievement, victory and loss and archiving this in forms which are globally retrievable. The new competences of the technology permit simultaneous global display on broad issues and on detailed cases and, as we have seen in the case of Malaysia, across many languages. Within the Malaysian context, we have seen that a major area of internet discourse has been that of foreign migrant labour. We have seen that there are many perspectives on this, from the traditional union structures wishing to stop the flow of migrants into the country as this labour stream is being used to undermine existing worker rights to the labour rights organisations which are pressing for better rights for migrant workers – but whichever perspectives the various agents and agencies are adopting this local debate now forms part of globalised discourse. The in-migration of vulnerable foreign workers parallels the discussions around the outsourcing of previously heartland jobs elsewhere – an outsourcing which is itself a consequence of the new technologies – and begin to form part of the discussion by international labour of the need for global unions to coordinate in the context of the new mobility of labour

and of jobs if the race to the bottom is to be prevented (see www.global-unions.org/ displaydocument.asp?DocType=PressRelease&Index=991210808&Language=EN). The use of the internet to get around local censorship constraints results in local discourse being overheard by a global audience. The possibility, indeed the certainty, of being overheard in this way has consequences for all parties in a discourse. Governments can come under external pressure to alter their positions towards acceptable global standards but global standards can also be restrictive of the action of other parties. For example, the acceptance of World Trade Organization global standards have adversely affected the vulnerable in many locations: it can be argued that in later stages of the policy process such inequities become problematic even for the strongest parties to hold to because of the transparency of such inequities and the system distrust it invites. However, localised discussions that become globalised discussions, either by accident or intent, can be entered by parties other than those chosen to be invited. Forming alliances external to the local environment can work for the initiating agency in one period and work against it in the next: moving discussions to a global forum can result in the loss of local control by all local parties. Global display invites the external into internal processes. The issue of whether this provides protection or exposure requires analysis. The future patterns of alliance between global actors are not yet known: in the case of the war on terror, we can already see that social movements which might previously have been deemed local liberation movements are now likely to be identified as global terrorist movements. Global technologies, however, seem to be playing their part in enabling the persistence of local resistance. Similarly, it may be that industrial action which was previously determined to be a local matter may become increasingly subject to global rules determined by the strongest actor in the global system, however, the ability and will to resist such codes may be provided by the same global communication technologies that permit the operation of such codes in the first instance. To conclude, labour movements are network organisations, and information technology is a network tool par excellence – globalisation or coordination by capital through this tool invites counter coordination. We can see the emergence of such counter-coordination already in the Malaysian labour movement with the policy dialogue through these new tools and new audiences between local labour agencies and governments. Such visibility can both provide solutions which favour labour and invite interference which does not: counter-coordination communication strategies will require considerable collective skill. Notes 1. The article giving the details of this story has a date of 2003. 2. Irene Fernandez who was sentenced to a year in prison for her documentation of labour rights violations: the case is still under appeal. References Bhopal, M. (2001), “Malaysian unions in political crisis: assessing the impact of the Asian contagion”, Asia Pacific Business Review, Vol. 8 No. 2, Winter, pp. 73-100. Holmes, L. and Grieco, M. (2002), “The internet, email, and the Malaysian political crisis: the power of transparency”, in Bhopal, M. and Hitchcock, M. (Eds), ASEAN Business in Crisis: Context and Culture, 1st ed., Routledge, London.

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Further reading Hogan, J. and Grieco, M.S. (2000), “Trade unions online: technology, transparency and bargaining power”, in Donnelly, M. and Roberts, S. (Eds), Proceedings of the Second Scottish Trade Union Research Network Conference, Paisley, pp. 55-68. Rowley, C. and Bhopal, M. (2005), “Ethnicity as a management issue and resource: the remaking of boundaries”, in Dahles, H. and Loh, W.L. (Eds), Asian Multicultural Organisations, Routledge, London. MacDonald, D. (1998), Industrial Relations and Globalization: Challenges for Employers and Their Organizations, ILO, Bangkok, available at: www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/ papers/1998/dmirglob.htm (Margaret Grieco is Britain’s first Professor of Transport and Society, which she holds at Napier University, Edinburgh. Margaret is also salaried Visiting Full Professor at the Institute for African Development at Cornell University in the USA. She has published extensively on issues of electronic adjacency and social and economic change. Margaret consults to a range of international agencies on the social context of electronic communications. E-mail: m.grieco@ napier.ac.uk; [email protected] Mhinder Bhopal has extensively researched and published on Malaysian labour organisation. He is Senior Lecturer in Personnel Management at the London Metropolitan University. E-mail: [email protected])

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Recovering experience, confirming identity, voicing resistance The Braceros, the internet and counter-coordination

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Stephen Little Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise, Open University Business School, Milton Keynes, UK, and

Stewart Clegg University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Abstract Purpose – This paper investigates how the learning trajectory of corporations utilising information and communication technologies has been matched by the labour movement and social movements associated with it. Design/methodology/approach – The paper investigates new communication dynamics of labour in the international setting. It then focuses on a broader and richer set of online practices by labour by drawing on material placed on the world wide web by members of and advocates for the Braceros (the strong arms) – migrant Mexican workers. These practices follow on a history of effective use of the new information communication technologies by the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Findings – The paper places these activities in the context of globalisation and the global movement of capital and labour. It argues that the practices of online communication associated with the Braceros can be harnessed to move beyond the reactive shadowing of capital by labour. Instead innovative and proactive forms of monitoring policies and critiquing outcomes become possible. Practical implications – Internet-based counter-coordination allows the construction and diffusion of a different understanding of the nature and consequences of the current mode of globalisation. Originality/value – The paper demonstrates the ways in which information and communication technologies can be used to engage in thematic mapping and construction of memory by labour and provides an example of the electronic sampling and indexing of material. Keywords Communication technologies, Internet, Labour, Migrant workers, United States of America, Mexico Paper type Research paper

Introduction This paper describes a new form of counter-coordination which combines the lessons learned by unions and organised labour with the paradigm of social and cultural movements which have developed through the use of networked technologies. It sets this new paradigm against the history of the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within commercial and government organisations. The development of new forms of electronically-supported administration and commerce has triggered corresponding innovation within the trade union movement. This progression of understanding within the union movement is set against wider

critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 pp. 123-136 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043 DOI 10.1108/17422040510595636

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responses to issues of identity and networking encountered in the present form of globalisation. Key contributions to the globalisation debate are coming from broader political movements sitting outside both the business context and mainstream party politics as practised in Western liberal democracies. The forms of discourse developed by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and broader political movements complement those within the formal labour movement. Such forms allow alternative views of events to stand against the dominant narrative and provide the basis of a new form of governance of both public and private policy. This is evident in the resources created around the history and culture of los Braceros (the strong arms), Mexican migrant workers employed in the USA during and after the Second World War. These online resources allow the recovery of experience, the re-confirmation of identity and the voicing of renewed resistance by a variety of contemporary actors from a variety of physical and cultural locations. After exploring the transformation of the communication environment in which capital and labour interact, we will return to the index of interest and identity developed by and around the Braceros – a development which follows on from the effective use of new ICTs by the Zapatistas in their own struggle of counter-coordination. A history of transformation The role of ICTs in the current mode of globalisation requires an examination both of the wider issues of networking and identity and of the ways in which these same ICTs can be used to engage with the thematic mapping and construction of memory by labour. Correspondingly, this paper will examine a convergence between the strands of labour identity, movement and counter-coordination, suggesting a form in which the lived experience of individual workers and their families can be combined with the political experience of organised labour in a rich medium of record. “Globalisation” is not a novel and irresistible process delivering unproblematic technological transformation of economic and social relationships. Such presentations of globalisation represent an ideological interpretation of significant technological changes. Globalisation delivers, at best, partial and selective inclusion in local and distant relationships. A range of discussions of globalisation from a variety of perspectives (e.g. Castells, 1997; Clarke and Clegg, 1998; Giddens, 1999; Stiglitz, 2002; Clegg et al., 2005) acknowledges a transformative element to current changes. Globalisation has repositioned the combination of the personal and political, celebrated in 1970s slogans, in terms of their reciprocal impact on domestic as well as public spaces through networking (Little, 2000, 2004). The understanding of micro-spatial decision making around urban spaces (e.g. Nelson, 1988) now applies to the global selection and location of resources (Castells, 1996; Dicken, 1998). A recent driver of globalisation for the corporate sector has been the reduction of transaction costs achieved through ICTs which replace a production or supply “chain” with much more densely networked patterns. The dynamics of the underlying ICTs mean that the focus of attention has shifted from flows of material to flows of information and knowledge. Production and consumption of goods and services takes place in an increasingly complex web, in which sophisticated and commodified products may be produced and consumed at either its centre or at the periphery. In the deep and complex history of the internationalisation of trade (Diamond, 1997), the Western mercantile tradition developed around a specific set of technologies, such as reliable navigation aids developed by Portuguese mariners (Law, 1986). Hirst and Thompson (1996) argue that a functional plateau was reached by the conclusion of the

nineteenth century with the reliability and regularity of the steamship and electric telegraph. The regularity and reliability of communication achieved by these technologies represented a step change from earlier situations of long-distance coordination blighted by the tyranny of distance (see for example Blainey’s (1966) description of European settlement in Australia). ICTs are essential to evolving levels of control over critical resources spatially distributed across national boundaries. In the past, when capital was largely nationally concentrated, one such critical resource was the supply, control and disposition of labour. National labour movements were able to exercise significant degrees of organisation and mobilisation in reaction to strategies that employers enacted in national labour markets, in order to maximise their nationally comparative competitive position. The entrenchment of a “White Australia” labour market policy in the programme of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) was perhaps the most spectacularly successful of such enactments[1]. Analytically, the White Australia policy represented an example of an extended attempt to exclude competitive labour. More typically, these strategies have been enacted at the firm level as firms seek cheaper labour inputs and unions seek to either exclude or organise these inputs. Clearly, taking the White Australia policy as an extreme example, rigging labour markets is an effective way of protecting domestic labour providers. With the offence that systems of exclusion provide to liberal opinion it is hardly surprising that such responses are no longer a part of the repertoire of national labour movements. Bargaining and exclusion has to occur over more explicit skill-based requirements and definitions. Yet such bargaining is conducted in national industrial relations systems. It should be evident that the extent to which national firms can loosen their capital from a given national sphere and deploy it more globally will affect the leverage they will have over any given nationally organised labour movement. What strategies of loosening have been followed by firms operating transnationally? Ford Motor Company Europe began a process of “complementarisation” across its European manufacturing resources from 1966 onwards, ensuring that multiple and redundant sourcing of components minimised both the threat of disruption and the bargaining power of the unions in any single jurisdiction. The unions responded by networking their separate nationally-constituted organisations to match this coordinative capability. The subsequent restructuring of such relationship across much wider geographical dispersal has led to what Lipietz (1992) terms the end of the “Fordist compromise”, in which manufacturing activity was matched by co-located consumption. ICTs have made it possible to minimise the cost of labour by separating producer and consumer with little loss in productive efficiency. The emergence of a political discourse which challenges the exploitative nature of such separation of core consumer and peripheral producer has demonstrated the capacity of ICTs to deliver monitoring and criticism of top-down policies to both policy makers and the wider public, leading to the possibility of a new mode of metagovernance of these network relationships (Grieco et al., 2003; Little, 2003). Locational strategies employing state-of-the-art ICTs allowed white-collar work from the US mainland to be relocated off-shore to the Caribbean as far back as the 1980s. Long before the current level of outsourcing and call-centre activity, “front office” tasks in prestigious locations were divided from “back office” tasks that had been relegated to the more local periphery of outer suburbia (Nelson, 1988). With the new freedom of location facilitated by electronic coordination, however, high and low

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value activities occupy a more complex spatial relationship. Research and development, raw materials sources and routine manufacturing, final assembly, markets and after-market support may involve physically adjacent activities supporting different value chains in different industries. Such complex interpenetration of peripheries and cores requires appropriate underpinning information and communication infrastructure in addition to physical location.

126 Networks and practice Globalisation has always hinged on key technological developments. Associated with these have been forms of social learning (see Sproull and Kiesler, 1991) reliant on lived experience in the new situation – an often neglected aspect of the emergence of new forms of practice. Technical innovation may achieve efficiency gains but social learning is necessary to achieve transformations of effectiveness (see Zuboff, 1988). The first and second industrial revolutions led to a spatial hierarchy involving resources, manufacturers, and consumers, characterised as an orderly pattern of flows of resources from a colonised periphery to a developed core and the distribution of goods and services, followed by diffusion of “advanced” practices from centre to periphery. Centripetal forms of spatial organisation may be said to have been dominant in the history of commerce. However, a critical shift from centripetal hierarchical models of organisation to more open, networked relationships is recently apparent. It is encapsulated in Saxenian’s (1994) comparison between Route 128 and Silicon Valley in the USA. Route 128 around Boston emerged as a centre of high technology industries in the 1960s. The East Coast approach relied on established companies and a new relationship with universities and central government, the core of President Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”. However, on the West Coast, relatively closed, large, individual organisations have been superseded by densely networked environments sustaining a rapid rate and high volume of innovation, typified by Silicon Valley, which is dominated by the loosely networked companies which grew up with the new technologies they promote in a milieu which provides a labour market and financial services appropriate to networked innovation. By the end of the twentieth century the vertically integrated multinational corporation, under unified ownership, had been replaced by networks of externalised relationships between associated but often autonomous firms. This wider separation of networks which link locations in East Asia with the USA and Europe is typified by the operations of electronics companies such as Texas Instruments, which distributes research and development between Austin in Texas and Taipei. Smooth operation relies on a synchronised corporate database physically replicated on identical hardware at each end of the link using a high-capacity datalink. The notion of “networked enterprise” – promoted by Castells (1996) as a means of geographically and temporally constrained collaboration in order to enter and shape specific market – has, however, already been superseded by more durable modes of operation. Companies such as ARM Holdings (www.arm.com/) produce high value intellectual property utilised by global corporations that rely, in turn, on third party manufacturing facilities such as those provided by Flextronics (www.flextronics. com/). The actors located at each node of the network have a range of geographical locations available to them across which to distribute intellectual property and physical processes: the furthest development of ICT dependent re-configuration.

When one considers these conditions of production it is evident that trade unions face a new reality. Their initial responses to Ford’s geographical strategy were to network transnationally as a counterweight; however, it is evident that they now have to respond to a much more complex set of relationships. These undermine their ability to coordinate appropriate responses to management demands for ever-lower costs and higher productivity. Organised labour has had to match the learning trajectory of that capital in whose employ it is globally arraigned. The literature addressing the use of information technology (IT) in business and administration and its consequences for social and industrial organisation (e.g. Dunlop and Kling, 1991; Zuboff, 1988) provides an archive of the learning process involved in these changes. Mainstream information systems textbooks provide an unobtrusive measure of the shifts in business understanding. For example, Sprague and McNurlin (1986, 1993, 1998) characterised this change in focus of IT use in organisations as a move from looking inward to improve company processes and structure to looking outward to incorporate products and services to looking across, that is linking to other organisations in order better to manage the supply and value change in an increasingly complex business environment (Sprague and McNurlin, 1998). Computerisation within commercial and administrative organisations initially represented an extension of earlier office technologies designed to address internal efficiency. As the potential of computers to manage supply chain and customer relationships became apparent, organisational effectiveness became a primary objective. Finally, as the innovations in business models and inter-firm relationships permitted by the synergies of networking became apparent, inter-organisational management of the production and value chain became the focus of both local and global systems. Unions and organised labour have of necessity followed a comparable learning trajectory, in response to the consequent shifts in the dynamics of the workplace. Hogan and Greene (2002) argue that their initial strategies, which applied ICTs to the recruitment and servicing of members – equivalent to the internal efficiencies – have been succeeded by a focus on the organisation and mobilisation of membership. Significant global campaigns have emerged from within the trade union movement and from the critics of globalisation. The next section looks at how these are leading to a form of electronic coordination which represents more than a reactive response to events and which allows an interactive and collective counter-coordination. Emerging practice and sustainable responses A globally distributed mode of production, consumption and supply has a significant impact on organised labour since inward investors can pick their distributed points of presence from a beauty parade of aspiring recipients. By openly seeking the most favourable infrastructures and government support, local and national, the large inward investors have ensured that governments in turn argue for labour market deregulation and weak employment legislation. This is seen as essential to the attraction to inward investment or the prevention of the relocation of existing activities (Clegg et al., 2005). The electronically-coordinated global economy requires a degree of open connectivity. One consequence may be that there arises a conflict between national social conservatism and containment and the demands of non-national inward investors. For instance, the inherent tensions in the modernisation strategy of Malaysia have been highlighted by Holmes and Grieco (2001), who illustrated how the necessary infrastructure for participation in a global economy created new forms of discourse (see

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also Grieco and Bhopal, 2005). Other political discourse has emerged at an inter- or transnational level, using the same technologies. For example, tensions on an international scale have emerged over one of the most globalised industries – big pharmaceuticals – with contestation between drug providers and social movements representing the infected and affected drug users (Little and Grieco, in press). Debates from within affected regions that might otherwise be seen as geographically marginal become possible through the use of ICTs. The engagement of organised labour in South African campaigns for treatment and monitoring and in the enabling technology can be seen in the policy statements of the congress of South African Trades Unions at www.cosatu.org.za/docs/2000/hiv-ned.htm In April 2001, in the face of concerted campaigns in both real and cyberspace, a major concession was won from Big Pharma. Pharmaceutical companies withdrew a court bid to stop South Africa from importing or producing cheap versions of patented AIDS drugs, in effect surrendering intellectual property to which they were legally entitled in the face of globalised political counter-coordination. At a wider level of analysis, anti-globalisation activists have made extensive use of the internet, from Seattle onwards, to present their arguments. Klein’s (2000) work in collating the arguments of the most exploited participants in the global system is now presented in the form of an online portal linking to the struggles described at www.nologo.org/ Elsewhere, the combination of armed and virtual resistance developed by the EZLN – the Zapatistas – delivered the striking image of the laptop in the rainforest as the ultimate disintermediation between the periphery and the information-rich core, viewable at www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/zapsincyber.html and at www.uff.br/ mestcii/cleaver.htm The regionally-focused struggle of the Zapatistas provided a key element of the new paradigm for counter-coordination. Their combination of armed resistance and cultural resistance articulates a set of political demands firmly embedded in an understanding of indigenous identity and culture, which is also conveyed through cyberspace (see http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/2001/ccri/juchitan_feb.html). This potent and crucial combination is evident in the online alternative narratives of the Braceros. Both are distributed by the infrastructure of globalisation. Such alternative use of infrastructure presents a set of problems when viewed through the lens of the US-inspired “War on Terror”. The response to distributed and asymmetric threats is the disruption of perceived terrorist networks. However, this implies potential disruption or constrained global flows of information. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 (United Nations, 2004) requires member states to legislate in order to prevent the diffusion of technical knowledge and resources relevant to the development of weapons of mass destruction by non-state actors. A concern to avoid potentially dangerous technology leaving the control of established governments is understandable. Arms control regimes, particularly those concerned with chemical and biological weapons, are designed to deal with national programmes involving hundreds or thousands of tonnes of active material. Terrorist attacks, such as the release of sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system, need only involve tens or hundreds of grammes. As with earlier attempts to limit the diffusion of advanced information technologies to the Communist Bloc, however, these constraints also have the potential to undermine the free flow of information and resources necessary to the current mode of globalisation.

Of equal concern in the terrorist framework is the cross-border movement of labour, both legal and illegal. The electronic movement of capital, real and intellectual, is matched by significant flows of labour between low- and high-cost environments. Since regions with higher costs seek to retain higher value work, which requires relevant skills and commands corresponding rewards, there is often a corresponding shortage of resources for the remaining lower grade, low wage activities. Outsourcing strategies that have redistributed white-collar work on a global basis are of no use for low value physical work in assembly, personal services and agriculture within specific developed world national spaces. When an activity cannot be sent where the wages are lower then the low waged must be brought into the national space. Of course, this is often accomplished illegally. An underclass of workers who are often illegal immigrants works sporadically in extreme conditions outside the formally-regulated labour market: think of sweatshops in the garment industry, for instance. As Jones (2003) reports, there is research from Deloitte and Touche (1998) that suggests that informal sector activity ranges from 40 per cent in the Greek economy, through to between 8 per cent and 10 per cent of the British economy. States often encourage the informal sector as an arena from which street-level and taxable entrepreneurs might develop in enterprises other than the marketing of drugs, prostitutes, and the proceeds of crime (Deloitte and Touche, 1998; Sassen, 1998). In the USA during the Second World War, Mexican migrant labour was brought into the country to replace a US workforce that had been diverted to war production. Many individuals stayed after the war. It is estimated that there are approximately one million US residents who are descended from these workers or their families. Moreover, given the porous land borders of the USA, many wealthy middle-class people in major cities live off the backs of migrant, often illegal, labour. Villasen˜or’s (1992) book Rain of Gold tells a moving story. He writes of a Mexican-American friend who swam the Rio Grande five times before he became a hybrid, and of another who lived and raised a family in New York City for 17 years. When he first came, he told him, it was difficult to adapt because there were no shops selling the ingredients of Mexican cooking, no chillies, tomatillos, or masa harina. Now those items can be bought five minutes from his New York home. Even in cities such as Melbourne or Manchester, far from Mexico, it is possible to buy these things. Languages, food, and cuisines, together with the spread of places of worship, are a good index of globalisation, because wherever people move, they take their everyday material cultures with them, and their language, religion, and food are the most evident manifestations of such culture. Well, at least they do where they are able to stay. There are, however, some categories of worker that are shipped in and then shipped out and who never achieve residency, whether legal or not. In common with many other countries, the UK has operated a Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme since the Second World War (see http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/ comments.php?id=740_0_4_0). The scheme allows foreign students to enter the UK to fill seasonal farm jobs as legal workers, but the treatment and status of these workers provokes continuing debate, (e.g. Elliot, 2003; Lawrence, 2003) while the expansion of the European Union to 25 members has provided new sources of legal and illegal labour that may still be relatively disadvantaged (Kosviner, 2003). The experiences of these individuals and their families, the legal mechanism around their status and their treatment are now logged on the internet. The next section describes the creation of an index of such material relating to one particular group of workers – the Braceros.

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Indexing the Braceros President Bush has declared his intention to restart negotiations over immigration reform with the Mexican Government. However, the main reform under consideration in the post 9/11 era is no longer an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Both governments have proposed a temporary worker programme that looks hauntingly familiar – like the Bracero programme of 1941-1964. One participant in that programme, Rigoberto Garcia Perez, remembers that while it was humiliating and abusive, it also led to his family to settle in the USA. He told his story to David Bacon, as part of a documentation project on transnational communities sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation (see www.labornotes.org/archives/2002/04/f.html). Post 9/11 anxieties over nationality and identity have led to a resurrection of the arrangements applied to the Braceros – the strong arms – who came north to replace agricultural workers drawn into wartime manufacturing production in the USA. Instead of the expected normalisation of the status of migrant workers, a much less equitable set of arrangements is now being proposed by the Federal administration. However, these are themselves subject to critical cyber scrutiny. The Oaxaca Index was constructed as a shadow exercise during the tenth APROS international colloquium held in Oaxaca, Mexico in December 2003 (see www.aeo-uami.org/apros/ oaxaca/). The aim was to generate a set of resources in support of the face-to-face interactions and observations that were taking place in Mexico. Materials created at the colloquium were also placed on the web site, linked to existing resources (see www. geocities.com/archiving_practice/outsidein.html). The aim of the Oaxaca Index was to capture existing materials using a simple word search function on the world wide web, in order to create a matrix of materials surrounding los Braceros, the migrant Mexican workers who crossed the US border. For translation of Spanish text into English a free online resource was located at www. freetranslation.com/ A simple html template was used to log the keywords used and the search results, providing live links to the materials discovered at www.geocities. com/archiving_practice/losbraceros.html A similar search discovered material and narratives based around the international boundary between Mexico and the USA at www.geocities.com/archiving_practice/ boundariesandborders.html which emphasise the disruption and discontinuity of the border which links in turn to a portal for resources documenting the nature and implications of this international divide (see www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/ borderlands.html). In contrast, other searches uncovered material, from family archives (see www.cmp.ucr.edu/students/glasshouses/) and personal histories (at www.labornotes.org/archives/2002/04/f.html), which emphasises connection and continuity of identity across the divide. There are also contemporary records created and collated by US academics: The Braceros in Oregon Photograph Collection is an artificial collection; the images were drawn from several university archives collections. They include the Extension Bulletin Illustrations Photograph Collection (P 20), the Extension and Experiment Station Communications Photograph Collection (P 120), the Extension Service Photograph Collection (P 62), the Agriculture Photograph Collection (P 40), and Harriet’s Collection (http://digitalcollections.library.oregonstate.edu/bracero/).

Labour Management Decisions has placed online a set of official photographs taken of the processing of Mexican workers on arrival in the US (see http://are.berkeley.edu/ APMP/pubs/lmd/html/winterspring_93/gallery.html). An attempt at the construction of a comprehensive archive from the perspective of organised labour can be found in Spanish at www.farmworkers.org/bespanol.html and in English at www.farmworkers.org/benglish.html Current material includes records of a class action being conducted in the USA in pursuit of wages set aside under the US-Mexican agreement as a form of compulsory saving, but never passed on to the workers involved: About 350,000 contract workers (called “Braceros”, Spanish for strong arms) were hired beginning in 1942 to assist the USA in response to the depleted national workforce caused by the Second World War. The Braceros provided farm labour and worked in railroad yards. Under a bilateral agreement between the USA and the Government of Mexico, forced savings accounts were created for the Braceros. Into each account, a portion of the Braceros’ wages were deposited. The purpose of these accounts was to ensure that the Braceros would return home to Mexico on termination of their contracts (www.lieffcabraser.com/braceros.htm).

House Resolution 522 of the California State Legislature acknowledges the contribution of the Braceros with Braceros Day (www.house.gov/ose/Press/Press_Releases/2003/ September/22sept03_braceros_recognition.htm). One striking discovery was of the retablos, a traditional cultural artefact[2], being used to mark the border conflicts experienced by Mexican labour. The retablos of Mexican migrant labour now carry images of the institutional and authorised violence they experience as they seek to cross the border and are created to give thanks to God for their safe escape on their dangerous passage. These highly evocative images are available online: These wooden altar screens emerged in Mexico during the early eighteenth century as a blend of European and Amerindian votive traditions. In time, the term retablo came to refer to individual paintings on wood, tin, or canvas. In colonial Mexico, paintings were commissioned by individuals or purchased from untrained travelling artists and included in home altars (www.bloomingtonlatino.net/retablosdescription.html).

This form is used for both religious and secular narrative. As with the EZLN, a clear stand of identity and cultural orientation is evident in the extant materials from the Braceros community. The assembly and reframing of the Braceros material into an index of action, past and present, coupled with the rich infrastructure of cultural identity, demonstrates the recovery of historical practice in a manner which challenges the recreation of that practice under similar conditions of perceived national threat to the USA. The real-time assembly of extant material provided a means to broadcast and network such conceptions of practice. It also represents a step in a process of social learning within the Odyssey Group of organisation researchers that has been conducted over several years and on several continents (see www.geocities.com/ the_odyssey_group/). The online materials which archive the experience of the Braceros reveal a combination of pre-existing cultural forms – the retablos with their graphic narrative content carrying a cultural identity to new territory – and more widely familiar forms of online record. The Oaxaca Index functions as a portal to a set of resources relevant to the experience and aspirations of the Braceros and their families: it also

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demonstrates the variety of uses, conflicting and complementary, which have been made of the materials by different online narrators. A portal is a home page that provides a set of structured links to online resources. These resources can be repositioned and represented according to the priorities and objectives of the portal’s creators. It was therefore possible to recover and reassemble the existing materials around the Braceros into a form appropriate to the objectives of the APROS meeting to which they formed a backdrop. The rise of the portal metaphor to organise web access allows the margins to communicate with the centres: for instance, a country such as Estonia provides public access in its own Finno-Ugric language (Abbate, 2000). Freely available “front-end” translation software, as incorporated in the Index, can now overcome the language barrier. Miller and Slater (2000, p. 7) describe a distinctive set of social activities undertaken on the Internet by the Trinidadian diaspora: Indeed the significance of studying the Internet is the degree to which it transcends dualisms such as local against global. It forces us to acknowledge a more complex dialectic through which specificity is a product of generality and vice versa.

The incorporation of personal, cultural and political identity into this new mode is a necessary response to the penetration of public and private space by the logic of globalisation (Little, 2000). While forms of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and other identity-based politics have been able to use the internet effectively to carve out a viable presence in cyberspace, what is the potential for more traditional collectivist organisations from the labour movement? Counter-coordination as governance Hogan and Greene (2002) argue that member services, outreach and mobilisation have been succeeded by contestations over the nature of internal democracy within unions. They contrast the relative lack of success of the service-oriented strategies with the degree of mobilisation achieved around the contestation over internal processes. Inter-union coordination in response to the globalisation of value chains was taken forward by the UK Liverpool dockers’ dispute, which took place between 1995 and 1998. Extensive mobilisation of support from within and beyond the labour movement was achieved through the use of ICTs in concert with more traditional forms of mobilisation (Carter et al., 2003). Following the defeat of the dockers, the skills developed in the struggle have been carried forward to archive the dispute (www.mmm.merseyside.org/ cd.htm) and to develop a sustainable skill-base within the community (www.mmm. merseyside.org/project.htm).Within 48 hours of the settlement of the UK dispute an identical dispute broke out in Australia, a locus of support for the Liverpool workers and a regulated labour environment. This second dispute is archived at http://mua.org.au/ war/ and is discussed in Clegg (1999). Of critical significance was the role of the Federal Australian government in planning the dispute, involving overseas training of serving members of the Australian armed services (http://mua.org.au/war/cloak.html www. ilwu19.com/global/wharfie/update65.htm). Clearly, learning and counter-coordination is taking place on both sides and new forms of coordination and counter-coordination can be expected. The hijacking of the EZLN logo for commercial purposes and the response to it shows what is in play (www.spacehijackers.co.uk/html/projects/boxfreshres.html).

The emerging global system is far from complete and far from determined, but it is having a profound impact on social and working life in the regions included within and excluded from it. ICTs are driving the distributed processes of globalisation. ICTs provide new forms of cultural and political indexicality. They also provide new forms of counter-coordination for excluded constituencies. In turn these are the means for the potentially excluded to refine and develop their experience and knowledge most relevant to the new relationships. The richness with which the consequences of policy can be illustrated and archived provides the critical link in the construction of a process of metagovernance – governance of governance – in a critical discourse from which the national and local state has too often withdrawn. The speed of change in markets, competition and technology means that there is a socio-institutional lag as any new techno-economic paradigm emerges (Perez, 1985). For example, e-commerce is already mutating into m-commerce: mobile delivery of services. Despite the relative inadequacy of current wireless application protocol (WAP) mobile telephony, the combination of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites with global positioning systems (GPS) will allow location-sensitive services to be delivered to individuals and groups on the move (Taplin, 2000). Federal legislation which predates 9/11 requires GPS transmitters to be fitted to all US cell-phones. There will be continuing reassessment of the spatial and cultural dynamics of flows of capital and labour. The lag presents an opportunity to develop and demonstrate forms of metagovernance from within and between the affected communities themselves. Conclusion The paper argues that unions and organised labour have had some success in harnessing the key technologies driving current globalisation and that they have much to learn from the ways in which various identity politics have used web space. They have matched the sequence of innovation and organisational learning evident in the commercial development and deployment of ICTs and emerging global forms of interaction. However, the example of the Oaxaca Index in collating the online resources of the Braceros indicates a potential proactive advance over even the most sophisticated versions of distributed coordination. The incorporation of a cultural frame is of critical importance given the cultural dynamic identified in the role of global brands as the spearhead of globalisation (Klein, 2000). The open approach represented by the Oaxaca Index and related online artefacts, retains an advantage over the corporate model: it demonstrates that ICTs can be used to engage with the thematic mapping and construction of memory by labour. The significant value of the intellectual property at the centre of the ARM/Flextronics paradigm of global production described earlier demands a restriction on the open flow of ideas and of the growth of network relationships. There is a need for caution and constraints to be placed on actual and prospective partners in order to preserve intellectual property. As with the paradigm of Open Source software development (Raymond, 2001) in which software code is shared freely and openly across a community of developers, the public good approach exemplified by the Oaxaca Index on the Braceros shows that personal and public information and materials can be shared freely and that critical synergies can emerge from such free exchange. The construction of identity and the recovery of experience are essential to the formulation of sustainable resistance and to repositioning around the processes of

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globalisation. The reframing and indexing of extant materials logging the experience and aspirations of the Braceros, in both economic and cultural terms, is a demonstration of a capacity for networked responses to networked problems. The capacity to counter and contextualise otherwise unchallenged assertions allows a form of governance beyond the constraints of national or regional remit. The success of AIDS campaigners in shifting both government and corporate policy suggests that this metagovernance takes counter-coordination to a new level of social discourse. Notes 1. The origins of the “White Australia” policy can be traced to the 1850s. White miners’ resentment towards industrious Chinese diggers culminated in violence on the Buckland River in Victoria, and at Lambing Flat (now Young) in New South Wales. The governments of these two colonies introduced restrictions on Chinese immigration. Factory workers were vehemently opposed to all forms of immigration, which might threaten their jobs – particularly by non-white people who they thought would accept a lower standard of living and work for lower wages. At the time of Federation in 1901 a dictation test was introduced for prospective immigrants, to exclude certain applicants (those who did not conform to the “white” test) by requiring them to pass a written test in a language, with which they were not necessarily familiar, nominated by an immigration officer. With these severe measures the implementation of the “White Australia” policy was warmly applauded in most sections of the community, especially those that represented organised labour (Connell and Irving, 1980). 2. A remarkable collection of which can be seen in Frida Kahlo’s house in Coyoacan, Mexico City. References Abbate, J. (2000), “Virtual nation-building in Estonia: reshaping space, place, and identity in a newly independent state”, paper presented at Virtual Society? Get Real! Conference, Ashridge House, Berkhamsted, May. Blainey, G. (1966), The Tyranny of Distance, Sun Books, Melbourne. Carter, C., Clegg, S.R., Hogan, J. and Kornberger, M. (2003), “The polyphonic spree: the case of the Liverpool dockers”, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 290-304. Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy Society and Culture, Vol. I, Blackwells, Oxford. Castells, M. (1997), The Power of Identity: Economy Society and Culture, Vol. II, Blackwells, Oxford. Clarke, T. and Clegg, S.R. (1998), Changing Paradigms: The Transformation of Management Knowledge in the 21st Century, HarperCollins, London. Clegg, S.R. (1999), “Globalizing the intelligent organization: learning organizations, smart workers, (not so) clever countries and the sociological imagination”, Management Learning, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 259-80. Clegg, S.R., Kornberger, M. and Pitsis, T. (2005), Managing and Organizations: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, Sage, London. Connell, R.W. and Irving, T.H. (1980), Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narrative, and Argument, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne. Deloitte and Touche (1998), Informal Economic Activities in the EU, European Commission, Brussels.

Diamond, J.M. (1997), Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Norton and Co., New York, NY. Dicken, P. (1998), Global Shift: Transforming the World’s Economy, 3rd ed., Paul Chapman, London. Dunlop, C. and Kling, R. (1991), Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, 2nd ed., Academic Press, Boston, MA. Elliot, V. (2003), “Gangmasters who reap the human harvest”, The Times, 8 July. Giddens, A. (1999), Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Shaping Our Lives, Profile Books, London. Grieco, M.S. and Bhopal, M. (2005), “Globalisation, collective action and counter-coordination: the use of the new information communication technology by the Malaysian labour movement”, Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 1 No. 2/3. Grieco, M., Little, S. and Macdonald, K. (2003), “The silent revolution: electronic data interchange, metadata and metagovernance”, European Spatial Research and Policy, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 5-7. Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1996), Globalization in Question, Polity Press, Cambridge. Hogan, J. and Greene, A.M. (2002), “E-collectivism: online action and online mobilisation”, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (Eds), Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse, Ashgate, Aldershot. Holmes, L. and Grieco, M. (2001), “The power of transparency: the internet, e-mail, and the Malaysian political crisis”, Asia Pacific Business Review, Vol. 8 No. 2, Winter. Jones, M. (2003), “Globalization and the organization(s) of exclusion in advanced capitalism”, in Westwood, R. and Clegg, S.R. (Eds), Debating Organizations: Point-counterpoint in Organization Studies, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 252-70. Klein, N. (2000), No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, HarperCollins, London. Kosviner, T. (2003), “Plight of the illegal Poles working on Britain’s farms for slave wages”, Evening Standard, 7 July. Law, J. (1986), “On the methods of long-distance control: vessels, navigation, and the Portuguese route to India”, in Law, J. (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge?, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, pp. 234-63. Lawrence, F. (2003), “The new landless labourers”, The Guardian, 17 May. Lipietz, A. (1992), Towards a new Economic Order: Postfordism, Ecology and Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge. Little, S.E. (2000), “Networks and neighbourhoods: household, community and sovereignty in the global economy”, Urban Studies, Vol. 37 No. 10, pp. 1813-26. Little, S.E. (2003), “Globalisation, Europeanisation and metagovernance: society, space and technology”, European Spatial Research and Policy, Vol. 10 No. 2, special issue on Metagovernance, pp. 9-24. Little, S.E. (2004), Design and Determination: The Role of Information Technology in Redressing Regional Inequities in the Development Process, Ashgate, Aldershot. Little, S.E. and Grieco, M.S. (in press), “Electronic stepping stones: a mosaic metaphor for the production and re-distribution of communicative skill in an electronic mode”, in Clegg, S. and Kornberger, M. (Eds), Space, Organization and Management, Business School Press, Copenhagen. Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000), The Internet, an Ethnographic Approach, Berg, Oxford.

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Nelson, K. (1988), “Labour demand, labour supply and the suburbanization of low-wage office work”, in Scott, A.J. and Storper, M. (Eds), Production, Work, Territory: The Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism, Unwin Hyman, Boston, MA. Perez, C. (1985), “Microelectronics, long waves and world structural change: new perspectives for developing countries”, World Development, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 441-63. Raymond, E.S. (2001), The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, rev. ed., O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA. Sassen, S. (1998), Globalization and Its Discontents, New Press, New York, NY. Saxenian, A. (1994), Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Sprague, R.H. and McNurlin, B.C. (1986), Information Systems Management in Practice, 2nd ed., Prentice-Hall, London. Sprague, R.H. and McNurlin, B.C. (1993), Information Systems Management in Practice, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall, London. Sprague, R.H. and McNurlin, B.C. (1998), Information Systems Management in Practice, 4th ed., Prentice-Hall, London. Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. (1991), Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Stiglitz, J.E. (2002), Globalization and Its Discontents, Norton, New York, NY. Taplin, R. (2000), “Perfect guidance for the stars”, The Times, 3 October, p. 17. United Nations (2004), “UNSCR 1540 non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction”, available at: www.un.org/Docs/sc/unsc_resolutions04.html Villasen˜or, V. (1992), Rain of Gold, Delta, New York, NY. Zuboff, S. (1988), In the Age of the Smart Machine, Basic Books, New York, NY. (Stephen Little is Head of the Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise within the Open University Business School (OUBS). He has co-edited books and journal issues covering the influence of the Asian economies in the twenty-first century, intelligent urban development and meta-governance. He is researching new forms of mobility and regional development in the knowledge economy with colleagues from OUBS and other institutions in the UK, Europe and Asia and electronic governance with colleagues from government and non-governmental organisations in the UK and Africa. E-mail: [email protected] Stewart Clegg is Professor of Management, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and Director of ICAN Research. He is also a Visiting Professor at Aston Business School, UK; the Faculty of Business at Maastricht University, and Visiting Professor and International Fellow in Discourse and Management Theory, Centre of Comparative Social Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He has published over a 100 refereed publications, most in top-tier international journals, such as the Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Management Learning, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Organization Studies and Human Relations. He has published many books and is perhaps best known for the Handbook of Organization Studies, which he produced with Cynthia Hardy and Walter Nord (Sage, London, 1996), and which won the American Academy of Management George R. Terry “Best Book” Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Management Knowledge” in 1997. E-mail: [email protected])

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The networked union? The internet as a challenge to trade union identity and roles Miguel Martı´nez Lucio

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Bradford University School of Management, Bradford, UK, and

Steve Walker School of Information Management, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK Abstract Purpose – The article aims to look at the development of the internet in terms of its implications for the labour movement and its international activities. Design/methodology/approach – The paper brings together conclusions and findings based on the previous work of the two individual authors who have studied the role of the internet from a national and international perspective, using a range of methodologies. Findings – The impact of the internet in terms of facilitating communication and renewal strategies has been highly significant. However, the authors argue that such developments are also mediated by trade union structures and organisational traditions/ideologies at the national level where there is still a considerable degree of variety. It also looks and focuses on some of the challenges of international labour co-ordination through the use of the internet, noting some of the difficulties faced by trade unionists. The paper therefore brings together insights into the way organisations such as trade unions interact with such developments both at the national and international level. Originality/value – The article emphasises the need to develop a political and sociological understanding of the internet within industrial relations and in terms of future research. Keywords Internet, Trade unions, International business, Labour Paper type Research paper

Introduction It is quite common to have debates emerge regarding the informational changes within society and the emergence of what is labelled a network society with virtually scant regard for the question of trades unions. The new, flexible forms of communication within economy and society are seen to challenge the monolith of bureaucratic processes and mentalities. Within sociology we see Castells (1996, p. 375) talk in terms of an informational economy where: . . . the new communication system radically transforms space and time, the fundamental dimensions of human life. Localities become disembodied from their cultural, historical, geographic meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks, or into image collages, inducing a space of flows that substitutes for the space of places.

In political terms any organisation such as a trade union which is anchored in terms of fixed spatial and temporal approaches to action can be considered as belonging to “old social movements” (Giddens, 1991). In economic terms we hear of an age of virtual capitalism – of light and liquid capitalism – based on the manner in which financial flows and economic decisions are facilitated by electronic and computational processes (Leadbeater, 2002; Bauman, 2000). There is a chorus of commentaries that equate these

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social and economic shifts with the globalisation of capitalism. The national, local, and bureaucratic features of society are all destined to fall prey to this new flexible universe, which at its heart has a new informational mode of production. However, we have also seen the emergence of a range of discussions about trades unions and their organisational processes that question and challenge the manner in which they have been isolated from these developments. These debates have been dealing with questions of regulation, identity, organisational development, economic roles and more recently, and more relevantly in terms of this article, their informational strategies. The ease with which commentators can hide or ignore the dimension of labour has been questioned (e.g. Munck, 2004). This paper will draw from debates under the label of “the internet and the labour movement”. It will argue that the trade union movement has indeed begun to utilise these new dimensions of the social and economic structure of society to enhance and renew its role. In this respect we will concur with a range of interventions that highlight the significance of these developments and the manner in which the political and organisational reach of organised labour has been enhanced. However, it will also argue that the manner in which organised labour deals with such developments is varied due to the variable and experimental approach of organised labour and the high degree of diversity in terms of its: . communication culture; . organisational identity; . democratic processes; and . new forms of network-based organisational innovation (Martı´nez Lucio, 2003). It will also argue that there are new network forms of trade union organisation emerging that are enabled by such factors as the internet, but that there is a question as to how they relate to such factors. This leads the authors to question the new technological determinism that underpins the analysis of much of the discussion on the internet and which sees new forms of networking as inevitable, and to call for an approach informed by the work of Greene et al. (2001) that is both sensitive to the political dimension and also based on an informed understanding of how communication is mediated and used. This approach resonates with a social informatics approach to understanding technology use (Kling, 2000), which seeks to understand information communication technology (ICT) use as the outcome of the interplay of networks of social, political, organisation, economic, as well as technological, factors. What is the new age of informational activity? The development and diffusion of ICTs have been widely associated with the development of new forms of social, economic and industrial forms of organisation. In some cases this has been presented as an essentially technically determined process. Others have presented ICT as one factor among several, such as the management of uncertainty in increasingly fluid and unpredictable environments that have generated novel forms of organisation. These new forms of organisation are widely conceived of as networks, which, it is argued, are better placed to handle and react to environmental uncertainty than traditional hierarchical organisation (Castells, 1996). In a context of globalisation, network forms are thought capable of providing a degree of flexibility to

institutions that would normally be unable to develop parallel structures of organisation and action. Much of the networked organisation is not, though, restricted to economic organisations. In the military, discussions of information warfare highlight the ways in which “sub-state actors” can overcome asymmetries in traditional military resources through organisational methods which include decentralised, network-oriented organisation (Ronfeldt and Arquilla, 2001) in processes exemplified by the activities of Al Qaeda. An array of social movement and other civil society actors is constituted as networked organisational forms that allow very diverse groups to come together in collective action where values and concerns coincide (e.g. Castells, 1997; Schultz, 1998; Moghadam, 2000), in processes which are often also technologically mediated (Naughton, 2001). The development of such networks has also been echoed in discussion of international labour organising (e.g. ICEM, 1996; Waterman, 1998, 2000; Mazur, 2000; Lee, 2004). The internet and the labour movement In terms of work and employment-related issues the emergence of electronic and computer-aided surveillance has caught the imagination of a range of observers. For them the new road to the network society is not simply one based on new forms of reciprocal and coordinated action, but is more akin to an emerging control system or panopticon which observes, collates and disciplines through information collected at the heart of organisations (Garrahan and Stewart, 1992). Labour sociology is replete with such studies and their more sanguine and critical view of the way that information technologies are being used within employment systems and the corporation at large. Recently the scope and systematic nature of such developments have been questioned, as they are themselves the product of formal, overt, and even professional interventions that are bound by resource limitations and the complexities of decision making and data management. Nevertheless, debates in labour process and employment relations have focused on the impact of information technology and the manner in which it brings a more complex and ethically difficult picture of the new network society when compared to earlier approaches outlined above. The extent and sheer scope of these debates cannot be underestimated (see Thompson and Warhurst (1998) for example). Lee’s (1996) The Internet and Labour Movement represents the main point of departure in the debate regarding how trades unions can respond to the development of the internet. Its thesis is that the development of the internet was a challenge to trades unions in a positive, not a negative sense. Lee’s work is both descriptive and prescriptive. It is a call to arms outlining the new possibilities of information technology and new forms of internet communication. Lee (1996) argued that the internet would even allow the trade union movement to renew itself and fill key gaps in its national and international systems of communication, leading to a broader and more meaningful dialogue within labour and beyond it. In effect, no one with access to this vehicle of the new economy could now find excuses for avoiding labour-related issues and materials. Diamond and Freeman (2002) have reiterated this argument. They point to the way the internet may resolve many of organised labour’s problem of acting in what is a more hostile and deregulated environment. Through the use of the internet the trade

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union movement has developed a range of information portals and circuits such that new points of reference and communication can exist in the most difficult of circumstances. Diamond and Freeman (2002) argue that without serious attention being paid to the internet, unions face being marginalised by other actors who may use it to create less independent “representative” bodies and even virtual unions. In the end the internet requires a more directly engaged and open union. They make their case clear by quoting a discussant of their work: . . . the more bureaucratic organisations are, the less effectively they use the web; the more an organisation’s members use the web, the more bureaucracy is undermined (Mason, as quoted in Diamond and Freeman, 2002, p. 593).

This mirrors sociological interventions that argue that the alternative media can contribute to alternative public spheres and realms (Downing, 1996) and the enhancement of public spheres that are based on a range of independent sources and levels (see Negt and Kluge, 1993). The internet is widely seen as offering particular opportunities for transnational labour organising (e.g. Borgers, 2001; Lee, 1996, 2004). Hodkinson (2001) has argued that the international dimension of labour activity has been nourished by a whole new dimension of debate, engagement, and creativity which has emerged through the internet and online mailing lists, alternative web sites, and access to a broader range of materials. The emergence of parallel trade union constituencies and spokespeople who draw together practitioners, political activists and academics – and who communicate and raise policy issues that resonate and even agitate leading trade union bodies – is a development that shows that the internet acts as platform for an alternative space within the labour movement. As with mainstream trade union politics and organisational behaviour, there is always the possibility that such alternative networks can be disconnected and located in discussions which may not resonate with trade union members or workers. The development of online lists which have quite e´litist terms of engagement, and which may lead to a degree of information saturation, is now a reality. The political tensions within these information networks are testament to the way the internet can open discussion, but it can also close it around pre-existing e´lites both within and beyond leadership structures. This political dimension of the internet in trades unions has been pioneered by a range of academic studies pointing to the manner in which the internet represents a political as well as an organisational challenge to unions. The school of thought emerging from the work of Grieco, Greene and Hogan has introduced a political element to the debate, grounded in debates on bureaucracy (Greene et al., 2001, 2003; Hogan and Grieco, 1999; Hogan and Greene, 2002). They draw their point of reference from the work of Michels (1915) on how union bureaucracies emerge and then show how the internet can challenge bureaucracy when used by oppositional forces across four dimensions. First, the inequality of knowledge that sustains organisations may be contested by the way the internet can assist groups in their circulation of alternative and critical texts. Hogan’s (2005) study of the politics of the British trade union MSF, now merged with others to form AMICUS, shows how the internet can be used actually to undermine the leadership during difficult times. Second, the differential control over the means of communication is challenged by the very nature of internet access and the

way e-mail may be used to circulate to a wider range of participants. Within this school of thought Carter et al. (2003) argue with reference to the Liverpool dockers’ dispute of the late 1990s that the polyphonic qualities of an organisation can be enhanced by the internet which can act as the catalyst for the mobilisation and expansion of networks in a way unheard of in the past. Third, constraints in terms of time and space which limit the possibility of meetings and coordinating activities may actually be overcome by minority groups who use the internet through on-line discussion forums, for example. Fourth, communication skills are now not the sole preserve of skilled professionals and core labour market groups: there is the irony that trade unionists can acquire “e-printing” skills in a way that manages to alert others to the broader possibilities of communication. While some trade union leaderships have tried to resist these dynamics, others have sought to harness them to new political agendas. For example, ICEM’s (1996) founding document Power and Counterpower sees technology-mediated networking as a method which can contribute to building a countervailing power to global corporations, reducing the “distance” between local and transnational union organising. In Sweden, starting in the late 1990s, the LO have tried to link ICT use and trade union education to build new “interfaces” between unions and members, in response to the decentralisation of national collective bargaining. This has involved some radical departures from traditional union organisation, including facilitating greater “horizontal” communications between workplaces and local unions, and seeking to incorporate facilitation of such networking into the work of trade union officers (Creanor and Walker, 2005). Hence the four main vectors along which trade union hierarchy, with its more accommodating view of relations with capital and the state as is implicit in the work of Greene et al. (2003), has been established, is susceptible to political interruption from an alternative range of agendas.

The internet and the national influence on networking The development of the internet, and the evolution of web site technologies in particular, can be viewed in terms of a range of various factors. There is a range of mediating processes that configures the way the politics of the internet develop. These factors are apparent at the national and international level of trade union structures and strategies. These allow us to appreciate the broader politics and “ecology” of trade union relations with new forms of ICTs. They ensure that we do not fall prey to an analysis that is either technologically determinist or anchored in any simplistic binaries regarding bureaucratic processes. In addition they force us to understand the sociological factors that mediate informational developments within society and therefore the use and understanding of these regardless of intervening institutional strategies. At the national level a series of organisational factors and environmental issues can configure the manner in which the internet is mediated and engaged with by organised labour (Martı´nez Lucio, 2003; Walker, 2002a). One needs to look at the national level because of the manner in which the concept and meaning of international strategies is not disengaged and separated from the role of national traditions, icons and cultures within the labour movement. The international is not a topography – a layer of sediment – that exists at the point of intersection between nations. It is determined and influenced in great measure by the national trajectories and systems that configure

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distinct patterns of international trade union approaches, traditions and discourses (Lillie and Martı´nez Lucio, 2004). Hence, one must engage with four questions and issues outlined previously in relation to trades unions (Martı´nez Lucio, 2003): their link into communication strategies, their link to union identity, the relation with internal democratic and decision-making processes, and the impact of organisational contingencies in the form of new forms of social networks and their related activities. Observing and discussing developments in relation to these issues will allow us to study the nuances of the internet and the more complex realities of its development. How the internet is responded to will depend on communications strategies. There is an issue as to how e-mail communication is used within the core and margins of a union. The way such communications are developed around constituents is important. Does a trade union have an open approach to communication based on strong feedback cultures? Does a trade union draw clear lines between internal and external communications? Does it have a strong commitment to communication to start with? In this respect, trades unions may vary in terms of their open and closed nature (Martı´nez Lucio, 2003). That is not to say that the development of the internet does not have its own impact on communication systems and their relevant bureaucracies as Greene et al. (2003) argue. However, there are communication strategies, or even an absence of such strategies, that may frame the actual development of internet communication systems and one should see the relation between the organisation and technology as a symbiotic and socially-mediated one. If we talk about internet-based communication then how do the internal structures of the trade union communicate? Is it through national, regional or industrial structures or is it through the branches based within the workplace? The question of internal communication is one that raises questions about the manner in which unions may differ as to how their internal structures are represented through the portals of the information age. Communication systems are contested sites of power. The question is how the relation with the workforce in terms of alternative communication is established or re-established through the internet. For example, some trades unions may privilege the role of their workplace representatives in terms of the new iconography and information systems of the union. Others may prefer to organise the image and information of the union from headquarters through a services-driven basis, as we discuss below. Communication strategies may therefore be driven by a need to service bargaining and economic exchanges within a traditional view of regulation or even a new business view of service delivery. Others may use the internet-based systems of communication for other political purposes. Some unions of a more militant and/or radical persuasion – whether on the Left, based around anarcho-syndicalism, or whether they have Marxist orientations – use their web sites as extensions and reproductions of their more traditional forms of communication in the form of leaflets or publications which call participants to attend public spaces and join in protest, or by providing interaction between workers through chat rooms and interactive message boards, for example. So, one can discern a difference between the trades unions in their approach. These typologies may come under pressure over time with the multiplicity of voices that can emerge in terms of the new forms of communication, but much may depend on what the purpose of communication is within any one trade union.

The problem is that we can see how communication cultures may shape the nature of the internet’s use within the labour movement, but it is contingent on strategies and approaches to the question of communication as well. In fact, in terms of communication, who is it that does the communicating and why? Any discussion of communication therefore requires a discussion of questions of identity and democracy. Communication is also a function of organisational identity and capacity. In terms of identity, Hyman (2001, pp. 3-4) has argued that when we think of trades unions we should appreciate that the organisational identities of trades unions vary in terms of market, society and class: All trades unions face in three directions. As associations of employees, they have a central concern to regulate the wage-labour relation: the work they perform and the payment they receive. Unions cannot ignore the market. But as organisations of workers, unions embody in addition a conception of collective interests and collective identity that divides workers from employers. Whether or not they endorse an ideology of class division and class opposition, unions cannot escape a role as agencies of class. Yet unions also exist and function within a social framework which they may aspire to change but which constrains their current choices. Survival necessitates co-existence with other institutions and other constellations of interest (even those to which certain unions may proclaim immutable antagonism). Unions are part of society . . .

A market-oriented trade union will use the internet as a vehicle for a hierarchical relationship with its members which stresses the delivery of services; a class-oriented union may prefer to highlight a broader range of industrial conflicts and use their internet presence on calls for forms of class action through reference to, and highlighting of, strikes, for example; a socially-oriented trade union may draw on broader social issues and allow their website, for example, to be a space for alternative internal and external voices. These are ideal-types and the reality may consist of a hybrid or different combinations of these types, but the point is that trade union identity may be a factor in mediating such developments. In effect an appreciation of the direction a union is coming from and the direction it is taking permits us to locate the way strategic developments are contextualised and eventually established and with what impact, both internally and externally. These issues of purpose, identity and developments can therefore be aligned alongside the development of new forms of communication in terms of how modes of communication are linked to each other. Hence, distinct trade union traditions at the national level will frame the manner in which the internet is developed, used and understood. However, the internet is not an endogenous development that can be easily moulded by current actions and traditions. It will also have implications for union purpose and action. It will challenge traditional models. Hence Hyman’s new work argues that the changes occurring in the structure and process of society and the economy call into question traditional hierarchies. Trades unions do not only have to work with networks; they must steadily act as networks. They must start visualising themselves in a more organic and less traditional manner in terms of their actions and views of solidarity (Hyman, 2001). The simple “tug of war” that has determined the employment relation and the manner in which unions have engaged with capital and the state within a framework of traditional social regulation will not be able to contain the more diverse and multiple links that exist within the contemporary context, and the “polyphonic” aspects of the internet’s impact, as Carter et al. (2003) remind us.

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The political shaping of the internet is therefore related to issues of democracy and transparency. Greene et al. (2003) are quite right to draw out the political issues here. The role of the intranet is central to this question. Trades unions tended to differ in terms of the availability of organisational discussions, decisions, documentation, and counter-documentation to members on their respective intranets. Some unions consider access to information and transparency as central to its political position: they encourage debates around factions and constituents. Others tend to focus their documentation on policy statements and reports. Internal debates may not be that common in terms of their presence on the intranet due to the attitudes of leadership or the belief that there is a lack of focus and ongoing commitment within online forums (Falk, 1998), i.e. they are incapable of creating tangible mobilisations. The internet may therefore vary in the hands of different trades unions as a tool for democracy. Some trade union – or trade union-like – organisations have therefore even used the internet and e-mail developments as a vehicle for external communication due to the lack of an internal critical mass being less concerned with intranets: it is viewed as a vehicle for enhancing external democracy and political links with and between social movements. Much may depend on the nature of hierarchical relations. Issues of democracy will be challenged by the network developments discussed earlier in relation to Hyman. The hierarchical tug of war, to use that metaphor again but with respect to organisational issues, may be replaced by a multiple set of voices in and around the union that challenge the decision-making process. The problem that may arise is that these internet-related constituencies may emerge beyond the trade union if trades unions do not respond and change – what Diamond and Freeman (2002) label “virtual unionism”, i.e. web site-based unions offering employment-related services and information. Much may depend on the extent to which the union movement uses the internet to broaden its alliances and boundaries in terms of action, education and representation. The social dimensions of the internet will contribute to this. Even the messiah of the network society appears to acknowledge the uneven and exclusivist use of the internet in terms of race, age, gender and class (Castells, 1996, p. 371; 2001, p. 238). Ultimately, though, innovation and strategy are also dependent on projects and individuals that intervene at key moments. The internet has to be understood in terms of the way communication and organisational cultures shape its use. Yet there is also the question of the new organisational forms that emerge as a consequence of the internet. What has emerged is the leading role played by key, and, at times, younger individuals within trade union communication departments who do not come through traditional union career structures. They appeared to act as the mediators and filters of the new “network society”, interpreting and proposing changes. These individuals are involved in marketing issues through their involvement in questions of union iconography and symbolism as reproduced or varied on relevant web sites. In some cases their proposals for shifting the symbolic representation created many internal debates and tensions. In some trades unions they are increasingly linked on a transnational basis through formal or informal international labour bodies. Hence they combine the roles of “internet geeks”, new media specialists, and marketing experts. They work in new departments or on inter-departmental basis. In fact, the systematic rise of media specialists and departments is quite significant in recent years within the

sphere of trades unions. The internet and the corresponding discourses of change provide them with a significant legitimacy and set of power resources within the union movement and on its periphery within its social constituents. They challenge the traditional and usually male iconography of the union and organise training and networks that can draw in a range of actors and allies, however much may depend on the communications strategy, identity and democratic processes of the union. Increasingly, there is an emerging constituency of individuals charged with developing information technology and corporate image, working around a set of new agendas and mobilising within the union for reform and making consciously controversial interventions. These constituencies operate through distinct organisational traditions preferring to develop diverse, open and loose networks that share and pool learning resources. One could argue that there is a need for an organisational sociology of the internet. The impact of the internet may depend on these new coalitions of forces and on such contingencies. Similarly, education departments of unions and confederations have played important roles in mediating visions of the internet through training officers and members in the use of the internet, particularly during the 1990s, and more recently through the incorporation of ICT into education activities in a range of ways (Creanor and Walker, 2005). The design of internet training reflects visions of the role and importance of technology in trades unions, at least as seen by trade union educators (Walker, 2002a). A study of introductory internet training in four European confederations highlighted presentations of the internet variously as a vehicle for extending the reach of vocational training; as a topic for collective bargaining in the workplace (e.g. around issues of access and privacy); as being enrolled in broader technology-support organisational reorientation and change; and as a means for improving branch communications with members (Walker, 2002a). These visions derive from a range of contingencies including broader political and cultural visions of trade union participation and the role of trade union education; prevailing national levels of access to ICT and ICT training; organisational size; and access to internal and external (e.g. state, European) resources. So national traditions and customs within organised labour and the broad space of labour representation and politics in terms of incumbent communication strategies, matters of union identity, internal democratic and decision-making processes, and the impact of organisational contingencies in the form of new forms of social networks and their related activities are salient factors in the development of the internet in employment relations. Action and identity continue to format the nature of internet and informational strategies, providing it with a range of diverse organisational characteristics. Nevertheless, over time we may find this fourth dimension in the form of a new organisational logic emerge based on social and political networks rethinking the form of representation within employment relations. It is at the international level, where trade union organisation has not had the institutional gravitas of more bureaucratic national organisations, where these questions of new organisational forms can be seen to be developing and where new networks and organisational forms are assisted and organised through the internet.

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The internet and the international context of trade union strategy and politics Historically, “formal” international trade union organisation has tended to be both hierarchical and bureaucratic. International union structures have acted as vehicles for communications among senior trade union officers, apparently remote from the concerns of many trade unionists. Globalisation of economic activity, alongside the falling cost and increased availability of both ICTs and international travel, have both opened up the possibility for new (and potentially competing) channels of communication among trade unionists, and simultaneously rendered them increasingly important. A number of possible outcomes of these developments were identified in initial accounts of the phenomenon of transnational labour networking. For example, the sectoral global union federations (GUFs) might establish more decentralised regional structures, and develop networks of trade union officers and representatives in their industrial sectors and in major transnational corporations. The development of trade union networks in particular multinational corporations has been discussed in the contexts both of European Union (EU) legislation covering the establishment of European works councils and globally (ICEM, 1996; Thorpe, 1999). These developments may reduce the organisational distance between the international organisation and the workplace organisation (ICEM, 1996). An alternative vision posited that as it became increasingly straightforward for staff in national unions to communicate with their peers internationally, communications channels would develop independently of international union structures, potentially rendering them redundant especially where national unions are better resourced to carry out international work than the relatively small secretariats of the GUFs (MacShane, 1992). Others have argued that direct communication between rank and file activists in different countries offers an opportunity to circumvent bureaucratic structures entirely, as in the case of the 1995 lockout of Liverpool dockworkers (see below). Each of these potential network configurations alters the relationship between local, national, regional, global and sectoral levels of labour organisation. They are, however, primarily concerned with networks within and around trade union organisations. Elsewhere, the emphasis has been on developing networks which link trades unions and organised labour more generally, with other social movements (Moody, 1997; Waterman, 1998). Labour-oriented non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have developed networks which bring trades unions together with social groups including womens’ organisations and others (Martinez Lucio and Weston, 1995; Kidder and McGinn, 1995) across traditional national and sectoral organisational boundaries. Heterogeneous networks combining both international trade union bodies and decentralised NGOs have emerged in transnational labour organising: campaigns in support of Guatemalan coffee workers benefited on the one hand from the rapid transfer of information, decision making and grass roots involvement of workers and other social groups, and on the other hand from the ability to mobilise people and to provide financial and infrastructure resources possible from the more traditionally accountable IUF (Kidder and McGinn, 1995). Much of this earlier discussion of transnational networking was, of necessity, speculative and frequently based on extrapolation from a single case. These speculations have often been tinged with a technological determinism, which has

echoed some of the more outlandish claims made for the wider economic and social consequences of ICT innovation, most obviously in the dot-com boom hysteria. Now, with a decade’s experience of internet-mediated networking, there is a growing body of work which we can use to start a more rigorous assessment of networking practices. The following highlights one particular dynamic in the evolution of transnational networking: the sources of innovation internal and external to trades unions themselves, before highlighting some contemporary examples of trade union networking, which together underline an “ecological” view of transnational networking and highlight some current issues. Taking a social informatics perspective (Kling, 2000) on the use of ICT in transnational labour networking encourages us to look not just at the technology and its immediate use, but at its use in its broader social and organisational contexts. Such a perspective highlights a rather diverse picture of the ways in which trade union networking is emerging, showing a wide range of actors and their practices co-existing, at times in cooperation and at times in tension. Trade unions’ and organised labour’s use of ICT is in many cases closely associated with organisational innovation, both within and outside “formal” trade union organisation. In the mid-1980s Poptel[1], then a project of a London-based technology worker cooperative, started to provide e-mail and related services to, inter alia, several GUFs and affiliates, and through the Interdoc NGO network organised an international conference “Electronic Communications and the Labour Movement” in 1991. In North America Labornet, affiliated to the Association for Progressive Communications, played an important role in developing the use of computer-based communications technologies. Independent or semi-independent innovator-activists have played significant roles, among the best documented of which are the use of the internet during the Liverpool dockers’ dispute. Here, internet-literate activists facilitated the dockers’ use of the internet to develop and sustain contacts internationally. In all of these cases, and plenty of others, important sources of innovation were outside trade union organisations, though often in close collaboration with influential trade unionists. Independence from trades unions allowed organisational autonomy in experimenting with the technology, and access to resources (e.g. through markets, national and European funding opportunities) that may have been difficult for trades unions themselves. The existence of these projects outside trades unions raised important issues of accountability. For the South African WorkNet project, emerging from the heart of the anti-Apartheid struggles, where a mandate was essential for all political activity, this posed particular tensions, discussed at length by Adler (1992). It would, though, be a mistake simply to counterpose these extra-union developments with a conservative bureaucracy resistant to technology and change. As noted above, two of the GUFs were among the first organisations to use the Poptel services to improve communication with and between their affiliates. The founding documents of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM) (1996) made clear the role of ICT in developing new forms of labour internationalism. ICEM went on to pioneer techniques for web-based networked campaigning in the late 1990s in a series of internationally significant disputes (Walker, 2002b) Similarly, the European Trade Union College has been involved in a sustained programme of work since the mid-1990s, first concentrating on internet training for trade unionists (Walker, 2002a) through the development of e-learning

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methods and networks (Bridgford and Stubbs, 2001; Creanor and Walker, 2000) to the use of these techniques in a range of educational interventions in to transnational ICT-mediated networks (Creanor and Walker, 2004; Walker and Creanor, 2004). A quick overview of some contemporary networked organisation forms might include: . Extra-union labour networking: originating outside the trade union movement, networks of NGOs in areas including human rights, development, fair trade, women and consumers groups have emerged, campaigning around workers’ rights largely outside international trade union organisations, as in the European Clean Clothes Campaign (Shaw, 2004). . Internet-only organisation: among the novel forms of internet-enabled networked labour organisation is the labourstart.org web site. Here, a network of volunteer correspondents around the world (many of whom are officers of national and international unions) maintain a labour and trade union news web site which has become an important part of the international labour landscape. At the time of writing, the web site claims that over 15,000 people are members of its “ActNow” campaign alert e-mail mailing list (Labourstart, 2004; Robinson). . Networked campaigning: during the late 1990s, ICEM[2] made extensive use of the internet in a series of international campaigns. Networked campaigning identified not just the immediate industrial adversaries, but also their wider networks of customers, suppliers and investors, providing news about these networks and offering ways for web users to contribute actively to the campaign. The internet element of the campaigning also helped to establish links with non-labour organisations, such as environmental and indigenous peoples’ groups with whom common cause could be made in particular campaigns (Walker, 2002b). . Union organisational networks: GUFs have been establishing networks in multinational corporations and industry sectors at a global level. Regionally, particularly in Europe, a range of types of trade organisational networks have been developed, including “virtual committees” through which traditional trade union structures have used the internet in expanding the scope and improve the responsiveness of their work, and in creating new structures for example to coordinate work around European Works Councils in particular industrial sectors (Walker, 2004). This preliminary review highlights three broad themes. First, the term “networking” is being used very loosely to describe a wide range of new organisational forms and practices; or looked at slightly differently, there is a broad ecology of international labour networking practices and organisational forms reflecting some of the diversity of the earlier visions of the consequences of transnational networks. Second, some of the earlier visions have not always been sustained. Perhaps most strikingly, the widely discussed example of the Liverpool dockers’ use of the internet, whilst a fundamental example of international solidarity and an outcome of significant international co-ordination, can also be seen as the product of a specific combination of circumstances such as the legal constraints on both the national and international trades unions both operating under UK law, the history of rank and file dockworkers contacts across Europe at least, dating from the 1970s which formed the initial network

mobilised by the dockworkers (Kennedy and Lavalette, 2004), and the involvement of internet-knowledgeable activists from outside the dockworkers themselves (Carter et al., 2003). The Liverpool dockworkers therefore remain one of the most frequently cited exemplars of technology-supported rank and file internationalism (e.g. Lee, 2004). Third, the development of these transnational networks poses a range new of problems which need new organisational capacities. Transnational networked organisation is not straightforward: the availability of a technological infrastructure and the skills to use it may be a necessary prerequisite of global network organisation (and establishing the prerequisites globally itself remains a formidable obstacle), but it is not sufficient. Networks are likely to need to adapt, for example to the particular culture and organisation of individual corporations (Spooner, 1998), while organisational, linguistic and cultural difficulties are likely further to continue to provide substantial obstacles to the development of online transnational networks, for example among trade union educators. Neither can the development of networks always be seen as positive. In some cases emerging networks may pose threats to effective transnational organisation, for example where local labour and management form networks to compete for resources with other plants in a multinational company (Martinez Lucio and Weston, 1995). Linguistic, industrial relations, cultural, technical, organisational and political barriers to wider international organisation require labour to develop new skills to facilitate effective coordination of trade union activity between trade unionists who remain largely locally situated in their relationship with work (Walker and Creanor, 2004). A rather more nuanced picture would identify a range of different types of relationship, including “independent” or “semi-independent” innovators (Carter et al., 2003), the role of trade union and worker education innovations (e.g. ETUCO and its programme of internet work), as well as the institutional contexts (for example between industrial sectors and sub-sectors and differing geographic regions) and the political perspectives of key trade union actors: although such an approach would still need to be sensitive to the political dimensions and tensions within these relations. Conclusion This paper illustrates the diversity of initiatives and practices that are emerging in relation to the trade union movement’s renewal of its strategies regarding the internet. The development of new forms of communication within a globalised context has normally been seen to be a challenge to trades unions due to their “traditional” forms of decision making and action. Such views permeate the study of international organisation and the development of network forms of action. However, the paper has pointed out that not only is there a series of curious responses related to these phenomena, but also that there is an academic debate regarding it. The paper suggests that aspects of this debate have tended to view the internet as an add-on which can be manipulated by trade union organisations – whether national or international – within their ongoing strategies of change. This may be the case, but as Greene et al. (2001) have pointed out there is a political dimension to the way the internet is approached which means that it raises possibilities for groups of trade unionists and a broader range of activity beyond the formal remit of trade union hierarchy. The democratic potential of such developments should not be underplayed. The authors concur with this argument pointing to the way new virtual spaces are being

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constructed in terms of strategy, education and communication. However, the political space mediating the development of the internet may be quite broad. The paper points to the way national organisations mediate the development of the internet in various ways according to a range of factors. Hence one must engage with four questions and issues outlined previously in relation to trades unions (Martı´nez Lucio, 2003): their link into communication strategies, their link to union identity, the relationship with internal democratic and decision-making processes, and the impact of organisational contingencies based on new professionals and networks related to the internet, for example, and their role. Observing and discussing developments in relation to these issues will allow us to study the nuances of the internet and the more complex realities of its development. In terms of the international dimension, the paper reiterated this, but pointed out that such a level of development was less constrained by the mediating role of national bodies of organised labour than it was confronted by a new set of challenges. First, the term “networking” should not be used loosely to describe a wide range of new organisational forms and practices as there is a broad “ecology” of national and international labour networking practices and organisational forms reflecting some of the diversity of the earlier visions of the consequences of transnational networks: new flexible and transnational bodies can vary as much as much as national institutions in terms of their character and politics even if they are new. Second, the use of the internet for the purpose of a more robust and militant form of trade unionism will still need to be understood in relation to other factors that underpin such an approach. The social, regulatory, resource and political dimensions of the labour movement are still important in shaping the use of new forms of informational processes, but how they interact with new forms of networks sustained by the internet and more open modes of communication is a matter for further research. Third, the development of these transnational networks poses a range of new problems which need new organisational capacities in terms of skills, education, accessibility, networks may need to adapt, for example to the particular culture and organisation of individual corporations (Spooner, 1998). Whether developments such as networks complete the transition to a more stable institutional basis is another matter (Davies, 2004). However, we are seeing new dimensions of worker activity that will challenge the boundaries of the organisation: the question is to what extent they will be influenced by traditional organisations in terms of their identity, communication culture, and democratic process. Notes 1. One of the authors of this paper was heavily involved in the Poptel project at that time. 2. International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers Unions.

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Ronfeldt, D. and Arquilla, J. (2001), “Networks, netwars, and the fight for the future”, First Monday, Vol. 6 No. 3, available at: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_10/ronfeldt/ Schultz, M. (1998), “Collective action across borders: opportunity structures, network capacities and communicative praxis in the age of advanced globalisation”, Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 587-616. Shaw, L. (2004), “Beyond unions: labour and codes of conduct”, in Munck, R. (Ed.), Labour and Globalisation: Results and Prospects, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, pp. 169-80. Spooner, D. (1998), “Trade union telematics for international collective bargaining”, in Sussman, G. and Lent, J.A. (Eds), Global Productions: Labor in the Making of the Information Society, Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ. Thompson, P. and Warhurst, C. (1998), Workplaces of the Future, Macmillan, London. Thorpe, V. (1999), “Global unionism – the challenge”, in Munck, R. and Waterman, P. (Eds), Labour Worldwide in the Era of Globalisation: Alternative Union Models in the New World Order, Macmillan, London. Walker, S. (2002a), “Internet training in trades unions: a comparison of four European confederations”, Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 294-304. Walker, S. (2002b), “Pay us our wages! Information warfare and industrial conflict in a global economy”, Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture, Vol. 34 No. 3. Walker, S. (2004), Dialog on Project Evaluation Report, Leeds Metropolitan University/European Trade Union College, Leeds. Walker, S. and Creanor, L. (2004), “Crossing complex boundaries: transnational trade union education”, paper presented to Networked Learning 2004, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, 5-7 April. Waterman, P. (1998), “The second coming of proletarian internationalism? A review of recent resources”, European Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 349-77. Waterman, P. (2000), “Trade union internationalism in the age of Seattle”, Global Solidarity Dialogue, available at: www.antenna.nl/ , waterman/ageattle.html (accessed 18 October 2004). Further reading Castells, M. (2001), “A rejoinder to Abell and Reynier’s ‘Failure of social theory’”, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 52 No. 3, pp. 541-6. Castells, M. (2001), “Information technology and global capitalism”, in Hutton, W. and Giddens, A. (Eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, Vintage, London. Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2000), “Trade unions on line: technology, transparency and bargaining power”, in Donnelly, M. and Roberts, S. (Eds), FuTUre: Working Together for Change. Proceedings of the Second Scottish Trade Union Research Network Conference 2000, pp. 58-68. Lindblom, C.E. (1968), The Policy-making Process, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Martı´nez Lucio, M. (1991), “Trades unions and communism in post-Franco Spain”, Journal of Communist Studies, December. Martı´nez Lucio, M. (2002), “Spain in the 1990s: strategic concertation”, in Berger, S. and Compston, H. (Eds), Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Europe, Bergren, New York, NY.

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(Miguel Martı´nez Lucio works on the subject of changing industrial relations. His work covers the changing nature of labour management-relations, the renewal of trade union structures and identity, the development of new forms of representation at work and in social contexts. The research also covers the nature of regulation in contemporary capitalism and the manner in which regulatory boundaries and roles are reshaped. He has focused on European level issues. Other work has involved the development of collectivism and the rethinking of collective action. The changing nature of union-political relations is a further feature of this interest. E-mail: [email protected] Steve Walker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Management at Leeds Metropolitan University where he specialises in the study of the social and organisational aspects of ICT design and use. He is a member of both the British Computer Society and the Higher Education Academy. He has worked extensively in the field of trade unions and ICT, for almost 20 years. Most recently, he has been working with the European Trade Union College on a series of projects on ICT and trade union learning. For more information, see www.imresearch. org/staff/swalker/index.htm)

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ICTs, distributed discourse and the territorialisation of labour: the case of Balkan trade unionism Andreja Zivkovic

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University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, and

John Hogan The Business School, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to examine the significance of information communication technology (ICT) for Balkan labour. Drawing on the heuristic of “distributed discourse”, this paper aims to explore virtual forms of communication and interaction. The paper aims to examine the privileged role of ICT in the: formation of autonomous trade union structures and channels of communication; evasion of the territorial structures of the nation-state and the construction of virtual communities of international labour solidarity; and authoritative transmission of models of industrial relations practice and of capitalist modernity in virtual space. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted in-depth interviews, followed up by further discussions, with officials and researchers from unions in the Balkan region. IR academics in Serbia and Montenegro were also consulted, as were union web sites and those of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Serbia, Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions of Serbia. The purpose of the dialogue was to build an empirically grounded framework for understanding the limits and possibilities presented by the new distributed communications technologies of the internet for labour in the era of globalisation. This article provides qualitative data to allow reflection on the possibilities inherent in ICT for the reinvigoration of trade unionism and labour mobilisation in this era of rampant neoliberalism, particularly in the area of trade union democratisation and accountability. Findings – The article finds that key figures within the Balkan labour movement are conversant with the potential of ICTs. It is also apparent that the construction of cyber-unionism at the official level is subject to the authoritative force of neo-liberal imperial governance. However, this is a regime of policing that is indexed and auditable through the very distributed communication technologies which can affect forms of meta-governance beyond the control of institutions. Research limitations/implications – The findings, based on the interrogation of qualitative data are provisional hypotheses and an invitation to further research on the space-time dimensions of trade unionism in the age of globalisation. Practical implications – This paper highlights the situated character of ICT utilisation. While ICTs can be implicated in the reproduction of extant organisational forms and politics, this article provides the international labour movement with a viewpoint from which to build ICT strategies and appropriate organisational structures that recognise the limitations of centralised representation and control. Originality/value – This paper represents fresh and contemporary data on the use of the internet by Balkan labour. By interrogating the qualitative data an invitation to further research on the space-time dimensions of trade unionism in the age of globalisation is presented. Keywords Eastern Europe, Labour, Globalization, Communication technologies, Trade unions Paper type Research paper

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Introduction The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image (Marx and Engels, 1848).

This paper examines the significance of information communication technology (ICT) for the construction of Balkan post-communist trade unionism. Its findings are grounded in a research project into the use of ICT by Balkan trade union activists and officials based on interviews[1], elaborated through the medium of a content analysis of the South East European Labour Educators Network (SEELEN) web site (see www. seelabored.org), and focused around the case of the ex-Yugoslavia. The example of the Balkans is arguably paradigmatic of the challenges facing labour in the era of globalisation: neoliberal restructuring, the eclipse of the nation-state in the face of multinational capital, the reassertion of empire and the unleashing of warring collective identities (Zivkovic, 1999, 2004). This paper examines the significance of ICTs for this bonfire of territorial structures, economic regimes and collective identities. Drawing on the heuristic of “distributed discourse” established in extant research on the implications of ICT for the politics and processes of trade unionism (Hogan and Grieco, 2000; Hogan and Greene, 2002; Greene et al., 2003), this paper explores the potentiality of distributed forms of communication for trade union democratisation and for the construction of an alternative model of globalisation, “alterglobalisation”, based on a politics of meta-governance (Grieco, 2002). The concept of ICT as a distributed network will also be deployed to examine the development of new global forms of economic, political, military and informational power. The case of Balkan post-communist trade unionism will be seen as a particularly savage example of the relationship between the territorial-institutional networks of the international state system and capitalist world market and the virtual networks of cyberspace in the formation of imperial networks of power, of empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004). Developing the implications of concepts of empire as a distributed form of economic and military power (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004) this paper will locate Balkan trades unions within the striated time-space (Deleuze, 1983) of the Balkans as a turbulent outpost of emergent empire. Deploying the concept of “doubling” and “simulation” developed in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, 1980; Deleuze, 1983), we will examine the way in which virtual networks are both a site in which imperial norms and administrative regulations are doubled and distributed and a site of resistance to the simulation of Balkan labour as obedient imperial subject. Finally, we should note the limits of this study. Like Foucault (1981a, p. 4) we are not offering “treatises in philosophy or studies in history . . . [but] philosophical fragments put to work in a field of historical problems”. Our findings, based on the interrogation of qualitative data by means of the concepts of distributed discourse, empire, doubling and simulation, are provisional hypotheses and are an invitation to further research on the space-time dimensions of trade unionism in the age of armed globalisation.

ICT, distributed discourse and trade unionism There is little doubt that the development of ICTs, in particular the internet and the world wide web, has opened up a series of intriguing possibilities for trades unions and labour. The use of these communication technologies by trades unions, at both official and unofficial levels has expanded rapidly. Likewise, the field of inquiry on unions and the internet has generated significant academic attention (Hogan and Grieco, 1999; Greene et al., 2001; Fiorito, 2001; Diamond and Freeman, 2002; Hogan and Greene, 2002; Carter et al., 2003), including the production of special edited issue of the Industrial Relations Journal devoted to the theme (Greene and Hogan, 2003). Within the growing body of literature, we have already pointed to the benefits to be derived from drawing on and contributing to the conceptualisation of trade unionism and the internet through the analytical and normative template of distributed discourse. The wider discussion of the implications of constructing distributed discourses, now made all the more pervasive with the more widespread distribution of communication technologies made available in the digital age, for society and organisation can be deployed to great effect (Grieco, 2002; Clegg, 2002). ICT enables communication to occur rapidly, at low and distributed cost. The time-space poverty of participants can be attenuated by allowing for asynchronous communicative exchanges and through the creation of virtual adjacency for actors who would otherwise be separated by physical distance. The relatively low cost of online publication renders less credible any claim that the presentation of decisions, processes and action must be subject to the rule of informational parsimony. What is more, flows of information are now much harder to retain within institutional boundaries, while the distribution of points of entry into the force field of communication allows for unsanctioned and unofficial communicative pathways to be opened, where organisational performance may be observed and indexed. Hence, the communicative possibilities are more extensive interaction, greater density of communication, sharper visibility and higher levels of transparency. The implications of distributed discourse for trade unionism and labour are profound. Within the realm of union governance, any tendencies towards oligarchy (sustained by control over the flow of information, access to superior knowledge, skill in the art of politics and a membership diverted by the pulls of work, family and leisure) are challenged by the possibility for greater equality of knowledge, distributed control over the means of communication, the enhanced communicative skills of more ordinary union members and a reconfiguration of the time-space dimensions of communicative practice. With the diffusion of the technologies and skills for the faster and more extensive marshalling of materials revealing organisational and leadership performance the bargaining power of the led over those who lead is strengthened (Hogan and Grieco, 1999). This capacity to index and audit performance, however, goes beyond the merely internal of union governance, it is also significant in effecting a reverse panopticon (Hogan and Grieco, 1999) in relation to labour’s opponents, with significant implications for tracking and thereby resisting their manoeuvres. Furthermore, the capacity to meet and organise in virtual time and space, both erodes dependency on employer and state sponsorship and thereby calls into question the necessity of industrial legality and its associated conservative praxis. What is more, the possibilities presented by ICTs for distributed discourse are highly portentous for the exercise of worker power through mobilisation, in particular by allowing for the release of a polyphony of voices (Carter et al., 2003), whose insights,

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innovations and imagination could well contain the antidote to a bureaucratic routinism that is identified as corrosive of the foundations of solidarity (Hyman, 1989). Thus, the extra-territoriality of cyberspace presents a range of intriguing dynamics that could well have a transformative set of effects on the politics and processes of trade unionism. Through an exploration of the spaces for distributed discourse within the context of Balkan labour, we seek to reveal the attempt to domesticate the logic of distributed discourse at the same time as pointing to the persistence of its force. ICT, globalisation and empire The previous discussion of information technology as distributed discourse enables us to pose two inter-related questions that are fundamental to an understanding of the present force field in which Balkan trade unionism is being formed: (1) To what degree is ICT exemplary of the process of globalisation and the structure of the global order that is emerging? (2) What is the position of the Balkans – and consequently of the territorial-administrative space of Balkan trade unionism – within this global order? The heuristic of distributed discourse points to the emancipatory potential of ICT. It does not seek unproblematically to read off new forms of production, organisation and power from the introduction of new technologies. It not only avoids the technological determinism of much bien pensant globalisation theory, it enables a critical vantage point on technology as a site of struggle between different models of social organisation. The contemporary opinion holds that the globalisation of financial markets, technology and information is undermining the nation-state as the key power-container of modernity (see Giddens, 1985), leading to the emergence of a “network society” (see Castells, 1996, 1997). In the “information age” the increasing global electronic links between financial markets, media organisations, technology and information create “spaces of flows” that capture the older “spaces of places”, the space of states that must, as it were, go with the flow or go under (see Castells, 1996, 1997). Thus for Castells the nation-state is being by-passed by three types of flows; economic (multinationals), technological (digital technology) and cultural-informational (autonomy of new media). Furthermore it is claimed that the flexibility and autonomy of digital media enable it to bypass the disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms of nation-states, and that ICT is at the vanguard of globalisation. ICT is an example of a “rhizome” (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), a non-hierarchal and non-centred network representing a concept of social order defined by active transversal or encounter rather than objectification (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). The drive of the nation-state is that of “territorialisation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), in this instance the control of information, its confinement within the constellations of administrative power and a specific territory. As with Foucault, the “always already” of power is resistance and ICT can be seen as the Deleuzian nomad (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) whose drive is to “deterritorialise”, to cross borders, and to escape territorial stratification: The primary determination of the nomad, in fact, is that he occupies and holds a smooth space [espace lisse ] (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, pp. 512, 510, 583).

ICT thus mirrors the “smooth space” of the globalised cosmopolis. And in this virtual electronic agora new disembodied communities form independent of the traditional control of the nation-state. E-visionaries claim that, hand in hand with globalisation, ICT is undermining the nation-state as “a set of institutional forms of governance, maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries, its rule being sanctioned by law, and direct control of the means of internal and external violence” (Giddens, 1985, p. 121) and laying the basis for a cosmopolitan (cyber-)citizenship. The concept of distributed discourse enables us to grasp the one-sidedness and technological determinism of this informational theory of globalisation. The latter completely obscures the territorial-temporal circuits of the economic and military competition that shapes the present capitalist world system. ICTs and computer mediated communication (CMC) are notoriously a spin-off from the US military-industrial complex, from Cold War structures of military-economic competition between the superpowers. Hence technological determinist theories of ICT that derive utopian consequences inherent in the technical properties of digital technology simply ignore the imbrication[2] of the apparently “smooth”, virtual space of ICT in the worldly, divided space of states and territories. The concept of distributed discourse thus suggests that virtual networks of power not only have the potential to evade territorial structures, but also to redistribute power within the framework of the of the “iron cage” of modernity: that is, to reproduce the reified bureaucratic organisational structures of empires and nation-states, corporations and firms, trades unions and political parties. Our argument is not plus c¸a change, plus c’est la meˆme chose! While the discourse of globalisation points to very real transformations it tends to obfuscate them in a utopian language, that is, the language of a non-place (see Held et al., 1999; Giddens, 1999). This apparently neutral discourse ignores both the agent and object of globalisation; namely that the globalisation of free markets, neoliberalism, is being promoted by international institutions dominated by the advanced capitalist countries. At the same time the collapse of the USSR has occasioned a struggle between the advanced capitalist states and blocs over the political economy and state architecture of the “New World Order”. Repositioning globalisation in space and time would require us to talk once more of empire (see Hardt and Negri, 2000) as hierarchical, stratified, but also contested networks of power. In what follows we do not uncritically follow the concept of empire as developed by Hardt and Negri. Indeed, we note two contradictory views of empire in their work: empire as a “smooth space” (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and as a “striated space” (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Both are fruitful in that they examine the world system as a network form of power, but whereas the former is perfectly compatible with the technological determinism of ideologies of globalisation, the latter recognises that networks both reflect unequal relations of power and are a site of struggle over relations of domination. Our understanding of empire, then, is of an emergent global economic and political order forcibly imposed and regulated by international organisations whose direction is contested by the major capitalist powers. As we will see below, informational networks are not only circuits enabling the smooth transmission of imperial power, but also the site of resistance against empire.

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Furthermore empire is not merely a system of power that externally acts on bodies and things, it is directly productive of subjectivities and social life. Hardt and Negri’s concept of empire draws upon Foucault’s (1978a, b, 1994) concept of power as “biopolitical”, as directly productive of life through the internalisation by the subjects of a diffuse network of “apparatuses [dispositifs] of power-knowledge” that regulate customs, habits and productive practices (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Empire is thus a normative order fusing juridical and ethical concepts that affirms a right that both envelops the entire space of civilisation, as a boundless, universal space; and that encompasses all time within its ethical foundation. Imperial right constitutes new figures of imperial sovereignty so that nation-states become mere administrative subdivisions of empire and peoples are constructed as obedient subjects of the imperial res publica. It is in these terms that we should see the new cosmopolitan or transnational discourse of sovereignty, with its assertion of the primacy of international order or human rights over national sovereignty, namely as a charter for imperialist intervention, a “moral order” (Hardt and Negri, 2000), an “order of discourse” (Foucault, 1981b) licensing unlimited interventions and police actions by the advanced capitalist powers. In the 1990s the Balkans became an object of concern of this imperial “moral order” precisely since it flew in the face of the dominant “language-games” (Lyotard, 1984) of the post-1989 period – “End of History”, “globalisation”, “democracy”, “civil society”, “the rule of law”, “multiculturalism”. Precisely because it appeared to directly challenge the new figures of imperial sovereignty, the Balkans attained the status of the Other of modernity in the normative discourse of empire. Consequently it was transfigured in the Orientalist imaginary (see Said, 1978; Todorova, 1997) as a timeless barbarian space of “primordial ethnic hatreds”, requiring the military intervention of “international institutions” to be reintegrated into the “international community”. Once the tribes have laid down their arms at the feet of empire the process of what is euphemistically known as “nation-building” can commence. For empire is not merely content to rule by force of arms, but directly (re)produces imperial forms of governance and normative frameworks in the conquered territories. The question of post-communist Balkan trade unionism cannot be divorced from this biopolitical project to integrate the Balkans into the territorial, administrative, informational and normative networks of empire. Locating the Balkans in imperial time and space Having outlined our concept of empire as a network form of power, we will now proceed to locate the Balkans in time and space, in order to map the precise time-space coordinates that constitute the field of present-day Balkan trade unionism. First, let us say that, just like the discourse of globalisation, the above apparatus of power-knowledge constitutes the Balkans as an object of knowledge, of “biopolitical” “disciplinary action” (Hardt and Negri, 2000) by rendering it utopian – a non-place or a place existing outside of space and time. From the point of view of imperial right considered as universal in time and space, those lands lying outside of its domain can only be considered as non-places. Rejecting this discourse means reinserting the Balkans into the combined and uneven space-time of a world system riven by inter-state conflict and increasingly subordinate to the capitalist world market. Hence

the collapse of Yugoslavia is not some atavistic reaction to the capitalist compression of space and time noted by the “boosters” of globalisation (for this term see Held et al., 1999) but, rather, its effect. The rise of nationalism in the ex-Yugoslavia was primarily the result of its impact of increasing integration into the world market which accelerated tendencies to uneven development in the shape of competing republican-national autarchic blocs (Woodward, 1995a). Given its dependant position Yugoslavia in the 1980s became one of the first experiments in neoliberal “shock therapy”, enduring successive IMF austerity plans which demanded the elimination of state subsidies to inefficient industries and regions (see Woodward, 1995b). The resultant erosion of the social and political foundations of Yugoslav federal system led to a profound crisis of social relations. The logic of territorialisation that had emerged out of market socialism found its finished expression in competing nationalist projects aiming to hegemonise the Yugoslav space; but also in waves of strike action that rarely broke out of republican-national territorial frameworks and were increasingly interpellated in nationalist terms. The resulting wars of partition were not fought in a non-space outside the walls of the cosmopolis, but in the vacated space of the post-Cold War Balkans left by the collapse of the USSR where the dominant states and blocs vied to determine the New World Order. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Macedonia became pretexts for military intervention, part of a process of “disciplinary action” involving the eastward expansion of NATO and the encirclement of Russia, the demonstration of US primacy over the European Union (EU), Russia and China, and the extension of the USA’s geopolitical reach into Central Asia (see Zivkovic, 1999). The present imperial protectorate over Iraq was prefigured in the “humanitarian intervention” that led to the establishment of an international protectorate over Kosovo (Zivkovic, 2004). In the peace treaties imposed on the natives of the Balkans and Iraq we find that “the economy will be a market economy” and that aid is tied to debt repayment, privatisation, opening of domestic markets to multinationals, the cutting back and privatisation of welfare provision and public services, the flexibilisation of labour markets, and the privatisation of pension systems (see Zivkovic, 1999). The Balkans emerging from this process of economic and political is a patchwork of dwarf statelets that are internally contested, unviable and therefore dependent on external interventions. In other words, the very fragmentation of the Balkans as the point of application of imperial biopower is the condition for the erasure and enclosure of the Balkans within the territorial, economic and juridical networks of empire. This is the time-space context of Balkan trade unionism. As we will see, it is a space in which empire directly acts on the Balkans to construct it as a subject not only integrated into the reproduction of the imperial networks noted above, but also itself productive of the latter.

Empire, ICT and netwars: the distribution and doubling of power in space and time Having developed our concept of empire as a network form of power and located the Balkans within the emergent imperial order, we can now return to the question of the role of virtual ICT networks in the formation of imperial networks of power, of the

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relationship between distributed networks of economic, administrative and military power and the potential for distributed discourses of resistance to empire. E-utopians like Rheingold (2000) argue that, “The political significance of CMC lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy’s monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps revitalise citizen based democracy”. Certainly this captures one aspect of ICT in the Balkans. For example, the development of democratic and trade union movements and of civil society in Serbia, was intimately bound up with ICT. Indeed total government control over the official media and vigorous repression of alternative media impelled civic movements like the UGS Nezavisnost (Independent) Trade Union Federation, the Otpor! (Resistance!) youth movement, the 1997 student movement, and, perhaps most famously, the B92 radio station, to turn to the net. ICT – in providing non-regime sources of information (see for example the B92 web site: www.b92.net) as a tool for organisation (e.g. the Otpor! and University of Belgrade Student Protest 1997 web sites – see respectively: www.yurope.com/mirrors/ protest96/bg/5.3/ and www.otpor.com) and free democratic debate – was the precondition for the separation of civil society from the state and the model of a virtual republican civic virtue. Our own research has confirmed this aspect of ICT as a space of virtual evasion and resistance to territorial structures of power, a space wresting autonomy for Balkan trades unions; the precondition for their emergence as independent labour organisations. As Zoran Djuricic, president of the Independent Culture and Arts Union (Granski sindikat kulture i umetnosti, “Nezavisnost”), recollects: In a country facing war, a large number of refugees, the expansion of the grey economy and a larger and larger number of unemployed workers and a media totally controlled by the dictatorial regime of Slobodan Milosevic, the main task imposed on the trade unions was the objective and timely informing of their members. The Nezavisnost Trade Union Federation with the help and support of NGOs formed “The Partnership for Democratic Change” and by equipping regional offices in 27 cities in Serbia, together with lectures, seminars and public meeting, handed out to its members and all others present taken from the websites of international trade union organisations, opposition parties of that time and the free media. This approach significantly facilitated the development of the need to find other sources of information in a completely new way, as well “live” discussions between citizens. And we must not forget the significance of ICT in linking trade unions across the territory of the ex-Yugoslavia. Through the exchange of e-mails contacts were made between colleagues, relations were renewed, following which meetings took place which significantly contributed to open and constructive talks and the develop of a democratic, tolerant and open trade union movement (e-interview conducted by Hogan and Zivkovic, July 2004).

In the Balkans ICT has not only been the site of the autonomisation of trades unions, but of their incorporation into imperial networks of power. The distribution of ICT networks has been a consistent strategic concern of empire. The role of the US State Department from 1998 in organising seminars in democracy, civil society and civic resistance, in funding Serbian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), independent trades unions and opposition groups, and in pushing the latter onto the Net in order to improve the distributive mechanisms of education in imperial norms and enable the emergence of local distributed discourses of imperial self-regulation, is notorious (see www.usaid.org.yu/top/strategy.php). Just as empire has instrumentalised the wars of partition of the ex-Yugoslavia to extend its geopolitical hegemony over the Balkans, its redrawing of the region as an

internally stratified assemblage of protectorates and dependencies, neoliberal stability pacts, association agreements, and debt-servicing plans, as a dispositif of biopower, so the virtual network is subcontracted as a condottiere of empire, resulting in a process of virtual doubling in which the apparatus of imperial power-knowledge is imposed on bodies and things to constitute Balkan labour as an imperial subject, with the illusion of autonomy and participation (in empire). This doubling of the virtual over the real is best understood in terms of Deleuze’s theory of simulation. Deleuze (1983) rejects the standard conception of a simulacrum as the copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer be said to be a copy. For Deleuze simulation does not replace the real but produces it through a despotic process of overcoding in the form of an apparently stable system of territories and identities that are then folded, doubled onto bodies and things, thus creating the entire network of representation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). The doubling effect acts on the fragmented, mutilated, marginalised and pauperised body of Balkan labour to make it whole again by simulating it as a prosperous and empowered imperial subject. And it is precisely the imperial distribution of virtual networks that makes possible a distributed discourse of empire. The incorporation of Balkan trades unions into ICT networks sponsored, funded, refereed and monitored by empire, like SEELEN – networks that seek to reconcile free markets and social justice, private property and worker participation, imperialist domination and regional stability, democratic forgetfulness over nationalist memory – must perforce result in a simulacrum of trade unionism, where the copy now charged with imperial subjectivity annihilates the model. If we take the model of trade unionism to imply structures of labour representation based on the minimum criterion of formal organisational autonomy from both state and capital then the effect of virtual doubling is the enclosure[3] and erasure of Balkan labour as independent actor. The doubling effect also involves the simulation of a virtual “international community”. The “international community” is of course no more than a euphemism for empire, but what is interesting here is the process whereby copies of the original model proliferate to reproduce the representational code of empire as a territorial-administrative space of universal sovereignty. Thus spatial flows of information, precisely because they are so many forms of distributed discourse, gesture towards the transnational, so that the planetary virtual community comes to double the “international community” of the ideology of globalisation. Trades unions, NGOs, international media organisations, nation-states and national movements have all appealed and continue to appeal to authoritative international organisations and “world public opinion” to work to implement the “shared values” of “civilisation”, i.e. different and contradictory territorial-political projects, ranging from ethnically cleansed nation-states to the supercession of national sovereignty in transnational governance. Thus the netwars to partition the Balkans – where the politics of nationalist and imperial war are carried out by other means – have sought the arbitration of international institutions to impose particular nationalist-territorial or civic-political projects, thus reproducing the domination of the advanced capitalist states over the international state system. International NGOs have been compared to the mendicant religious organisations of the late middle ages like the Jesuits or Dominicans whose religious idealism shaped the normative discourse of the Holy Roman Empire in the same way in which the contemporary NGO discourse of the

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primacy of international legal norms over national sovereignty creates the “moral order” for the “exceptional interventions” and “police actions” of modern empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The same tale can be told of Balkan trades unions and NGOs. For example, the Nezavisnost trade union federation consistently opposed the nationalist wars of partition and the oppression of minorities, sought to defend the rights of labour in the face of demands to suspend the right to withdraw labour in the name of the national interest, opposed the NATO war against Serbia of 1999 as strengthening the Serbian state against civil society, and called for inter-communal reconciliation and internationally supervised joint peace initiatives (see War Resisters International, 1999). The destination of such demands was not to a class subject, but to the very international institutions of empire, like the United Nations (UN), from which the new doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” surged, the very doctrine whose effects Nezavisnost bitterly opposed, but to whose norms it also appealed. This virtual simulation of the “international community”, the proliferation of symbolic universals, could only result in the distribution and reproduction of the transcendental norms of imperial sovereignty. This distributed discourse of transcendental juridical-ethical imperial norms, where the subjects of power articulate their contradictory national-territorial and socioeconomic interests within a single binary representational space, means that economic artillery of commodities that breaks down all Chinese Walls finds a ready point of application in the norms of the citizens of non-imperial domains. However la pense´e unique is not the only possibly form of distributed discourse. To understand why its hegemony may only be provisional and conjunctural we must return to the space-time coordinates of the Balkans. The Balkans has historically been a meeting point of empires, and it is precisely the economic, political, military and ideological clash of empires that has transmitted the authoritative models of modernity in the region. In the nineteenth century these were nationalism, popular sovereignty, market relations, representative government, bureaucratic-rational administration, socialism and anarchism; in the twentieth century, imperialism, communism and fascism, national economic regimes and autarchic economic development. Today the transcendental norms of the free market, liberal democracy, civil society and international governance are the latest (imperial) stage in the distribution of models of power and justice in the Balkans. As a dependent, fragmented and peripheral region, and precisely because of the fragility and weak legitimacy of regional state structures and backwardness of economic forms, the Balkans historically has readily welcomed both the political forms of modernity and the counter-critiques of capitalism brought by the hurricanes of distributed imperial competition. Thus the logic of the process of simulated doubling is not merely to reproduce empire for there are two conflicting forms of distribution of simulacra. One is certainly that of empire and it is normative, regulative and limitative. But there is another form of simulation that evades the territorialisation of bodies and identities through a process of deterritorialisation that produces difference and new subjectivities. ICT is thus the site of the distribution of antagonistic discourses, where the doubling of biopower both constitutes the virtual subject and meets the biopolitical resistance of the non-identical subjectivities of the virtual multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2004); that is, those whose labour is directly productive not only of material goods, but also of social life in general.

The relationship of Balkan trades unions to the virtual redoubling of empire demonstrates the contradictory potential of distributed informational networks: on the one hand, the dissemination of authoritative imperial models of governance and trade unionism; and nationalist resistance to empire in the name of national self-determination and national economic regimes. If the former is most clearly expressed in the Nezavisnost and SSSCG (Montengro) trade union federations, the latter is exemplified by the ex-state trades unions of Serbia (SSSS), who supported the idea of national unity throughout the wars of partition and were complicit in the repression of labour protests, defended the concept of national sovereignty against illegal wars and blamed mass unemployment on the “international community” (sanctions and bombing). The unions in Serbia thus reflect two sides of one contradictory process of capitalist globalisation – of empire: Nezavisnost has sought to codify international structures that would enable civil societies and free markets to flourish autonomously within particular nation states, while the SSSS sought to defend the nation-state as the framework for political and economic sovereignty and for the pursuit of economic justice. It is in this latter sense that some Balkan trade union officials see “the potential of ICT for the construction of a movement against globalisation” (e-interview with Mircea Miclea, an official of the “Apararea” Trade Union of Romania, October 2004). However these two options do not exhaust the possibilities of distributed discourse, but chart alternative forms of the iron cage of modernity. We have not so far advanced to the point where a distributed discourse of trade union activists, workers and citizens has emerged to challenge not only empire, but also the right of local trade union bureaucracies to represent labour on the imperial territory.

SEELEN: a case study in the virtual distribution of imperial governance Having made the link between the between virtual networks of distributed discourse and the reproduction and the contestation of imperial networks of power we are now in a position to extend our analysis to the possibilities of ICT-based autonomous participation, transparency, and democratisation for emerging forms of trade unionism in the Balkans. The key stakes in this confrontation between networked forms of power and networked forms of counter-coordination are as follows: . the transfer of authoritative models of trade unionism to the Balkans; . the education of trade union officials and activists; . the reproduction and legitimisation of bureaucratic forms of authority in trade union organisations; . new forms of communicative practice and mobilisation; . external dependency on international imperial actors and institutions; and . indexicality and counter-projects of meta-governance. These issues will be taken up in the course of an analysis of the SEELEN web site and ICT networks, supplemented with materials drawn from our research into ICT use by Balkan trade union officials and activists. The justification for the study is that SEELEN is quite simply the most significant trade union ICT network in the Balkans, is at present in fact substituting for the relative underdevelopment of such networks

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and is driving the integration of Balkan trades unions into informational networks of power[4]. The origins of the SEELEN project lie in a Regional Labor Union Networking project funded by United States Agency for International Development, State Department (USAID) and managed by the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity (AFL-CIO) and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. USAID’s global strategy is based on four “pillars of development”: security, freedom through democratisation, open markets and justice through transparent legal frameworks. SEELEN is an externally mediated, distributed trade union network involving all nine SEE countries and, by 2004, 18 trade union confederations. It seeks to facilitate communication and cooperation between “democratic” south east European (henceforth SEE) trades unions in order to promote regional democratisation, the transition to the free market, and the education of trade union officials and activists, workers and the general public in order to participate fully in the process of economic and political reform. In this sense SEELEN expresses a real need on the part of regional unions for mechanisms that facilitate the education and informing of members on the economic reform process and that enable them to “develop effective strategies for worker participation in economic reform” (www.seelabored.org). ICT as the infrastructure of this regional trade union network and as one of the major channels of internal communication is significant in that it generates a distributed discourse of communication and organisation that overcomes the time-space poverty of the participants – although not only in the usual sense since, as we saw above, the very infrastructure of ICT use has to be externally “distributed” in the Balkans[5]. This last point reminds us of the contradictory character of ICT distributed discourse: namely, that the distribution of autonomy is not necessarily in contradiction to the doubling of imperial networks of power and may even be functional for the reproduction of the latter. What is at stake then is the very future of Balkan labour as an independent actor, for SELEEN represents a project aiming at the instrumentalisation of Balkan labour through distributed networks of communication. To illustrate this claim let us take mission statements from both the SEELEN and USAID web sites: [T]hrough their continued participation in the network, SEE unions can contribute to the development of a public point of view that sees transition more in political terms and less in ethnic ones, encouraging their countries to embrace a common future based on democracy, the rule of law, and a peaceful, cooperative relationship with their neighbors. Through its structure and process, this project provides the notable benefit of encouraging the resolution of conflict and the building of understanding between different ethnic groups and countries. As this process continues, the network’s labor educators will be able to see transition more in political terms and less in ethnic ones. As they then carry that vision to union leaders and members through their education programs, Southeastern European workers and their families will begin to develop a consensus that embraces a common future based on democracy, the rule of law, and a peaceful, cooperative relationship with their neighbors (see http://seelabored.org/PAGES/Fseelabored.asp).

Similarly, for USAID, the SEELEN project aims: To strengthen labor networks in the Balkans, with the goal of reducing regional tensions and building public solidarity throughout the region around worker issues. Linking Serbian trade

union activists with their counterparts through Eastern and Western Europe is a key aim, and is expected to promote the full re-integration of Serbia into the community of nations. In addition, it links Macedonian unions, which are some of the largest multi-ethnic organisations in the Balkans, with their regional counterparts to garner lessons on how to deal with ethnic tension resulting from enterprise privatisation and restructuring (see www.usaid.gov/).

What is at stake then in this doubling of the material in the virtual is a distributed discourse of deterritorialisation, removing actors from local, national-territorial structures and constructing them as imperial subjects of the territory of empire. Even more remarkable is the technique of disciplinary power applied to this end: the virtual construction of traditions of labour solidarity in order to overcome what are disingenuously termed “regional tensions”, by calling on the workers to unite for they have nothing to lose but their right to national self-determination, to construct labour organisations that will serve as ballast to the “creative destruction” (see Schumpeter, 1977) of forms of production and ways of life by the market. In this way the pacification of Serbia and the reconquest and administration of a formerly troublesome imperial backwater, takes place through a process of virtual doubling, where Balkan labour, seduced by the simulacrum of its virtual participation in the networks of empire, itself becomes a simulacrum of imperial subjectivity, and is erased as an independent actor. Moreover SEELEN is itself constituted in a foundational moment of virtual violence, through a declaration of the imperial right to determine the allocation of rights to represent Balkan labour that will prefigure the virtual enclosure and erasure of the latter. From its very birth it has been built on the exclusion of the SSSS, the largest union federation in Serbia several times over. As one SEELEN administrator confided when asked to explain on this situation: In a nutshell when this program was started the SSSS was not invited to participate. It was the former state trade union and its leaders were historically supporters of Milosevic. They have been trying to make changes and I think they are making progress. However, when the program started, it was done in close cooperation with ICFTU and SSSS were not affiliates, and there was some resistance on the part of Nezavisnost in relation to the history. SSSS finally joined up with the WCL, which is of course the catholic based international confederation. Ho hum. I do not think that all the Confederations involved are in the ICFTU but, without getting into all the machinations of the Balkan war, Serbia was seen as the major protagonist and integrating many organisations from Serbia into the broader international community has been difficult, except for those that took an anti-Milosevic position early.

Charged with social partnership with the Milosevic regime, the SSSS was seen as an obstacle to the integration of Serbian labour into the economic (Washington Consensus, South East European Stability Pact), political (integration into the EU) and military (the system of protectorates in the Balkans) networks of empire. In this way the doubling of the material in the virtual involves a doubling of material violence as “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu, 1980), the virtual legitimation of relations of inequality in which the insoumis of Balkan labour are present only as a ghostly absence, the scene of a virtual massacre. Networks of distributed power are thus built on exclusion and separation, that is, on foundational acts of violence. But what of their positive aspect in founding conceptions of right? How do imperial networks of power like SEELEN produce imperial subjects and administrators and, by so doing, erase labour as an independent actor? The

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biopolitical project of empire takes place through a distribution of authoritative models of trade unionism based on a set of transcendental norms that inscribe imperial economic (the free market, the governance of international economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank) and political sovereignty. Education is thus central to this virtual doubling of “symbolic violence”, the virtual application of biopower to produce imperial subjectivity directly. The process of learning is distributed through a network in which the flow of information from authoritative imperial actors is mediated by the needs of new imperial subjects. In other words, the foundational act of modern Balkan trade unionism, the declaration of autonomy from state control, is captured for imperial purposes through a process of autonomous participation within imperial networks of power. And it is the precisely the shared first principle that the transition to the free market is the precondition for modern industrial relations based on collective bargaining (see Stojiljkovic et al., 1998) that constitutes Balkan trades unions as autonomous subjects of industrial relations with a direct interest in the promotion of market society (privatisation, open markets), that is, as directly productive of empire. Hence it is the transcendental norm of the market that initiates a process of transfer of authoritative models of imperial right to Balkan trades unions that are so many simulacra of democratic trade unionism. If this process appears to resemble education, then it is only in so far as a process of self-development is necessary for the development of an imperial subject. For within the SEELEN network there is no real cognitive dissension of the kind that is at the basis of politics considered as the struggle between rival models of the good life. Within the neoliberal binary code, information is disseminated to solve mere technical problems through the exchange of “best practices”, labour educators are trained in the techniques of imperial self-administration and themselves disseminate the “economic curriculum”, the normative framework of empire as a distributed discourse of simulated trade unionism. Education is thus distributed in a monologic rather than dialogic form, and the discussion of the participants must perforce be a kind of ventriloquism, a virtual dumbshow where material dependence and inequality is distributed across cyberspace as a proliferation of simulacra of self-education. The SEELEN web site is in this sense a particularly impressive externally-mediated, distributed educational network. It is a virtual index of an intense accumulation of (biopolitical) spectacles (Debord, 1992). Detailed documentary records are archived, recording the progress of the network in the re-education of labour educators in the process of market reform (most importantly in a series of imperially-mediated regional roundtables, involving also representatives of the World Bank, IMF, Balkan Ministers of Labour often charged with the definition of the economic and institutional context of trade union activity, i.e. in determining procedural norms). Issues tackled so far include the implications of privatisation for collective bargaining, organising, union structure, the structure of work, and corruption; the impact of changing labour markets, and in particular labour market flexibility on the unions, more specifically the challenge of reconciling security with flexibility in the modern economy; the role of computer communications systems in the development of common curricula and educational programmes; and the requalification and job placement of redundant employees and trade union advocacy on the issue. As a result of this process of biopolitical self-monitoring, the network

recently decided to develop an e-questionnaire that would serve as the basis for the establishment of a database of information on trade union education in South Eastern Europe: a virtual curriculum in the imperial simulacrum of trade unionism. This reduction of learning within trade unions to technical problem solving is confirmed by our research. As Zoran Djuricic, president of the Independent Culture and Arts Union recalled: With the help of ICT we bridged the period used by the union leaderships to firstly educate themselves and then the workers. Through the exchange of information with TU colleagues at home, Europe and from the ETUC and ICFTU many problems relating to TU activity were solved (e-interview conducted by Hogan and Zivkovic, July 2004).

It is superfluous, but unfortunately necessary, to add that the interests of international labour (ILO, ETUC, ICFTU and tutti quanti) are also articulated within networks of market power, that is within distributed networks of empire. More generally, international institutions outside of the world of labour (for example, the EU through the Stability Pact for South East Europe) have also promoted neoliberalism as the necessary condition for models of trade unionism based on tripartite collective bargaining and on social partnership with governments and employers in enterprise privatisation. In this sense the virtual distribution of imperial discourses constitutes Balkan trades unions as bureaucratic labour organisations with an interest in mediating conflicts between capital and labour on the territory of empire, that is organisations with a vested interest in the reproduction of market relations within the juridical-ethical framework of empire. The virtual distribution of an isomorphism between distributed networks of imperial authority and networks of bureaucratic authority is best illustrated by a fascinating discussion that took place within SEELEN and that can be found on the web site. On 15-16 December 2001 the Solidarity Centre’s (AICLS) SEE regional office hosted a roundtable in Sofia on the role of trades unions in privatisation, at which the SEELEN network was launched. The session on network structure saw the participants break up into groups in which they “produced their own visions for the structure of the network”. With regard to the participants’ understanding of networks there is an interesting virtual doubling of empire as a hierarchical distributed network at work. Trades unions as bureaucratic mass organisations proceed not from a conception of the interests of labour considered as a whole under the reign of capitalism, but from their interest as organisations mediating between capital and labour within a particular administrative-economic territory. Hence the discussions on the structure of networks revolved around the crucial existential question of all bureaucracies: where does power lie? In what space? Who is the sovereign? In the discussions trade union officials wanted to know to whom to address demands for accreditation as legitimate representatives of labour, since such accreditation patently does not lie purely at the national level in the Balkans, let alone at the regional level (now called South East Europe), which, as everyone knows, is a simulacra whose real centre is empire: Who gets the decision-making power in this network? They [the Bulgaria-Macedonia discussion group] mentioned that they do not envision this network as a real “structure”, but rather as a means of communication. There are not real decisions to be made; only technical decisions. We do not need a large amount of resources.

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The Bulgaria-Macedonia discussion group thus forthrightly posed the ontological question of sovereignty, so unmasking the absent centre of power around which the SEELEN, as a distributed network, is structured. And they were quite right that “there are no real decisions to be made” since the notion of a regional network is a pure simulacrum, and meaningful communication can only take place with the centre; that is, as we saw with the foundational exclusion of the SSSS from the network, the right to participation is based on the acceptance of imperial right. SEELEN is not a network of free, autonomous communication between equals, that is external to all relations of material dependency and violence, and therefore involving the “risky” proposal of “validity claims” in a communicative process “oriented towards understanding” (Habermas, 1984, 1987), but rather an externally-mediated network of distributed imperial power in which accreditation is based on the acceptance of imperial right. The Romanian group was then merely recognising the fact that the virtual bureaucratic right to represent labour is based on imperial right over territory when they demanded that the formally distributed structure of the network be replaced by a polycentric structure: “The network should operate in such a way that starts from a central unit with web-like appendages”. The logical consequence of this recognition of the absent centre of authority and mediation within the network was drawn by the Albania-Kosovo group: Thought [sic ] that the network required a structure governed by a board of managers or a coordinating council. This board should be managed by the Solidarity Centre.

By this they meant cuius regio, eius religio[6]. Having recognised the overarching right of empire, and thereby having had their own right to represent labour recognised, the Croatia-Serbia-Montenegro group then undertook to exclude their local rivals on the trade union scene from a share in bureaucratic right: The structure should include a party who is responsible for the issues. This party should include leaders who manage education programs at a national level (this drew much criticism. It was presented as a suggestion for a national “leader” and many questions arose over which union in a single country that leader would come from).

Thus the right of empire to administer territories is complemented by the right of trade union officials to speak on and determine issues of relevance to labour. The only problem with this position was that it raised the spectre of a nationalist-bureaucratic scramble for the feeding trough of imperial authority. Thus, while at first sight there appear to have been differences of opinion on the subject of network structure, in fact there was unanimity. The latter was based on the idea of imperially structured communication, the legitimacy and sole right of representation of trades unions over particular national-territorial spaces, and the unwelcome character of any distributed discourse in which labour might express its subjectivity and difference. We have seen that the autonomy of labour organisations from state structures that is distributed through market and ICT networks is not necessarily in contradiction with the reproduction of imperial or bureaucratic power networks and may in fact be functional for the reproduction of the latter. But what of a distributed discourse that escapes bureaucratic right to open a space for the Balkan multitude to give voice to labour, to represent its own right against the iron cages of modernity (markets, bureaucracy and states)? Such a distributed discourse does not yet exist partly because the digital divide still has to be bridged in the Balkans, but primarily because of the

hegemony of la pense´e unique, the universal belief in free markets, that is, as we saw above, intimately linked with the bureaucratic right of trades unions to represent labour on the imperial territory, and thus with the silencing of Balkan labour. For as Darko Marinkovic – formerly head of the Education and Research Council of Nezavisnost – admitted, trades unions are terrified of the potential of ICTs to generate a counter-discourse of labour representation: It is characteristic that trade union leaderships very often have different attitudes about the introduction and development of ICT in society and in trade unions. Namely, they generally support ICT in society, as important aspect, or precondition for economic and social development, but they do not support, or not to the same degree, ICTs in trade unions. The main reason for this in essence negative approach of trade union leaderships is resistance to changing, or better, improving the organisational structure of trade unions. More concretely, the introduction and development of ICT is always in direct proportion with the level of democracy and transparency of trade union work, and that is not very often in accordance with the interest of bureaucratised trade union leaderships. In that sense, is necessary to analyse in detail the relationship between the democratic infrastructure and ICTs in trade unions (e-interview, October 2004).

However, bureaucratic support for the “development of ICT in society” – that is for its role in distributing imperial networks of market power, imperial models of trade union governance, imperial ethical-juridical norms of sovereignty, in other words for network forms of power that distribute the bureaucratic right to represent labour on the imperial territory – is, as we saw in the case of SEELEN, not necessarily in contradiction with support for the distribution of ICT networks within unions and their integration into bureaucratic structures of organisation, representation and mobilisation. Darko Marinkovic provides us with a refreshingly clear policy statement that highlights the link between ICTs in distributing market power and in distributing bureaucratic authority: ICT has a very important role in the development of new concepts and practices of trade unionism in transition countries . . . Firstly, in contemporary trade union movements the main sources of power are not strikes and demonstrations, street conflicts, but rather knowledge and information. From that point of view, ICT means direct comparative advantage for each trade union. Secondly, one of the most important aims of trade unions in transition countries becomes the development and application of ICT, both in the national economy and in trade unions. From that point of view, ICT directly or indirectly supports the establishment of a new tripartite relationship between state authorities, trade unions, and employers, based on the culture of corporatism. Thirdly, ICT demonstrates the urgent need for systematic, organised, long term education of workers and management in transitional countries in all aspects: new technologies, new approaches to company management, new relationship between employees, trade unions and management, new trade union strategies. The development of ICT is one of the preconditions for the general technological, economic and social development of society, increasing of the standard and quality of life. At the same time it is one of the pillars of political stability and social peace. However, to be competitive, qualified, and competent social partners, trade union have to develop their own ICT infrastructure. The role of ICT is extremely important for the fast and efficient transfer of information, for preventing the manipulation of information and political manipulation, which very often provoke industrial and social conflicts. The experience of EU countries and successful transition countries convinces us that the establishing and development of powerful and efficient instruments of social peace, primarily

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collective bargaining and social dialogue, is not possible without the logistical support of ICT (e-interview, October 2004).

At work is the same isomorphism between trade union autonomy and distributed imperial power based on the terrain of market networks of power that grounds both imperial and bureaucratic sovereignty we noted above. Even the disciplinary techniques are the same: the attempt to bureaucratically police ICT networks; the transfer of authoritative models of collective bargaining and social partnership based on support for neoliberal economic governance; education in these models as enabling bureaucratic accreditation as the legitimate representative of labour; and the role of distributed discourse in the imperial instrumentalisation of Balkan trades unions for the purposes of social and territorial-administrative pacification. The result is the present erasure of Balkan labour as an independent actor in the political field. Hence, at present, ICT only functions to increase the organisational efficiency of trades unions and to legitimate trade union leaderships vis-a`-vis their members within the context of the transition to the market. It is in this sense that the following commentary by the general secretary of the Independent Trade Union Confederation of Montenegro should be seen: The role of ICT in the development of trade unions as bearers of civil society, pluralism and industrial democracy can freely and demonstrably be characterised as one of the most important in the development and modernisation of the entire trade union movement in Montenegro. The efficacy, accessibility, transparency and exchange of information by means of ICT have made our organisation more acceptable, modern, effective, and accessible to all the union members on the territory of Montenegro, and consequently further afield, to the citizens of Montenegro (e-interview with Danilo Popovic, July 2004).

A similar comment comes from Zoran Djuricic, president of the Independent Culture and Arts Union: Also extremely significant [in the development of Nezavisnost] is the use of the Internet and electronic mail between TU activists and in this way the speed of reaction and the carrying out activity directly on the terrain has enabled the workers to develop confidence in the union and accept it as a source of information.

The insertion of Balkans trades unions into distributed networks of economic, informational and political networks of global power, the growing use of ICTs within trades unions to provide information about economic reform and as a means of collective mobilisation[7], generates a new language of modernity through which trade union leaderships legitimate themselves to their memberships. The resulting discourse of union modernisation and democratisation legitimates itself with reference to the necessary economic modernisation and democratisation of transition countries, that is, on the grounds of the new distributed market and imperial forms of global power and the juridical-ethical figures of imperial sovereignty[8]. However, if the legitimacy of bureaucratic right is parasitic on market and imperial right and is able to benefit from the modernity and apparent transparency of greater and more diverse streams of information from above, the sense of inclusiveness and participation this creates in the membership – which is in stark contrast to the previous “transmission belt” function of trades unions under communism – then the increasing use of ICTs in trades unions is merely preparing the ground for a distributed extra-bureaucratic discourse that escapes oligarchic structures of communication sustained by control over information

flows, enables the auditing of union performance and thus has the potential to call into question bureaucratic right and organise forms of counter-coordination that challenge the accredited structures of labour representation based on networks of market power, of social partnership and imperial sovereignty. What one might call a dialectic of the unintended consequences of distribution of networked forms of power – particularly bureaucratic and market power, through informational communication networks – is best illustrated by the increasingly diverse ways in which ICT is being put to use in some Balkan unions, as for example in the “Podkrepa” Confederation of Labour of Bulgaria: In “PODKREPA” CL more specifically, new ICTs are being used to modernise union practices in a number of ways: † In administrative terms, websites have the capacity to be used as information databases containing organisational, personnel, policy documents and regular press releases. This brings efficiency gains by reducing the pressures on union staff time to respond to telephone or postal queries; † On-line service provision – direct access to union leaders and provision for members to communicate their opinion on policy matters and organisational structure. The site is used to promote trade union training and educational services, also new distance learning opportunities (distance learning courses – participating in and organising distance learning courses); † Information provision (via e-mail, website) – provide members with more and timely information on what their leaders are doing, and thus promote the accountability and transparency of e´lite level decision-making. † Communicate on a local, national, and global level, more frequently and effectively to a far greater audience (chat room for discussion); † Networking with other European trade union structures; † Close cooperation with European Trade Union College, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (invitation to trade union training courses, exchange of information on topic of new mutual concerns) (Sasho Petkov, Head of the Education Department, Podkrepa CL, e-communication, November 2004).

All of the above aspects of ICT use have the potential to generate their opposites as the virtual doubling of bureaucratic and imperial power meets its nemesis in the form of a redoubling of virtual extra-bureaucratic and counter-imperial distributed discourses. Informational databases and increasing flows of information from the bureaucratic centre to the membership base certainly generate greater transparency and accountability, but the very indexality (Grieco, 2002) of information means that the virtual doubling of bureaucratic and imperial structures of organisational and territorial power leaves a cybertrace, as in the virtual structure of the SEELEN web site itself, that reveals the real lack of voice of Balkan labour, its position of enclosure and thus its erasure as an independent actor. Hence the kind of plebiscitary auditing that the bureaucratic discourse of union modernisation seems to imply cannot prevent the seepage of flows of information – because of the extra-territorial properties of distributed discourse – outside of bureaucratic informational networks and the formation of distributed discourses of counter-auditing, of a reverse panopticon (Hogan and Grieco, 1999) that can track and resist not only bureaucratic right, but also the networks of market and imperial power on which it depends. (In this sense our paper represents a counter-auditing of empire based on an archaeology of the cybertraces of imperial power.) In distributed discourse the communicative practice of imperial

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governance, precisely because it projects itself through informational networks of power, meets its nemesis in an open-ended, plural and equally universalistic project of meta-governance (Grieco, 2002). The reconfiguration of the time-space dimensions of communicative practices implied by distributed discourses acts like a solvent on bureaucratic, cybernetic, and authoritarian patterns of communication, so that the latter are constantly threatened with implosion by an extra-territorial polyphony of voices in which labour strives to express its right to self-determination from bureaucratic and imperial right. Thus the attempt to give voice from above in order to improve channels of internal communication within unions, to monitor and solicit the views of the membership, and to foster a sense of inclusion and participation in the latter, for example on-line communication with union officials, as in the offer of the web sites of the SSSS and the Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions of Serbia (ASNS) to have “Your Questions Answered by the President” – this plebiscitary parody of distributed discourse may merely advertise the coercive silencing of labour within the informational, economic and political networks of empire. Thus, for example, the internal auditing of the Information and Education Centre of the SSSCG of Montenegro discovered significant dissatisfaction with the communication structures of the union[9]. Moreover, as union leaderships increasingly turn, with efficiency gains in mind, to the internet to organise collective actions in the defence of their members’ interests, then the process of soliciting the views of the membership for the purpose of ritualistic, legalistic, channelled and orchestrated forms of industrial conflict within the framework of empire can easily become reversed as the members themselves begin to communicate freely about what forms of labour representation and struggle best represent their interests in the struggle against empire. If at present the web site of the KNSB Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Bulgaria is conducting an e-ballot of its members about what action they would like the union to take in response to the abrogation of the Labour Code by the Bulgarian Government and employers, with proposed activities ranging from regional or national campaigns and demonstrations to a national general strike (see www.knsb-bg.org/), then this may provide the model of a permanent distributed balloting as workers begin to ask whether or not the model of social partnership that unions like KNSB or Podkrepa CL have been pursuing has enabled capital to undermine workers’ rights, and to ask the foundational question of whether or not the right of labour can co-exist with the right of market and empire, and to develop a communicative practice of counter-coordination that can escape the ossified structures of bureaucratic routinism. Indeed international communication with other trades unions, especially live discussions, may merely serve to legitimate union leaderships to their membership through the discourse of modernisation and modernity in which imperial right expresses itself, but may also expose Balkan trade unionists to the growing “alterglobalisation” movement that believes that “le monde n’est pas une marchandise” and that “une autre monde est possible”, and introduce them to distributed discourses and networks of counter-coordination that can serve as models and provide intellectual, strategic and moral inspiration for their own creative e-interventions. Finally, a growing and increasingly preponderant factor in the dialectical inversion of the virtual doubling of bureaucratic and imperial power into distributed

counter-power is the developing crisis of representation of Balkan labour. The virtual doubling of the market networks as the ontological basis of modern trade unionism and collective bargaining provides so many simulacra of trade union participation and autonomy, while in the real world trades unions are more or less irrelevant and are passive witnesses seduced by the spectacle of the creative destruction of Balkan labour by the free market. It is increasingly clear then that not only is the position of trades unions in the transition completely peripheral and limited to legitimating privatisation in exchange for tokenistic guarantees, but also that this is leading to a permanent crisis of trade unionism. As the roots of this crisis of representation lie in the integration of trades unions into imperial networks of market power, union leaderships – precisely since they accept the tacit “rules of the game” of the market and imperial “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1980) – can only respond to the crisis by appealing to authoritative international actors (international trades unions, EU labour legislation) when making demands on governments and employers. This results in a vicious circle of dependence where the crisis of bureaucratic right creates a demand for imperial intervention to ensure that the transcendental norms of market simulacra (the reconciliation of markets with justice) are enforced, leading to an even deeper crisis of representation. As this crisis deepens informational networks of counter-power may inaugurate a communicative practice of counter-representation that opens up a space in which the reassertion of the autonomy of labour enables its re-foundation as an independent actor.

Conclusion We began this paper by highlighting the ways in which the advent of cyber-unionism presents possibilities for labour to escape the logics and constraints of territoriality, whether this is the enclosed space of the nation-state or of bureaucratic organisations (trades unions and corporations). The heuristic of distributed discourse then enabled us to situate the emancipatory potential of distributed discourse and so avoid the technological determinism of theories of the informational society. By situating distributed informational communication networks within the emergent economic, informational, political and military networks of empire, we suggest that ICT can also be a mechanism for the virtual doubling of imperial power over bodies and spaces. The experience of Balkan trade unionism sharply illustrates the contradictory possibilities of the new informational technologies for the flight from national-territorial structures and for the application of the biopolitical networks of empire. The heuristic of distributed discourse further suggests that the integration of Balkan trades unions as autonomous actors into imperial informational networks on the ground of the market is itself generating the potential for a distributed counter-discourse that challenges both bureaucratic and imperial right. In this sense the virtual distribution and doubling of imperial power finds its potential antithesis in distributed discourses that point to alternative forms of global order. Thus, the concept of distributed discourse opens the space in which a project of meta-governance can be pursued based on the reflexive monitoring of distributed networks of power and the re-appropriation of a space of counter-coordination in which Balkan labour can assert its right to self-determination from empire.

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Notes 1. In-depth interviews, followed up by further discussions, were carried out with officials and researchers from the following unions: UGS Nezavisnost (Serbia), including its Educational and Research Centre and Economic and Social Research Council, as well as the Independent Culture and Arts Union (Granski sindikat kulture i umetnosti, Nezavisnost); the Independent Confederation of Trade Unions of Montenegro (SSSCG), including its Information and Education Centre; the “Podkrepa” Confederation of Labour, Bulgaria, including its Centre for Education; the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity (AFL-CIO), Belgrade; South East European Labour Educators Network; “Apararea” Trade Union of Romania. IR Academics in Serbia and Montenegro were also consulted as were the websites of the above and the following organisations: Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Serbia (SSSS), Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions of Serbia (ASNS). 2. “Covering with a design in which one element covers a part of another” (www.cogsci. princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn). 3. Here we are referring to Foucault’s idea that the territorial boundaries of organisations set parameters within which power is applied to bodies and things to produce the subject of power and in which surveillance is exercised by and over subjects, and that consequently the capacity of actors to evade observation can be the condition for evasion from the exercise of hostile power. See Foucault (1978a, b). 4. Mihail Arandenko of the Economic and Social Research Council of Nezavisnost speculates that “research into the number of everyday users of Internet among the union professionals would . . . reveal that municipal or firm level stewards as a rule do not use Internet, and that intranet of course is non-existent. Headquarters remain as distant from the rank and file members as they have always been. I am aware of an interesting Labor Solidarity Center regional activity in economics education for trade union activists, which includes ICT training to make use of the economic statistics and policy information available on the net”. 5. Thus, for example the Information and Education Centre (IEC) of the Montenegrin TUC (SSSCG) was equipped with three computers, a printer and a scanner by the American Center for International Labour Solidarity (ACILS) on the occasion of its founding in 2001, and a laptop in 2003. The ACILS also paid for computer training and 200 hours of internet time. The ICFTU donated a PC and a printer to the Centre (e-communication, Emina Huic, Coordinator, IEC, SSSCG, November 2004). 6. This reveals a further characteristic of the network. Local nationalist divisions spontaneously reproduce empire as external mediator, and the virtual doubling of this can only mean externally mediated communication. The Albanians demand empire, imperial protection, for fearing of virtually reproducing the former state of Serbian domination. 7. The evidence on this is highly contradictory. For example, Mihail Arandenko, a member of the neoliberal lobby group of economists, G17, and member of the Economic and Social Research Council of Nezavisnost, flatly denies that ICT is being used at present in the co-ordination of labour mobilisation. In fact he suggests that the role of ICTs in Serbian trade unions is “very limited at best. For example, the websites of main confederations are of modest quality, irregularly updated and inward-looking, with little reference to the wider social context” (e-interview, July 2004). 8. Links with international trade union federations are thus a token of union legitimacy, as for example in Nezavisnost’s 1998 Programme and Documents: “The INDEPENDENCE union federation is a full member of the ICFTU and the European Forum of the ECTU. This fact irrefutably proves the correctness of the policy that ‘Independence’ has conducted since its foundation, but also that Europe and the World recognises our readiness to accept and respect the fundamental values that found developed democratic societies in Europe and beyond” (see UGS Nezavisnost, 1998).

9. In the course of the 116 seminars organised by the IEC of the SSSCG between November 2001 and December 2003, and involving 1,610 trade unionists, the latter were asked to express their level of satisfaction with the communicational practices of the union federation: 682 were dissatisfied with their communication with the SSSCG, 554 were satisfied and 113 partly satisfied (document provided by Emina Huic, IEC Coordinator, November 2004).

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Grieco, M. (2002), “Introduction”, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (Eds), Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse, Ashgate, Aldershot. Habermas, J. (1984), The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Beacon Press, London. Habermas, J. (1987), The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. II. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionlist Reasoning, Polity Press, Cambridge. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000), Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004), Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin Publishers, New York, NY. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (Eds) (1999), Global Transformations, Polity Press, Cambridge. Hogan, J. and Greene, A.M. (2002), “E-collectivism: on-line action and on-line mobilisation”, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (Eds), Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse, Ashgate, Aldershot. Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (1999), “Trade unions on line: technology, transparency and bargaining power”, paper presented at a Workshop on Cyber Ontology at the University of North London, London, October. Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2000), “Trade unions on line: technology, transparency and bargaining power”, in Donnelly, M. and Roberts, S. (Eds), Proceedings of the 2nd Scottish Trade Union Research Network Conference, Paisley, June, pp. 55-68. Hyman, R. (1989), The Political Economy of Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice in a Cold Climate, Macmillan, London. Lyotard, J.F. (1984), The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848), The Communist Manifesto, London. Rheingold, H. (2000), Introduction to The Virtual Community. Finding Connection in a Computerised World, rev. ed., MIT, Cambridge, MA, available at: www.rheingold.com/vc/ book/intro.html Said, E. (1978), Orientalism, Pantheon, New York, NY. Schumpeter, J.A. (1977), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Stojiljkovic, Z. et al. (1998), Uloga Sindikata u Tranziciji (The Role of Trade Unions in the Transition), Centar za Proua˜avanje Alternativa and UGS Nezavisnost, Belgrade. Todorova, M. (1997), Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, New York, NY and Oxford. UGS Nezavisnost (1998), Programski Dokumenti (Programmatic Documents), UGS Nezavisnost, Belgrade. War Resisters International (1999), “Declaration of Yugoslav NGOs on the Kosovo War, Belgrade, 13 April”, available at: http://warresisters.gn.apc.org/xyu/en/beogrd2.htm Woodward, S.L. (1995a), Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990, Vol. 1945-1990, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Woodward, S.L. (1995b), Balkan Tragedy – Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. Zivkovic, A. (1999), “Le Protectorat. Instrument de domination?”, Le Monde Diplomatique, July. Zivkovic, A. (Ed.) (2004), “Balkan labour traditions”, Revolutionary History Journal, Vol. 8 No. 2.

(Andreja Zivkovic lectures in Soviet and Russian Politics at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge. He has published widely on the subject of the history and politics of Balkan labour movements from the nineteenth century to the present day, including the reader A. Zivkovic (ed.) (2004), “Balkan labour traditions”, Revolutionary History Journal, Vol. 8 No. 2. He is currently researching the evolution of post-communist industrial relations in the Balkans as well as the time-space dimensions of collective action in comparative and historical perspective. Andreja Zivkovic is also a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique on the contemporary Balkan scene. E-mail: [email protected] John Hogan is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations at the University of Hertfordshire and has researched and published extensively on cyber-unionism. He edited a special issue of the Industrial Relations Journal on this topic in collaboration with Anne Marie Greene, University of Warwick. E-mail: [email protected])

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Information and communications technology use in British unions Jack Fiorito and M. Todd Royle

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College of Business, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA Abstract Purpose – Aims to review British labour union leaders’ views on the use and importance of information and communications technology (ICT) within their unions. Design/methodology/approach – An open-ended e-mail survey and personal interviews conducted in 2000-2001 with union leaders provides the primary original data for this research. Responses are content analysed to assess the importance leaders assign to ICT for unions, to review the ways in which ICT is used, and the costs and benefits associated with ICT use. Charts and verbatim quotes are used to summarise respondents’ views. These views are compared and contrasted with data from the USA. Findings – Union leaders were generally enthusiastic about the importance of ICT for unions, citing various examples of ICT-based benefits to their unions. Some, however, expressed reservations about members’ access to ICT and potential “digital divides”, while others warned that ICT may encourage unions to neglect worker desires for “a human touch” in helping them resolve problems. British union leaders’ views generally reinforce findings from an earlier survey in the USA, although direct comparisons are limited. Originality/value – Provides information on ICT views from a reasonably broad sampling of British union leaders and demonstrates similarity of views across Britain and the USA. Keywords Communication technologies, Trade unions, United Kingdom, Employees Paper type Research paper

Introduction For well over two decades, management literature has explored and analysed information and communications technology’s (ICT’s) impact on organisational performance (see for example Dewett and Jones, 2001). Naturally, the principal focus has been profit or “bottom-line” impacts in business organisations, i.e. do ICT investments increase efficiency, and if so, how and how much? Only within the last decade have management and industrial relations researchers begun to explore ICT impacts in labour organisations and on labour movements (e.g. Lee, 1997; Shostak, 1999; Fiorito, Jarley and Delaney, 2000, Fiorito, Jarely, Delaney and Kolodinsky, 2000; Greer, 2002; Diamond and Freeman, 2002). Much of this literature has focused on the question of whether ICT holds promise to reverse labour’s decline, and much of it is based on the US case where labour decline has been dramatic and a more long-standing problem than in most other nations.

critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 pp. 180-193 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043 DOI 10.1108/17422040510595663

A debt of gratitude is owed to Mike Connelly, John Gennard, Ed Heery, Phil Taylor, and Martin Upchurch for their assistance in identifying and contacting union officers and staff who contributed information to this study. Gregor Gall and Ed Heery provided particularly helpful comments in early stages of the project. Of course, this study was made only possible through the cooperation and assistance of the union officers and staff who contributed information used in this report. The first author was a visiting professor at the University of Stirling at the time the data were collected for this study.

Among advanced industrial democracies, union decline has been most pronounced in the USA. Between the 1950s and 2000, union density (per cent organised of wage and salary workers) fell from roughly one-third of the workforce to under one-seventh (Freeman and Medoff, 1984; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001). While the decline has been most dramatic in the USA, parallel trends have been noted in Australia (Jarley et al., 2002), the UK (Towers, 1989; Waddington and Whitson, 1997), and elsewhere (Troy, 1990). In the UK, union membership has fallen continuously since 1979 (Waddington and Whitson, 1997, p. 515), and union density was estimated to have dropped from over 50 per cent in the 1970s to approximately 32 per cent in 1995 (Heery, 1997, p. 94). Metcalf (2000) noted that this trend has continued, and estimated UK membership at 30 per cent as of 1999. Recent statistics (according to a DTI report published in July 2004) are encouraging for unions in that union density rose in the UK in 2003 (for the first time since the Labour Force Survey started to measure union membership in 1989). However, Trades Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary Brendan Barber cautioned that there should be no complacency by unions because the DTI report also reveals that TUC membership fell by 250,000 in 2003 (www.tuc.org.uk). Given the historical and cultural UK-US links, broadly similar legal systems, and the global nature of economic forces that drive these trends, parallels in unionisation trends are not terribly surprising. Also unsurprising is that these trends have spurred union efforts to innovate and adapt to their changing environments. Interestingly, many of these non-US studies note parallels with US union problems and adaptation efforts, and it is clear that many unions abroad have looked to their American counterparts for possible solutions to their own decline. For example, Jarley et al. (2002) observed that the Australian “Organizing Works” programme is modelled closely on the AFL-CIO’s “Organizing Institute” programme. British Trades Union Congress officials followed the AFL-CIO’s lead by creating an “Organising Academy” in 1998, but also earlier in terms of public relations campaign themes and new forms of membership (Heery et al., 2000; Mason and Bain, 1993; Towers, 1989; Waddington and Whitson, 1997). With a recent movement toward a new system of formalised employer recognition of unions under law (the Employment Relations Act 1997) based on worker voting (see Gall and McKay, 1999; 2000), a tenet of US law for over 60 years, the parallels seem likely to grow. Not surprisingly, a growing area of parallel interest is union adoption of ICT. Given the importance of innovation in union organising success (Fiorito et al., 1995; Shostak, 1991), and the central role of information and ICT in union functions (e.g. Lee, 1997; Shostak, 1999), ICT is clearly a key issue for unions. Clark and Gray (2001) reported that ICT qualifications are growing in importance for union staffing decisions in US unions. Lazarovici (1999) cited cases reflecting a vital role for ICT in some recent US organising campaigns. Lucore (2002) reports that one of America’s largest unions, the Teamsters, has begun providing both members and non-members with access to easy internet links to job openings with union employers. This is being done both to help Teamsters’ members find other jobs after layoffs and to act as a resource for non-Teamsters who would like to work in an organisation with union representation. US academics have begun to examine union ICT use systematically (Fiorito, Jarley and Delaney, 2000; Fiorito, Jarely, Delaney and Kolodinsky, 2000). The Ad Hoc Committee on Labor and the Web (1999) pointed out numerous ways that unions can adapt ICT and especially the internet to their own ends. Similarly, Hogan and Grieco (2000) noted

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that UK unions have found many and varied uses for the web. They also noted considerable room for improvement. Dancsok (1996) found that UK, Canadian, and US unions were all rapidly adopting new ICT, although she noted that UK unions were trailing US unions in ICT adoption. Reflecting the perceived importance of ICT and perhaps a sense that British union ICT adoption needs to be accelerated, the (Trades Union Congress, 2001) recently sponsored a special conference focusing on unions and how they can use the internet. Organisational theory and ICT in unions Given what we know of institutional theory it seems likely that ICT will indeed catch on, beyond the possibly rhetorical pronouncements of key figures in unions themselves. Unions represent what Dimaggio and Powell (1983, p. 148) call organisational fields. These are “sets of organisations that in aggregate constitute an area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies and other organisations that produce similar services or products” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983, p. 148). With that in mind, the work of Greenwood et al. (2002) demonstrates the opportunity that a professional association, or a group of labour unions in this case, has to envision change. In other words, such associations can respond to shortcomings of the past and respond to the contemporary competitive environment by endorsing local innovations and shaping their diffusion. In this case it involves promoting the implementation and advancement of information technologies. In essence these associations of professional groups play a central role in “monitoring compliance with normatively and coercively sanctioned expectations” (Greenwood et al., 2002, p. 62). The union association, i.e. the TUC, may then engage in discourse that legitimates what affiliated unions “do” and thus adjust what it means to “be” a union (Greenwood et al., 2002). Institutional theorists (e.g. Scott, DiMaggio and Powell) have contributed much to the field’s current understanding of the interplay of environments and the relationships that organisations have with them (Delbridge et al., 2001). According to Scott (2003, p. 129), institutional theory in an organisational context has emerged in its current form since the 1970s and has continued to propagate the view of the organisation as an open system. That means there is a fluid boundary between a particular organisation and an environment made up of other similar organisations. Additionally, “[with respect to] the attention to the technical or task environment of organisation, institutional theory reflects the importance of the social and cultural environment with its various regulative, normative, and cognitive influences” (Delbridge et al., 2001). What one may then tentatively expect to see is a convergence in form toward “best practice” between unions in similar environments. Greenwood and Hinings (1996) have developed the notion of organising templates or archetypes. These are defined as sets of systems and structures reflected in ideas, beliefs and values (what the authors call the “interpretive scheme”) (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996, p. 1052; Delbridge et al., 2001). In general, the cultural environment provides a system of beliefs that is taken for granted but that nonetheless acts as a “template for organising” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991, p. 28; Delbridge et al., 2001). Given that individuals in organisations both in the UK and the USA generally believe in a democratic process and in representation (albeit with limitations in employing organisations), it seems unlikely that ICT deployment will massively and suddenly jeopardise the viability of previous union structures.

The general sense of urgency that union leaders assign to ICT implementation is theoretically justified when one considers the role of transaction costs and the nature of collective actions. Bonchek (1995) advanced the notion that a reduction in communication, organisation, and information costs increases collective action. Olson (1971) first applied the theory of transaction costs to collective action groups – unions for our purposes – in his book The Logic of Collective Action. Olson (1971, p. 48) cited three different problems that keep large groups from achieving their interests. The first two are best described as “free rider” problems. That is, the larger the group the less a person acting in the group’s interest receives, and the less likely that an individual will gain enough from getting the collective good to bear the burden of providing even a small part of it (Olson, 1971, p. 48). Be that as it may, the more important point with respect to ICT use is Olson’s (1971, p. 47) prescription that transaction costs are “the costs of communication among group members, the costs of bargaining among them, and the costs of creating, staffing and maintaining any formal organization”. The use of the internet can reduce those transactions costs (Diamond and Freeman, 2002). Transaction costs affect group efficiency and the group’s ability to overcome the “free-rider” problem. Central to our concerns is the tendency of “free riders” to make organisations less efficient. In addition, lowering communication costs allows the shifting of funds from one area of the organisation to another that is in more need of the resources and where such funds can be more productively utilised (Bonchek, 1995), e.g. to organising and recruiting. Lower communication costs also improve both the quality and quantity of information available to the organisation, thus reducing uncertainty and improving the quality of decisions taken (Bonchek, 1995). This point has been demonstrated in vivo by Lucore (2002), who reported that ICT diffusion has aided unions by electronically providing affiliated bodies with sample contracts for the purposes of organising and for crafting language for wage negotiations, in a more timely and economically efficient manner. The purpose of this report is to summarise the views of UK union officers and staff (particularly organisers) on the role of ICT in light of the conceptual outlines sketched above. The data for this study are drawn from questionnaire responses and interviews. The overall focus of the research was on the meaning and process of union renewal (see Fairbrother, 2000). One question addressed an emergent area of union innovation, the use of ICT. This question asked union officers and staff to assess the importance of ICT for the future of their union. Research method Data were collected between September 2000 and February 2001 through an open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. (Most questionnaires were completed in December 2000 and January 2001.) Potential respondents were identified in consultation with UK union officials and with appropriate faculty at UK universities. In identifying potential respondents, emphasis was placed on seeking individuals knowledgeable about their unions, particularly about organising matters. Approximately 50 individuals were thus identified. In most instances, these persons were contacted by e-mail and were invited to participate in the study via an e-mail questionnaire. The purpose of the study was described and confidentiality of responses was promised to participants. Most of those contacted agreed to receive the questionnaire and in these cases it was sent to them in a

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subsequent e-mail message. Those who had not returned a completed questionnaire within approximately three weeks were contacted again and encouraged to complete the questionnaire (e.g. a re-mailing of the questionnaire was offered in case the earlier mailing had been reported lost). In one instances a questionnaire was sent and returned by Royal Mail at the request of the respondent. In a few instances, personal interviews were conducted. In all, 23 usable questionnaires were returned or completed in this way (a response rate of roughly 50 per cent) and are used as the primary database for this report. This primary database is supplemented by additional information from 12 semi-structured interviews with some of these and other union officers and staff. For example, a number of brief interviews were conducted with various union officers and staff in attendance at the TUC meeting in Glasgow during September 2000 (i.e. early in the data collection process). Questionnaire responses were sorted by question. For each question, responses were reviewed several times before developing a content-coding scheme based on recurring patterns or themes in responses. Each response to each question was then content-coded for the presence or absence of these recurring patterns. The analysis below is organised around the results from the content coding for the question on ICT’s role, with verbatim or minimally-edited responses used to illustrate or clarify the meaning of results. The unions and respondents As noted above, usable questionnaire responses were received from 23 individuals. These individuals represent 13 different unions in a variety of industries. (Except for one union with three responses, no more than two respondents are from any single union.) All 13 unions are TUC affiliates. These unions tend to be relatively large, with an average membership of about 398,000, but range in size from just under 17,000 to over 1 million, with a median size of approximately 288,000 according to published data (Trades Union Congress, 2000). Except for one union with predominantly public sector membership, the respondents’ unions are primarily private sector-based. The private sector industries represented include manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, retail, construction, and transportation. One union described its membership as professionals, and two would be considered general unions by most accounts. In sum, the respondents’ unions reflect a broad cross-section of British industry and occupations, but with an emphasis on large, private sector unions. The individual respondents range from general secretaries to organisers who are actively conducting organising and recruitment campaigns on a day-to-day basis. Sample titles include general secretary, national secretary, deputy general secretary, regional officer, assistant regional officer, recruitment officer, and senior organiser. It should be noted that the vast majority of the respondents were nominated by UK academics who actively study unions, or by union or TUC staff. UK results and UK-US comparisons The key question for our purposes solicited responses to the following: “Do you think computers and other information technology (IT) will play an important role in your union’s future? Please explain”. Nearly all respondents provided an initial answer that can be easily classified as a “yes”. In fact, the only response not so classified discussed

specific ICT activities for the union, but simply did not provide a clear enough assessment of importance to be classified readily as a yes or no. Indeed, as shown in Figure 1 many respondents (41 per cent) offered emphatic positive responses using superlative terms such as “enormous”, “massive”, “absolutely central”, “unquestionably”, and the like. Some responses indicated that e-mail and other ICT applications have become a routine part of conducting union business, including union ballots. One particularly creative response elaborated on the tone of many:

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Well obviously! Do I really need to [explain]? We communicate with them. Everybody communicates with them. Our members work with them. We are enthralled, entertained, nauseated, liberated, and oppressed by computers. We are spied on by computers. We protest against, and organise in the organisations we need to confront, using computers. We maintain our systems of information by using them and have access to more information than we can use, but yet computers can prevent us from getting the very information we need. We can reach members and many others using computers in far flung parts of the country and the world using computers. We need to work faster to keep up to date with computers but we will never be fast enough. We are using web sites and email without even thinking too much about them, etc., etc.

Although this comment reflected the majority’s thoughts about the ubiquity of computers and suggests the sense of importance attached to them by many, one response noted concerns about “digital divides”: Yes I do [but] it is still very costly, particularly for our union which is not rich . . . [Ours] is one of the industries where technology cannot replace manual work in many areas . . . there is no computer in sight [on the job] . . . Many [of our] workers may not have the funds to get a computer at home . . . [They may be] illiterate and may not feel comfortable using a computer. So I believe ICT will be important, particularly in sorting out membership lists and sending out letters, but I can also see that it may create further problems for our industry as the two-tiered ICT society is developed.

Indeed, this trepidation over the so-called “digital divide” is well founded. The divide extends across several demographic characteristics that may be of concern to labour unions, most notably age, income, education, ethnicity, and marital status (Akhter, 2002). For example, as people age they show a greater reluctance to adopt new technologies and become more cautious in their decision making, thus increasing their

Figure 1. ICT important for the future?

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level of commitment to doing things the same way they have always done them (Akhter, 2002; Bostwick, 1973). As income increases the perception of the value of one’s time also increases, thus the relatively better off are more likely to take advantage of time-saving ICT devices (Akhter, 2002; Goldman and Johansson, 1978). Better-educated individuals exhibit greater evaluation propensity, and education can thus be said to cause one to be more informed about the use of the internet (Murthi and Srinivassan, 1999). All of these variables may affect the ability of any organisation to realise fully the benefits of new ICT investment, but the current trend favours such investment (Akhter, 2002). In a published report, “Falling through the net: toward the digital inclusion”, the United States Department of Commerce (n.d.) proposes that the gulf between the digital “haves” and “have-nots” is narrowing dramatically (www.ntia.doc.gov2000). Given the global nature of technological changes, the UK is likely to experience similar occurrences. The survey of union IT (Fiorito, Jarley and Delaney, 2000) lends partial support to this claim by examining the effect of ICT on staff redundancies within American unions. If the gulf between the “haves” and “have-nots” were widening among individuals, we would expect to find that unions were experiencing a reduction in staff size or consolidation of functioning in response to ICT adoption. This does not appear to be the case. Of responding US unions, 92 per cent stated “not at all” or “not much” to the item that read, “Some staff have lost jobs due to the implementation of technology”. At the same time, an overwhelming proportion (95 per cent) indicated that union staff jobs had changed due to ICT (responding “somewhat” or “very much”). In addition, there is some indication that within the unions themselves there is the emergence of an ICT e´lite group that may be distancing itself from other staff. Over two-thirds (69 per cent) of US unions responded affirmatively to the statement that “Technology implementation is the duty of specialists in our union”. Similarly, 54 per cent of American unions surveyed reported that one particular person in the union was in charge of technology issues. With respect to gender, Fiorito, Jarley and Delaney (2000, p. 14), found for the USA that “. . . gender composition does not appear to distinguish between unions using many and few ICT forms . . . there was no apparent difference between those [unions] falling above or below the gender composition median”. Gender composition in labour unions then, is not a liability, were one to mistakenly assume that women are somehow less technologically inclined, and that those unions with higher percentages of female members would therefore be less prone to adopt ICT. Unions then have seemingly overcome at least one hurdle along the “digital divide”, and not a moment too soon, at least for unions in the UK. Recent figures indicate that the proportion of women (29.3 per cent) in the UK workforce who are unionised is now almost equal to that of men (29.4 per cent). If this trend continues, density among women will overtake that of men sometime in 2004 (www.tuc.org.uk). There is some concern that technology is a double-edged sword. That is, making the members and leaders easily accessible via ICT also creates the possibility of easier unauthorised access. Leaders may be reluctant to establish a means by which their opponents or others can easily contact the membership. Leaders of some unions, like Roger Lyons, then of MSF, have been sceptical of their own membership’s ICT capabilities and may see investments as a potential waste of scarce resources.

Further, although some unions are using the web and other ICT as an organising tool, e.g. to provide online membership applications, this can also present problems. One official stated that while his union has used the web in such ways, his union lacked the staff needed to evaluate their experience and to ensure that the union is making the best use of ICT. That is, he could not honestly say whether online recruiting had a positive impact or an impact that justified its expense. He further noted that signature requirements at the time of the interview (2001) limited the possibility of “closing the transaction” of membership sign-up online. Another interviewee suspected that web-based organising is likely to yield members who are particularly expensive to service. That is, they seek out the union because they already have problems requiring union attention. It is not obvious that the internet might be any different in this regard than any other worker-initiated joining, and this comment may in fact reflect some xenophobia or a general cynicism about worker-initiated joining as opposed to members recruited through union initiatives. There is the possibility, however, that screening “problem cases” may be more difficult for unions via electronic media than it is via other means such as face-to-face contact. In explaining their views on the importance of ICT, British respondents commonly described three application areas. The responses were classified in this regard, and the results are also summarised in the figure (Figure 1). As shown, the most oft-cited application area involved union administration or research (55 per cent), followed closely by servicing and communicating with members (45 per cent), with organising applications following third (32 per cent). Some examples of responses to the question on ICT’s importance in this vein include the following: Enormous. The tracking of membership and the monitoring of organisation activity are crucial. We now manage by reference to facts instead of fairy stories. Yes, of course. For all kinds of reasons: joining up on line; e-mail mass communication; research; maintain databases; track movements of members; training. Yes. Faster response times. Better briefed officers. More support for stewards. More attractive to young people. Yes. We already get lots of visitors to our web page with members downloading application forms, etc. We have just revised the site to give access to organising information and tools. It will over the next five to ten years. For example, a recent survey of [our] members found that e-mail was the most effective way of communicating with members. The internet is a valuable source of information and advice for activists, etc.

Again US union ICT data suggest similar patterns. Almost all American unions (95 per cent) responded that they used IT for administrative functioning with particular emphasis placed on maintaining union membership rosters and tracking dues payments, bookkeeping, and streamlining office work processes. In all of these areas large majorities reported their IT use as “extensive”. Similarly, IT was used for servicing and communicating with members (93 per cent cited IT use in newsletter production) and regional offices (71 per cent) at the time the survey was conducted. Tracking current organising campaigns appears to be at least as important for the Americans as it is with the UK sample. Of the American sample, 59 per cent responded that their union used ICT to track organising, with another 11 per cent reporting they would do so within two years.

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One or two British respondents mentioned ICT as an aid to training. Providing activist training in a CD-ROM format, for example, offers some convenience, interactivity, and self-pacing advantages not available in more conventional training methods. American unions also dedicate ICT investments to similar functions. The survey of union IT (Fiorito, Jarley and Delaney, 2000) found that 77 per cent of American unions used ICT to deliver tutorials or training modules. In a different vein, some British responses (18 per cent) emphasised the job-related impacts of ICT on members due to the nature of the jobs or industry the union represents (e.g., telecommunications), while two responses (9 per cent) stressed that whatever the benefits of ICT, unions need to keep the personal touch that members value: [. . .] However, new technology should not be at the expense of the old familiar processes. Nothing is quite as effective as face to face communication. . . .[ICT] has its limits, as what most members want is a person to look after them.

Despite such concerns and some earlier-noted reservations regarding digital divides, the general view of British union leaders and activists toward ICT adoption revealed in this study was clearly optimistic, and in many instances enthusiastic. This was indicated in an overwhelmingly positive initial response to the question on ICT’s importance, the superlative terms used in many of those initial responses, and in more thoughtful elaborations regarding the various applications and impacts of ICT offered by many respondents. These responses echo those from the earlier survey of union IT, administered to a broad cross-section of American labour unions. In both nations, union leaders cited both effectiveness and efficiency benefits of ICT. Notably from the American survey, strong pluralities or majorities of respondents credited ICT with improving a wide range of union functions ranging from 46 per cent citing improvements in inter-union coordination, through 63 per cent citing improvements in organising, to 98 per cent citing improvements in servicing current members. These data are shown in Figure 2, along with the percentages citing ICT as responsible for improved union efficiency and as critical for the union’s future success. In each functional area (coordination, organising, and service), respondents further indicated that they expected greater benefits to accrue from ICT use in the future. For example, as compared to the 63 per cent who cited improved organising at the time of the survey, 76 per cent expected ICT to improve organising in the future. More generally, and as shown in Figure 2, fully 72 per cent felt that ICT use was critical for

Figure 2. Per cent of US unions citing ICT-based improvements by function and outcome

union success in the future. The American responses also supported the view that ICT contributes to better efficiency. A supermajority of 91 per cent responded “somewhat” or “very much” to the statement “our efficiency has increased due to the implementation of [ICT]” (also shown in Figure 2). While less systematically detailed, the responses from British union leaders reported above are clearly in keeping with the American responses. Owing to differences in methods and an interval spanning more than three years between the American and British data collection, close comparisons are impossible. Yet clearly the import of the responses from both nations is comparable: ICT is seen as already critical, growing in importance, and a highly promising area for future innovation by vast majorities of leaders in both American and British unions. Summary and conclusions This paper has reported the results of questionnaires and interviews from a variety of union officials ranging from organisers to general secretaries in a diverse group of mostly large and mostly private sector UK national unions. In addition, it has drawn some interesting comparisons with American unions. It has also pointed out possible theoretical grounds that justify, or at least help explain or frame many of the statements made. Nearly all the unionists in the sample see an important role for ICT in their union’s future, and many are emphatic on this point, using terms such as “massive” or “enormous” to make their point. Administration, service, and communication with members were the most prominently cited areas of ICT application, although organising received a fair number of mentions and training of union staff, representatives, or activists were also mentioned. More specific applications mentioned include using web sites to help workers join unions online, e-mail to communicate with members, providing representative training materials on CD-ROMs, and the internet as a means of conducting research on companies, to name a few. In the USA and UK the future holds promise for unions if they can effectively adapt ICT. One specific possibility for union evolution is that unions collectively create what Freeman and Rogers (2002) call “open source” unions. The term is drawn directly from computer programming and denotes the sharing of functionalities and modules in a “common language” that once in place offers others the opportunity to build on. The expected outcome would be a collaborative, common platform that everyone can share. Consequently open source unions have more extended and networked dealings than do present unions. This is so because in contrast to many current unions, which are based largely on formal groups of workers in majority-member units within employing organisations with collective bargaining agreements (particularly in the USA), open source unions include workers who seek representation or union advice but whose numbers fall short of a majority at their workplace. These members would be full-fledged members who could attend to issues such as enforcement of legal working rights, as well as bargain for themselves individually, but who could not collectively bargain. ICT is a necessary but not fully sufficient condition for the creation of open source unions. We note this simply because Freeman and Rogers (2002) do not claim the technology (e.g. the internet) alone will allow them to flourish, but rather technology is necessary to facilitate effective interaction between union staff and members when members do not fall into compact majority-member units. As with

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Shostak’s (1999) “CyberUnions”, Freeman and Rogers’ open source unions concept recognises that ICT may not only improve the functioning of unions in their current form, but also contribute to the evolution of unions toward new forms that may be better adapted to changing work environments or at least to certain parts of newer work environments. Another notable issue mentioned by at least one respondent involves the idea that ICT can help unions to attract young workers. This underscores Shostak’s (1997) point about effective ICT use conveying to young workers that unions are “with it”. In Hurd’s (1998) terms, ICT can aid in “contesting the dinosaur image”. While symbols are important, this is more than a symbolic issue. Today’s youth are growing up in very different communications environment from that of their parents. To connect with youth, unions need to use the media that are used by youths. Mobile phones, text messaging, e-mail, web sites, and surfing the web are all quite familiar to youth, and must be fully exploited by unions as means to connect. Despite the overall enthusiasm about ICT, some serious concerns were mentioned, not least of these being the adverse job impact that ICT and changes in certain industries will have on some unions’ members’ jobs. Such hesitations were not apparent when comparing the UK information with survey responses of American unions, although such comparisons are limited in that the American survey only queried respondents about union staff member jobs. Another concern was the possibility that “digital divides” will widen between the ICT-haves and ICT-have-nots, both at the organisation level and the level of the individual member. In addition, some respondents expressed concern that unions may rely too much on ICT and lose sight of the fact that members often want a person to help them. Some noted that face-to-face communication and the “personal touch” are often the most effective. However, on a more positive note, those worried by such a scenario might take some solace in the fact that organisational templates for structuring organisations are derived from institutions themselves (like unions). Therefore, radical change is at least problematic, and perhaps impossible because of the organisation’s normative embeddedness (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996, p. 1035, Delbridge et al., 2001). Unions are thus most unlikely to abandon proven “one-on-one” direct communications. Rather, ICT provides means to “broaden the bandwidth” for richer communication and a means to reach some members, prospective members, and others (e.g. family members and the general public) who may not have been reached or hardly reached at all in the past. Despite some concerns about digital divides and the dangers of losing the personal touch, the view from both sides of the Atlantic regarding ICT and its implications for union functioning is decidedly positive. Is there a factual basis for this optimism? As noted earlier, there is ample anecdotal evidence citing ICT’s positive impacts on unions, and noting greater potential for positive impacts (e.g. Lee, 1997; Shostak, 1999). In addition, Fiorito et al. (2002) recently reported systematic evidence suggesting substantial positive ICT effects for US union organising. Clearly, further investigations are needed. The literature (e.g. Dewett and Jones, 2001; Diamond and Freeman, 2002; Fiorito et al., 2002; Lee, 1997; Shostak, 1999) to date has identified a number of potential ICT-based benefits for unions and organisations more generally, including: . time savings, e.g. getting tasks done faster; . cost savings, e.g. getting it done cheaper, including savings in transaction costs;

. . .

.

.

flexibility, e.g. ease of tailoring messages to specific audiences; access, e.g. reaching workers via new methods or media; clarity, e.g. the ability to broadcast widely messages unfiltered by established media; coordination, e.g. via better communication between field offices or organisers and headquarters staff specialists; and image, e.g. to show that unions (or other organisations) are “with it” rather than dinosaurs from a bygone era.

Systematic study of these and perhaps other ICT benefits in British (or other) unions is needed. While British union leaders touched on some of these factors in their comments, and American union leaders did so in some of their responses to structured questions in the earlier study, neither study expressly sought to assess all of these benefits in a systematic manner. Studies along such lines could add considerable illumination to the role of ICT in unions and in their futures. Such studies may help to clarify whether ICT adoption by unions will simply mean greater efficiency within current union forms, altogether new forms, or both. References Ad Hoc Committee on Labor and the Web (1999), “Why the internet matters to organized labor”, available at: www.mindopen.com/laborweb Akhter, S.H. (2002), “Digital divide and purchase intent: why demographic psychology matters”, Journal of Economic Psychology, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 321-7. Bonchek, M.S. (1995), “Grassroots in cyberspace: recruiting members on the internet or do computers facilitate collective action? A transaction cost analysis”, paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April. Bostwick, J. (1973), Aging and Behavior, Springer, New York, NY. Clark, P.F. and Gray, L.S. (2001), “The 2000 survey of union administrative practices: preliminary findings and analysis”, paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association, New Orleans, LA, January. Dancsok, M. (1996), “The trade union movement and the internet”, available at: www.labournet. org.uk/sbu/Internet.html Delbridge, R., Simms, M., Heery, E., Salmon, J. and Simpson, D. (2001), “(Re)organizing the UK labour movement: a case study of institutional change”, paper presented at the EGOS Colloquim, Lyon, 5-7 July. Dewett, T. and Jones, G.R. (2001), “The role of information technology in the organization: a review, model, and assessment”, Journal of Management, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 313-46. Diamond, W.J. and Freeman, R.B. (2002), “Will unionism prosper in cyberspace? The promise of the Internet for employee organization”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 569-86. DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. (1983), “The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, pp. 147-60. DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. (1991), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Fairbrother, P. (2000), Unions at the Crossroads, Mansell Publishing, London.

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Fiorito, J., Jarley, P. and Delaney, J.T. (1995), “National union effectiveness in organizing: measures and influences”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 48, July, pp. 613-35. Fiorito, J., Jarley, P. and Delaney, J.T. (2000), “The adoption of information technology by US national unions”, Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Vol. 55 No. 3, pp. 3-34. Fiorito, J., Jarley, P. and Delaney, J.T. (2002), “Information technology, union organizing, and union effectiveness”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 40, pp. 627-58. Fiorito, J., Jarley, P., Delaney, J.T. and Kolodinsky, R. (2000), “Unions and information technology: from Luddites to cyberunions?”, Labor Studies Journal, Vol. 24, Winter, pp. 3-34. Freeman, R.B. and Medoff, J.L. (1984), What Do Unions Do?, Basic Books, New York, NY. Freeman, R.B. and Rogers, J. (2002), “Open source unionism: beyond exclusive collective bargaining”, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 3-4. Gall, G. and McKay, S. (1999), “Developments in union recognition and derecognition in Britain, 1994-98”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 601-4. Gall, G. and McKay, S. (2000), “Trade union recognition in Britain: the dawn of a new era?”, working paper, Labor Research Department, London. Goldman, A. and Johansson, J.K. (1978), “Determinants of search for lower prices: an empirical assessment of the economics of information theory”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 176-86. Greenwood, R. and Hinings, C.R. (1996), “Understanding radical organizational change: bringing together the old and new institutionalism”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 21, pp. 102-54. Greenwood, R., Suddaby, R. and Hinings, C.R. (2002), “Theorizing change: the role of professional associations in the transformation of institutionalized fields”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 45 No. 1, pp. 58-80. Greer, C.R. (2002), “E-voive: how information technology is shaping life within unions”, Journal of Labor Research, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 215-35. Heery, E. (1997), “Annual review article 1996”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 35, pp. 87-109. Heery, E., Simms, M., Simpson, D., Delbridge, R. and Salmon, J. (2000), “Organising unionism comes to the UK”, Employee Relations, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 38-53. Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2000), “Trade unions online: technology, transparency, and bargaining power”, in Donnelly, M. and Roberts, S. (Eds), Proceedings of the 2nd Scottish Trade Union Research Network Conference, University of Paisley, Paisley, June, pp. 55-68. Hurd, R.W. (1998), “Contesting the dinosaur image: the labor movement’s search for a future”, Labor Studies Journal, Vol. 22 No. 5, pp. 5-30. Jarley, P., Harley, B. and Hall, R. (2002), “Innovation and change in Australian trade unions”, Industrial Relations, Vol. 41 No. 2, pp. 228-48. Lazarovici, L. (1999), “Virtual organizing”, America@Work, Vol. 4 No. 9, September, pp. 8-11. Lee, E. (1997), The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism, Pluto Press, London. Lucore, R.E. (2002), “Challenges and opportunities: unions confront the new information technologies”, Journal of Labor Research, Vol. 23, pp. 210-4. Mason, B. and Bain, P. (1993), “The determinants of trade union membership in Britain: a survey of the literature”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 46 No. 2, pp. 332-51.

Metcalf, D. (2000), British Unions: Dissolution or Resurgence Revisited, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, London. Murthi, B.P.S. and Srinivassan, K. (1999), “Consumers extent of evaluation in brand choices”, Journal of Business, Vol. 72 No. 2, pp. 229-56. Olson, M. (1971), The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Scott, W.R. (2003), Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ. Shostak, A.B. (1991), Robust Unionism: Innovations in the Labor Movement, ILR Press, Ithaca, NY. Shostak, A.B. (1997), “Trustees, cyberunions, and tomorrow’s labor relations”, Employee Benefits Journal, Vol. 22, pp. 8-12. Shostak, A.B. (1999), CyberUnion: Empowering Labor through Computer Technology, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY. Towers, B. (1989), “Running the gauntlet: British trade unions under Thatcher, 1979-1988”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 42 No. 2, pp. 163-88. Trades Union Congress (2000), TUC Directory, TUC, London. Trades Union Congress (2001), “Unions and the internet”, conference announcement, available at: www.tuc.org.uk/Internetconference Troy, L. (1990), “Is the US unique in the decline of private sector unions?”, Journal of Labor Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 111-43. United States Department of Commerce (n.d.), “Falling through the net: toward the digital inclusion”, available at: www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fttn00/contents00.html US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2001), “Union members in 2000”, available at: http://stats.bls.gov/ newsrels.htm Waddington, J. and Whitson, C. (1997), “Why do people join unions in a period of membership decline?”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 515-46. Further reading McCarten, J. (2001), “Well managed”, Unions Today, January, pp. 22-3. Trades Union Congress (2004), “No room for complacency on union membership”, available at: www.tuc.org.uk (Jack Fiorito is the J. Frank Dame Professor of Management at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA. Professor Fiorito teaches labour relations, negotiations, and research methods courses. His current research interests include attitudes towards work, jobs, employers, and unions, and how unions function as organisations, including issues of union strategy, structure, and effectiveness. He has authored or co-authored over 50 journal articles as well as many conference papers and book chapters, and has co-edited one book. Professor Fiorito served on the faculties of the University of Iowa and Oklahoma State University prior to joining Florida State University in 1990. During 2000-2001, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He received his PhD in 1980 in Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. E-mail: [email protected] M. Todd Royle is a doctoral candidate in Organisational Behavior at Florida State University. His research interests include accountability, cross-cultural managerial issues, and contextual performance. He also enjoys research on institutional forces and labour movements. E-mail: [email protected])

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Unions and cyber-activism in South Africa Charley Lewis School of Public and Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Parktown, South Africa

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Purpose – The paper aims to present a historical overview of the use of information communications technology (ICT) tools and platforms, particularly e-mail and the internet, as tools of cyber-activism by the labour movement in South Africa. The paper also aims to give some consideration to constraints and challenges facing unions in the South Africa in the effective deployment of such cyber tools. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on the experience of a participant observer, incorporating analysis of historical examples of the application of the key ICT tools, and supported by reference to relevant documentation and related literature. The use by unions in South Africa of e-mail and the internet as tools of organisation and mobilisation is examined against the background of both access barriers and organisation constraints, and in relation to union strategies to address such challenges. Findings – Despite recognition by the South Africa labour movement of the possibilities of e-mail, the internet and other tools of cyber-activism, the ability of unions to exploit these tools has been limited, characterised by both successes and failures. Research limitations/implications – The paper has a relatively narrow focus on the experiences of specific unions in a single country, leading to conclusions which are not necessarily susceptible to generalisation. The lack of availability of both relevant primary documentation and secondary analysis makes it difficult to assess the accuracy of observations and conclusions. Practical implications – The paper suggests the possibilities and opportunities for unions in similar environments to exploit ICT tools, as well as the barriers and constraints facing their deployment. Originality/value – The paper presents the analysis and reflections of a uniquely placed participant observer regarding how unions in South Africa have been able to exploit e-mail and the internet as tools of cyber-activism. The analysis reveals both possibilities and limitations of cyber-activism in South Africa. Keywords Trade unions, Internet, Electronic mail, Communication technologies, South Africa Paper type Case study

critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 2/3, 2005 pp. 194-208 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043 DOI 10.1108/17422040510595672

www.cosatu.org.za The visitor to the COSATU web site[1] is greeted by a page hued in the bright socialist red that is the hallmark of South Africa’s dominant labour federation[2]. Prominent links off the home page refer the visitor to, among other documents, COSATU Weekly, an internal labour news publication; the text of a recent speech by General Secretary at Cornell University; several submissions to Parliament in response to proposed legislation; and a “Political Discussion Paper” prepared for the forthcoming Central Executive Committee. In addition, one can access sections dealing with policy, news, publications, and the federation’s structure and affiliates. A section devoted to press statements reveals an active media department, which has recently condemned plans by Tiger Wheel and Tyre to retrench 700 workers, noted a demonstration by “Concerned Zimbabweans Abroad” and the “Zimbabwe Crisis

Coalition” in support of COSATU’s condemnation of the Mugabe regime, publicised the achievement of labour’s Job Creation Trust, and mourned the passing of former union leader Joyce Kgoali. COSATU’s web site offers a valuable, voluminous and information-laden resource for members of the federation, journalists and academics. It is an indication of a trade union federation that places a premium on providing its information content as a resource to its members, as well as to the public at large. Further examination of the site reveals that one can sign up to receive, via e-mail, a daily bulletin of labour news stories focusing on South Africa and the continent at large, or ask to be sent the press statements that are e-mailed out several times daily by COSATU’s energetic press department. To what extent does the cyber front end at www.cosatu.org.za reveal a federation that has grasped the new opportunities and tools of the information age? What is the ability of the federation and its affiliates to exploit the still relatively young platforms of the internet and e-mail to strengthen their internal communication, to empower organisation and drive mobilisation? Have the new information communications technology (ICT) tools made any impact on the internal processes and dynamics of South Africa’s unions, on democratisation and decision making? This paper will seek to capture some of the historical development of ICT tools and platforms by unions in South Africa, as well as to examine the use by the labour movement in South Africa of both e-mail and the internet as tools of cyber-activism. Finally, the paper will give some consideration to both constraints and opportunities of cyber-unionism in the South African context, reflecting on some of the strategic issues and organisational tensions presented by ICTs. COSATU and ICTs: a brief history It was barely a year after the creation in 1985 of COSATU as the country’s dominant anti-Apartheid labour federation that unionists began to turn to the nascent electronic world of bulletin boards and e-mail services as a channel of communication. Spurred on by government repression, surveillance and harassment of COSATU, its affiliates and officials – a handful of labour activists led by Taffy Adler – began to experiment with FidoNet-based e-mail and bulletin board services. This culminated in the establishment in 1987 of WorkNet as a local vehicle for electronic communications services, with collaboration and support from the UK-based Labour and Economic Research Centre, and later from Poptel GeoNet (see Lee, 1997; Esterhuysen, 2002). WorkNet’s early Johannesburg-based infrastructure was very much a Heath Robinson-style affair, using home-written software to provide a bulletin board e-mail service linked to the GeoNet server in Germany. Simone Shall, then one of its system operators, recalls the manual and time-consuming process of cutting and pasting messages between platforms[3]. Some of this WorkNet traffic appears to have been a conduit for e-mail communications between the trade unions in South Africa and the ANC-led anti-apartheid liberation movement in exile[3]. Shall recalls receiving Umsebenzi, the then banned underground publication of the SA Communist Party, from the UK via WorkNet’s link to Poptel, sending it out to local journalists, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and unions and then hurriedly deleting it[4]. Although WorkNet was able to notch up some early successes – Lee (1997) cites the fairly effective coordination of a campaign to force Mobil Oil to disinvest from South

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Africa, along with the development of linkages between South African unions and the International Trade Secretariats to which many of them were affiliated – the capacity of all but a few local labour activists to exploit the burgeoning technologies was severely limited. Such channels of communication also became far less urgent with the 1990 unbanning and return from exile of the ANC, and the subsequent negotiated transition to democracy in South Africa. By 1993 WorkNet had decided to change its name to SANGONet to reflect the shifting profile of its subscriber base towards the NGO sector (Esterhuysen, 2002). COSATU nonetheless continued to pursue ICTs as a union tool. Beginning in 1990, in partnership with Italy’s socialist labour federation, CGIL, it began to set up a joint ICT project under the rubric “METRIC”, which sought to apply computer technologies and systems in the areas from which its acronym was derived: membership, education, training, information and communications. The project’s initial focus was on the acquisition of new computers, legalisation of software and the training of computer support staff. Under pressure from affiliates[5], the project soon shifted its focus and resources to the development and implementation of a union membership system, which, although implemented at several unions by the mid 1990s[6] and enjoying some successes, continued to be plagued by technical problems and internal union capacity constraints[7]. Throughout the early 1990s the METRIC Project tended to be concerned with such systems implementation and associated organisational development at the expense of the use of e-mail and the internet. An attempt was made in 1994, however, to link COSATU’s regional offices together by means of e-mail in preparation for the country’s first democratic election in 1994 and as a counter to possible disruption of its communications by the outgoing regime. This was a dismal failure, partly because of the unreliability and lack of user-friendliness of both the freeware program chosen and the donated computers and modems being used, and partly because of lack of skills to deal with such difficulties in the regional offices. Only one regional office was able to use the system to any degree, and then only for personal messages. It was thus not unexpected that COSATU’s advent on the infant internet was at the hands of ANC internet pioneer Tim Jenkin rather than through its own initiative. A veteran of Operation Vula’s[8] actively clandestine networks, which from 1988 had used modems and personal computers, tape recorders and telephones to ensure communications, command and control of the ANC’s underground resistance activities (African National Congress, n.d.), Jenkin had been instrumental in giving the ANC a presence on the web in the run-up to the 1994 democratic election. As the incoming ANC government strengthened its internet presence, Jenkin set up web sites for SA Communist Party, COSATU, and several of its affiliates during 1995. Initially these sites were hosted under the ANC’s domain name, where COSATU’s web site was still resident when it was chosen by labour news portal LabourStart as its “Web site of the Month” in December 1996. In the meantime, COSATU began to explore the possibilities of e-mail as an organisational tool, initially replacing the cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming fax group dial that had been used to distribute its press statements, with e-mail messaging. The federation continued to use WorkNet’s successor, SANGONet, as its internet service provider, and soon upgraded to a proper, remotely-hosted mailing list.

Building on this, and based on the recognition of the potentialities of e-mail and the internet, the final phase of the METRIC Project saw an active campaign to promote the use of e-mail by COSATU and its affiliates. All head and regional office staff were given e-mail addresses and internet access. An e-mail address was also offered to every affiliate, and e-mail and internet training provided. E-mail replaced the hand-written paper-based telephone messaging system at COSATU head office. E-mail became the official channel for distribution of federation documents. During 1997 COSATU took control of its web site, which had until then remained rudimentary and sporadically updated, registering its own domain name and arranging for the site to be hosted by SANGONet. The site was subsequently substantially redesigned and redeveloped, with careful attention being paid to ensuring a functionality aligned to its core objective of information provision, along with a powerful new look and feel. When the site was relaunched in 1998, it showcased the federation’s content, with policy documents and speeches, press statements and publications featuring prominently. COSATU also expanded its use of mailing lists, taking over a private mailing list that had been established by Anna Weekes, spokesperson of the SA Municipal Workers’ Union. Weekes had begun to circulate within the structures of her union, and for some union sympathisers, a digest of labour news stories culled from online newspapers. Thus the Daily Labour News e-newsletter, which continues as a free service to this day, and which has over 1,000 subscribers[9], was born. Over time the integration of COSATU’s e-mail activities and its web site was strengthened. The site visitor can today subscribe to any of the mailing lists operated by the federation. Press statements that go out on its mailing list are dynamically updated on the web site. There is an online enquiry form for membership of any of COSATU’s affiliates, which is e-mailed to the organising department. Considerable effort also goes into ensuring that COSATU constitutional meetings[10] have a substantial presence on the web. Draft congress resolutions, reports and credentials are published in advance; speeches are published as they are delivered; and on occasion COSATU has provided its own news reportage of the congress. In addition a cyber cafe´ is provided for the delegates – at which long queues often form at the printer to secure hard copies of popular speeches. The site has thus grown from the “modest in scope” assessment of Lee (1997, p. 123) to become a substantial resource of both contemporary and historical information, containing over 8,000 documents and enjoying upwards of 90,000 page impressions a month. The site was again redesigned during the course of 2004, but the new interface is more amateurish in design, and is less efficiently maintained. COSATU thus appears to have invested considerable time and resources in developing and applying the tools of cyber-unionism, e-mail and the internet. What, then, of its affiliates, and of unions on the rest of the continent? All of South Africa’s major federations, and a number of their affiliates have internet web sites. An attempt to survey these was undertaken during the course of 2004, examining both links to affiliate web sites from those of the federations, as well as on likely web site addresses based on union acronyms in cases where the existence of such web sites was not immediately apparent[11]. The survey uncovered a total of 24 union web sites in South Africa, of which 17 belong to affiliates of the two largest federations, and four to unaffiliated unions (the

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remaining three are the web sites of the three major federations – COSATU, FEDUSA and NACTU). Overall, just under half of the affiliates of COSATU have web sites, including both its largest and its smallest affiliate[12], as do around a fifth of the affiliates of FEDUSA. No NACTU affiliates appear to have web sites. In general it is the larger unions that tend to be online. The quality and value of many of these web sites leaves a lot to be desired. Many are what are sometimes described as “online brochures”, with static content that does not appear to contain anything current – such as ongoing campaigns, press statements, or recent speeches. Several are defunct: either merely a registered domain name without functional content, or a domain name whose registration has lapsed. The COSATU web site itself stands out as a cornucopia of valuable information and resources, while only the recently relaunched site of its affiliate NUMSA had clearly been updated within 24 hours of the survey. The stability of these web sites as resources for union members or for the public at large may also be questionable. Several of the sites became non-functional (even that of a major federation, FEDUSA) or were resurrected between the date of the original survey and further checking a month later[13]. These figures compare very favourably with the rest of Africa. The Cyber Picket line’s World Trade Union Directory lists a mere 15 union sites across the entire rest of the continent[14]. The overall picture thus reflects a relatively good but rather erratic degree of internet presence, strong by developing country standards, but low in comparison to unions in the European Union (EU) and the USA. Given this relatively advanced level of electronic infrastructure, particularly in the case of COSATU, with organisational support for effective use and apparent integration into union work, it is important to consider the degree to which this is able to support and extend organisation and mobilisation, and to move in the direction of cyber-unionism. Without undertaking a rigorous quantitative assessment, a number of anecdotes (or examples) illustrate both potential and pitfalls. Using e-mail as a union tool The speed and reach of e-mail makes it an effective vehicle for mobilisation. Anna Weekes, spokes person of the SA Municipal Workers’ Union, demonstrated just how effective this could be as the impact of water privatisation loomed large, and multi-nationals Biwater and Dolphin Bay began to eye municipalities as attractive investment options. Weekes’ pioneering use of mailing lists was referred to above. She had also taught herself html coding, designing and setting up a web site for SAMWU at free web host Geocities, before COSATU offered her space at www.cosatu.org.za/samwu/ where the site remained until 2004. Confronted with water privatisation, Weekes began a systematic campaign of e-mailing unions and academics around the world, seeking information about Biwater and Dolphin Bay, and how unions elsewhere had moved to counter them. She was thus able to amass a substantial body of information, as well as build up a worldwide network of support against the privatisation of municipal water services. This led to the public tabling of a substantial report exposing the activities of these multinationals, as well as the launch of a global “Stop Biwater!” campaign. This campaign came to a head when Biwater took legal action to force a local internet service provider to take down an allegedly defamatory SAMWU press statement on

the Stop Biwater! site. In short order, spearheaded by the UK’s LabourNet and by Public Sector International, the site had been mirrored in no fewer than eight countries, and a flood of protest e-mails had been unleashed. Faced with a quick and powerful union response, and under pressure because of the resultant publicity, Biwater backed down, and the allegedly defamatory press statement remained online (Weekes, 1999). COSATU’s Daily Labour News e-mail bulletin has also had its successes. For example, in 2000 a union negotiator from the SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union e-mailed the author to express his gratitude for how the electronic newsletter had strengthened his hand during wage negotiations in the cotton sector. His e-mail spoke of how he had read in the daily bulletin of labour news stories a background article from a business journal which argued that wage increases promoted inflation. Later that day, as he sat down across the table from the employer’s negotiating team, they placed on the table a printed copy of the very same article in order to demonstrate how unreasonable the union’s demands were. His e-mail describes how he could “respond immediately and authoritatively, having read the article and thought about its implications. [They] were stunned” (Lee, 2000a). While this may be an isolated case, it does demonstrate how access to relevant information can empower unionists at the coal face, and how the collapse of time and space enabled by electronic distribution can benefit union structures. COSATU is the only union structure in South Africa that operates substantial, public mailing lists, one to distribute its press statements, and another to circulate the daily e-mail bulletin of labour news referred to above. An examination of the subscriber base of the latter list, more specifically targeted at union structures, enables some limited conclusions to be drawn from its subscriber list. Of the 1,031 subscribers to COSATU’s Daily Labour News mailing list in July 2004, 77 per cent have e-mail addresses that are identifiable as South African[15]. Just over 31 per cent of subscribers are identifiable as structures, employees or organisations within the labour movement (largely COSATU and its affiliates and associated structures[16]). A further 27 per cent of subscribers have identifiably corporate addresses (i.e..co.za), but these may well be from management seeking similar empowerment to that described by the SACTWU negotiator above, rather than union members or shop stewards. The figures thus do not reveal anything conclusive, although they do suggest that a considerable number of union officials (almost exclusively within the COSATU fold) recognise the service as sufficiently valuable to subscribe to it. E-mail has also been used to enlist support from South African unions for campaigns being waged elsewhere. During 2000, COSATU received an e-mail appeal for assistance from workers in Australia. Their company had been bought over by Barlows, a South African multinational, and they were being threatened with retrenchments. They were put in touch with the relevant COSATU affiliate, the SA Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union, who wrote to Barlows management in protest, and tabled the matter at negotiations. However, success has also been mixed with failure. Over 100 of the online membership enquiries described above from the COSATU web site were found languishing – unread and ignored – in the inbox of the COSATU organiser some months after the feature had been introduced.

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Exploiting the union web site Although www.cosatu.org.za has from time to time provided links to a number of global or South African campaigns that the federation has supported, and has even on occasion used a banner advertisement visible for a few seconds to profile particular South African events such the ANC elections campaign or a national strike, the site has not been seen as a major vehicle for mobilisation and organisation. Its primary role has remained that of an information window, and for this the site has been widely commended by unionists and commentators alike. An examination of the web site over the period January-December 2004, reveals a monthly average of over 27,000 visitors to the site, and a total of over a million page impressions for the period[17]. Of the just over 70 per cent of those visitors for whom domain details can be traced, just over 37 per cent are South African and almost one-quarter are.com addresses. The UK, Canada, Holland and Australia feature as the most common country code visitors, accounting respectively for between 1.7 and 1.0 per cent of known visitors. Sources as diverse as Mexico and Saudi Arabia, Slovenia and Finland, and even the US military feature as visitors. While this does suggest that the site is well patronised by South Africans, the proportion of external visitors is surprisingly high, partly perhaps because of the international respect COSATU enjoys, but surely also because of lack of capacity and connectedness among its rank and file (which issue will be discussed later). The pages enjoying the greatest number of impressions over the year are, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the number of non-South African visitors, those with information about the federation and its affiliates. Pages of links to useful labour resources and giving access to policy documents ranked in popularity, with most recent press statements and, intermittently, COSATU weekly also proving popular. Interestingly, the page that was consistently and overwhelmingly the most popular throughout 2004 is “A struggle within the struggle”, a gender political education booklet[18]. One can only speculate at the reasons for this, since the document is not directly hyperlinked from the home page, as is the case with all the other popular pages. Overall the statistics reveal a site that is considered a valuable repository of information about the federation, its affiliates and labour policy, but of rather more interest internationally. The unions in South Africa appear to have mounted only one cyber campaign of any significance and size over the years, the campaign to “Stop Telkom Retrenchments”. Telkom is the country’s giant, partially-privatised de facto telephone monopoly. Huge profits have come at the expense of the laying off of over 28,000 workers, 46 per cent of its staff, since 1999, and a telephone subscriber base that has been shrinking for four successive years and now stands at just over 4.8 million fixed lines. Dismayed at plans to downsize by a further 3,500 jobs by 2005, the three unions organising at Telkom banded together in an attempt to stop the juggernaut. Court injunctions, the appointment of a commission to analyse Telkom’s rationales and propose strategic alternatives, the creation of anti-company web site www.hellkom.co.za, and an e-mail protest campaign were all elements in a coordinated campaign. The web site, defended by the NGO Freedom of Expression Institute, faced threats of legal action to force its closure (see ITWeb, 2004). The e-mail campaign which was launched towards

the end of August 2004 utilised the Act Now! facility offered by global labour news portal LabourStart, where visitors to the site could generate, customise and then send individual protest e-mails to senior Telkom executives. LabourStart had long sought an appropriate campaign on behalf of a union in Africa, and was only too glad to assist, publicising the campaign on the home page of its web site and in its weekly newsletter[19]. Visitors to the page were given information about Telkom’s planned retrenchments in the light of record profits, and huge remuneration for senior executives, and then invited to sign and send an e-mail calling on the company to “stop the planned retrenchment of 4,181[20] Telkom workers”. By the end of November some 2,737 such protest e-mails had deluged the inbox of Telkom’s CEO, Siswe Nxasana, and senior executives. Of the three South African unions, only the right-wing Solidarity was able to make any effective contribution to the campaign, issuing press statements, e-mailing its members, profiling the campaign on its web site. COSATU’s own affiliate, the Communication Workers’ Union was woefully unable to keep pace. Its website was largely defunct, and it appears to have had no effective e-mail contact with its membership. Repeated appeals by the author to COSATU to profile the campaign on its own home page, and to appeal to its Daily Labour News subscribers to participate, went unheeded. As a result, few of the signatories of the protest were South African, and it fell short of its target. Although the campaign received considerable press coverage, Solidarity was the main beneficiary of this, and its outcome was merely an improved severance package offer. The barrier of access Lack of access to ICTs by both unions and their members is one of the key barrier inhibiting their widespread adoption and effective use, particularly in Africa. Leading ICT analyst, Manuel Castells, noting that “information technology, and the ability to use it and adapt it, is the critical factor in generating and accessing wealth, power, and knowledge in our time”, has remarked that “the disinformation of Africa at the dawn of the Information Age may be the most lasting wound inflicted on this continent by new patterns of dependency” (Castells, 1996). Similarly, in his report, The Digital Development of Labour Organisations in Africa, Marc Be´langer, head of the ILO’s Workers’ Activities Programme, launches his own investigation into the “challenges and opportunities faced by African labour organisations in adopting computer-based technologies” with an analysis of the “digital divide” separating those with access to ICTs from those without. He concludes that “access to the internet is a major problem confronting digital development in Africa” (Be´langer, 2001). The 2003 World Telecommunication Development Report of the ITU also focuses fairly extensively on the question of access for countries in Africa, noting that, despite considerable advances, the continent still lags very far behind the levels of access enjoyed by developed countries (International Telecommunication Union, 2003). Poverty is a major cause of the lack of access by individuals and groups to ICTs, particularly in an environment like South Africa, which is a society characterised by high levels of inequality between rich and poor, and by extensive pockets of poverty, most notably in the Limpopo and Eastern Cape provinces, where GINI Coefficient[21] levels of up to 0.8 were recorded in South Africa’s 2001 census.

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South Africa’s apartheid legacy of a small, largely white e´lite and a poor, largely black majority, makes the GINI Coefficient an appropriate indicator to the constituency served by DITSELA, whose major constituency is COSATU, the largest trade union federation in the country, with 1.8 million members who are overwhelmingly black, and, despite an upsurge in public sector membership, still extensively blue-collar[22]. The high levels of poverty and inequality, even in the industrial heartland of Gauteng, suggest that access to ICTs is likely to be low. The potential for any form of cyber-unionism is further tightly constrained by lack of access to a fixed line telephone, which is the main channel for individual and small organisation connectivity to the internet. By 2004 only 10.4 out of every 100 South Africans had access to a fixed line telephone. Taken together with the likely impact of the high levels of inequality demonstrated in the previous section, South Africa’s fixed line telephony penetration figures do not show a climate conducive to the extensive use of ICTs by trade unions. The picture is sustained even with the inclusion of mobile access. The dramatic growth of mobile services in South Africa is a much-vaunted phenomenon, with the 2001 census revealing that 32 per cent of households had access to mobile telephony, outstripping by far the mere 24 per cent of households with access to fixed line services. Mobile services, however, are less conducive to cyber-unionism, as they offer very limited access to e-mail and the internet – although text messaging has been used on an ad hoc basis to mobilise union members to participate on radio talk show phone-ins or to watch television appearances of union representatives. Disaggregation of the statistics presented above by race and location would be essential, given South Africa’s history and the demographics of the union movement’s largely black constituency concentrated in some half a dozen major conurbations across South Africa. Such an accurate demographic breakdown is not readily available, but an analysis of figures drawn from the now-discontinued October household surveys undertaken by Statistics South Africa, does provide evidence in support of a racially demarcated “digital divide” in respect of access to telephony. Although the access gap is far more stark and dramatic in rural South Africa, even in urban areas a “white” household is more than twice as likely to have a telephone than is a “black” household. If we turn more specifically to computers and level of access to them, a similar picture emerges. Although South Africa ranks favourably by African standards, it is far behind the kind of levels enjoyed by developed countries. Fewer than one in ten households in South Africa is believed to own a computer, whereas in a number of developed countries the figure is well above 50 per cent. An examination of the levels of internet access in South Africa reveals similar patterns. The country is thought to boast almost one-quarter of the continent’s estimated 14 million internet users. Although this may seem a favourable figure, it is important to note that the growth of the internet in South Africa lags far behind the rate for the rest of the continent, with its number of users levelling off at about 3 million, and its share of users in Africa having fallen from over 50 per cent a short three years ago (International Telecommunication Union, 2004). Further, it is still fewer than one in ten South Africans that have access to the internet, far below the kinds of levels enjoyed in developed countries, where figures of more than half the population using the internet are the norm (International Telecommunication Union, 2003).

Similar low levels of access are reported by Bridges (2003) in their 2002 survey of the “digital divide” in Cape Town. Of their respondents only 14 per cent had access to the internet, whether at home or at work, and 67 per cent had never used a computer. The sample population of their survey does not allow full demographic disaggregation, but they quote figures from WebChek’s Project SA Web User 2002 to suggest that a mere 11 per cent of South Africa’s web users are black Africans. Somewhat higher figures were reported in a 2004 survey of 86 union officials (including shop stewards (nearly 30 per cent of the sample) but excluding rank and file union members) participating in an accredited training programme offered by DITSELA, the trade union training institute. Of the respondents, 45 per cent reported using computers either often or daily, but this percentage shrank to 29 per cent and 26 per cent respectively for the same level of usage of e-mail and the internet. Only 20 per cent reported having access to a computer at home. While these figures suggest union officials are considerably better connected than the average, they show a considerable way to go before cyber-unionism becomes the norm in South Africa. It is further important to stress that effective access to ICTs is far more complex than mere connectivity to the technology. There are a multiplicity of factors, both objective and subjective, that impinge on and mediate the ability of individuals to utilise access to ICTs in ways that meaningful, productive, and useful. The Bridges (2003) study of “real access” in Cape Town recognises this when it states that “providing access to technology is critical, but it is about more than just physical access”. The Bridges study makes use of a matrix of 12 criteria, which they see as underpinning effective access. These include a range of issues – such as affordability, capacity and training, locally relevant content, trust in technology, and socio-cultural factors – in addition to the basic physical access to the technology. In the light of the complex dimensions of effective access to ICTs, it is worth looking at some of the factors affecting the ability to utilise ICTs effectively that are particular to the union environment. A range of such factors has been variously identified by Cooper and Carr (n.d.) and Be´langer (2001). These are confirmed and extended by anecdotal evidence at the disposal of the author, and include: . Inadequate infrastructure. The internet connection in most union offices is a dial-up connection, and often uses the only telephone line in the office. This means that going online often means disconnecting and subsequently reconnecting the fax machine, or inconveniencing the regional secretary and other office staff. This places a considerable hurdle in the way of accessing e-mail and the internet, let alone remaining connected for extended periods of time. . Power relations in the union office. Throughout Africa, trade unionists have complained that ICTs are seen as a status symbol, and that often the most senior person in an office has the internet-enabled computer on their desk. Sometimes, on the other hand, the computer is on the desk of the office administrator, who uses it as a rare source of status and control. In either case, getting access to the internet for other staff often means disrupting the work of someone else, either of senior status or who may be reluctant to surrender a source of power. It is thus frequently not possible for the union to make optimum use of this resource. . Workload. Union staff are often overloaded with union work, only able to function in crisis management mode due to the nature of union work, and

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frequently work away from the office for extended periods. On the one hand, this compounds the internal access dynamics described above. On the other hand, it also means that union staff do not feel they have time and resources to engage with new technologies. Poor infrastructure. Union offices often have outdated and unreliable computer equipment because they are unable to afford to purchase or maintain new, high, quality infrastructure. Telephone lines are sometimes disconnected because of late payment of bills. An environment where staff are attempting to use outdated equipment and are faced with intermittent breakdowns, mitigates against effective use of ICTs. Lack of support capacity. Unions often lack the basic user skills and technical capacity to troubleshoot even minor problems, with the result that e-mail and the internet often does not function for long periods. Lack of computer literacy. Many trade unionists have little formal education, resulting in low levels of computer literacy. Not only does this affect the ability to deal with minor technical problems, as described above, but it also makes the use of computers a tedious and time-consuming task that is frustrating and ultimately disempowering. Oral culture. Many unionists are used to functioning in an environment where oral interventions at meetings, in negotiations, and on the shop floor are the norm. They are often uncomfortable with the more formal, written culture that is associated with computer use, where word processing and e-mail are dominant applications. This is compounded by low levels of formal literacy in the South African environment due to the legacy of apartheid education. Organisational culture. Unionists are used to operating within lines of communication that are hierarchical. Some (Greene et al., 2001; Lee, 2000a, b) have argued that ICTs have a tendency to democratise unions, undermine existing power structures and create horizontal networks of communication rather than hierarchical ones. Some senior union officials could find this threatening. Opposition to ICT e´litism. Union members are sensitive to processes or environments that are perceived as undermining to union internal democracy. There is a residual hostility to the use of ICTs in some quarters, as the technology itself is viewed as e´litist, and one that excludes large components of the labour constituency.

Barriers to access can assume a sometimes-unexpected union flavour, as the above description suggests. They can also occasionally come from unexpected quarters. Be´langer (2001) reports that unionists in many African countries experience difficulty making effective use of access secured through cyber cafe´s because of an anti-virus motivated prohibition on the use of diskettes. It is clear that the digital divide has many facets! Capacitating unions to use ICT COSATU itself has not been unwilling to recognise some of the impact of the constraints described above on the ability of its membership to exploit the possibilities

offered by the new tools of cyber-unionism. A landmark resolution adopted by its Special Congress in 1999 commits the affiliates of the federation to campaign actively to secure online workplace access rights for each and every shop steward – to an employer-supplied computer with e-mail and internet access. The call forms part of a composite resolution on “Media and information technology”[23], which deals comprehensively with ICTs as a labour resource, referring, inter alia, to office applications, Y2K, e-mail, the internet, an intranet, distribution and discussion lists, and the impact of the information economy. Against the background of the need to “see IT as a valuable tool (as business does) [to be used] where it benefits labour and helps us to improve our operations”, the resolution calls for inclusion “as a collective bargaining demand the right of access for shop stewards to e-mail facilities (including training) at the shop floor” and commits the federation to “launch a campaign to ensure dedicated access for each shop steward to computer, internet and e-mail facilities at each workplace”. It was clearly a resolution with the power to make a significant impact on the ability of union structures right down to the grassroots level, to utilise e-mail and the internet to strengthen their organisational, bargaining and mobilisation capacities. Unfortunately, it has remained a resolution largely honoured in the breach, with only the SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (which ironically does not itself have a web site) making any substantial progress towards its implementation. By 2001 SACTWU had secured online rights agreements at both its major bargaining councils, and had begun to train shop stewards at various institutions around the country (Daily Despatch, 2001). Unfortunately, few other COSATU affiliates appear to have followed suit. COSATU itself took another initiative to secure access to e-mail for workers with the launch of www.union.org.za, a free full-function web-based e-mail service for union members and activists, which was provided by ISP InfoSat. Within a few months of its launch www.union.org.za had signed up in excess of 500 members, numbers of whom subscribed to COSATU’s various mailing lists. Trade union training institute DITSELA also made extensive use of the service to secure e-mail addresses for its trainees. In addition the facility was publicised by LabourStart as a valuable resource for unionists worldwide. The service has, however, subsequently fallen into disuse. It began to attract a number of spammers in late 2000. COSATU’s technical support of the user base lapsed, and, with the federation unwilling to fund its migration to a new platform, the bright union colours and logos were stripped from the site, which was downgraded to a generic front end. And for which new sign-ons were blocked. Moves were explored to secure funding for its continued existence, or to hand it over to either the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions or the International Labour Organisation, both of which saw it as potentially a valuable global resource, but nothing came of these initiatives. www.union.org.za is now a facility used only be a dwindling core of its early subscribers.

Conclusion The picture of labour capacity in the field of ICT as painted above, and the potential for cyber-unionism in South Africa, has been a mixed one.

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On the one hand there appears to be a clear recognition of the possibilities of e-mail, the internet and other tools of cyber-activism, as evidenced by the considerable investment by South African unions, particularly those from the COSATU fold, in securing a presence on the web and in providing e-mail communications infrastructure. This is borne out by the 1999 Special Congress resolution referred to above. On the other hand, there appear to be considerable capacity constraints in driving such initiatives far enough so as to be able to exploit their benefits. It is unclear whether this is due to budget constraints, lack of skilled capacity. Perhaps it is merely that the unions in South Africa, given their constituency and its low level of connectedness, place cyber-unionism low on the list of priorities. As a result, successes have been intermittent, and the champions needed to drive and expand the possibilities of online activism in the labour movement all too few and far between. The union movement in South Africa has had its share of cyber-sceptics, who are deeply pessimistic about any possibilities of exploiting the new electronic tools in any significant way. It is likely that the unions in South Africa will continue to experiment with e-mail and the internet, and that they will continue to experience cyber success alongside cyber failure. It is, however, only when a significant proportion of its members come online that South Africa’s labour movement will experience both a significant demand for cyber-unionism alongside the capacity to exploit that. Given current trends, that day remains some way off. Notes 1. The COSATU web site can be found at www.cosatu.org.za The site content described here was accessed on 27 November 2004. 2. The web site lists “21 trade unions affiliated to COSATU, with a combined membership of just over 1.8 million” (www.cosatu.org.za/affiliates.html). 3. Interview with Mike Jensen, 24 June 2002. 4. E-mail from Simone Shall, 2 December 2004. 5. With the transition to democracy, COSATU unions sought to achieve financial self-sufficiency, making the accurate monitoring and collection of membership dues a priority. One of the larger affiliates, NUMSA, also had strike a ballot invalidated in court because it was unable to produce a membership register. 6. These included NUM, CWIU, TGWU and SAMWU. 7. The SA Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) was able to uncover several instances of fraudulent misappropriation of union dues by employers. On the other hand, the much larger National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was never able to operate or maintain the system with any degree of effectiveness. The Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) lost its entire system with over a year’s data in a computer crash. 8. A special operations underground network set up by the ANC’s armed wing, umKhonto weSizwe. The system pioneered by Operation Vula continued to run with ever-increasing effectiveness until a chance arrest in July 1990 led to the capture of some key Vula communications people – along with their computers and files. 9. By 2001, assiduous marketing had grown the number of subscribers to this list to over 2,500, but a server crash destroyed the subscriber listing, and it has never been fully rebuilt. 10. Particular attention is paid congresses and central committee meetings. The former is the highest decision-making structure of the federation, and is convened every three years.

11. The survey was undertaken by the author in terms of a computers in education feasibility study for DITSELA, South Africa’s trade union training institute. 12. NUM with 300,000 members and SAFPU with 200 members respectively. 13. At the time of writing, even the COSATU web site had become a victim of domain name problems. For over a week at the end of December 2004, its domain pointed to an advertising place holder page of Telkom Internet, to which COSATU is in the process of switching its internet service provider services from those of SANGONet. 14. This figure is likely to be under-reported, since the site reflects only 18 sites for South Africa itself. See www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/union/africa/index.htm for more information. 15. This estimate is based on addresses ending in.za as well those belonging to Internet Africa and SANGONet, which have global domain names. The figure is still likely to an under-estimate, as the list contains subscribers to the free e-mail services of Hotmail and Yahoo! 16. These included e-mail addresses from COSATU, SACTWU, NEHAWU, NUM, NUMSA, SADTU, FAWU, CWU, SAMWU, SATAWU, CEPPWAWU, DITSELA, NALEDI, www. union.org.za and one from FEDUSA. 17. The author is grateful to Joseph George of SANGONet, who, with the permission of COSATU, made the access statistics for the site available to him on http://stats.sn.apc.org/ cosatu.org.za/usage_200401.html 18. This document, located at www.cosatu.org.za/docs/2000/struggen.htm, scored the greatest number of page impressions month after month, averaging 2,156 impressions per month, almost twice the 1,180 per month of the next most popular page. 19. The campaign page may be found at www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/ show_campaign.cgi?c=36. 20. This was the figure the union had for planned downsizing over four years. Company documents at the disposal of the labour commission give a figure of 8,169 over the four year period. 21. The GINI Coefficient is a widely adopted measure of income inequality, with a value between 0 (absolute equality) and 1 (extreme inequality), which is frequently used as an indicator of levels of poverty in a given society. 22. Naidoo (2000) describes the average union member in South Africa as “an African male, in his thirties, living in Gauteng and working in the manufacturing sector as an operator”. 23. The resolution is available online at www.cosatu.org.za/congress/cong99/cons-res. htm#Media References African National Congress (n.d.), Talking To Vula: The Story of the Secret Underground Communications Network of Operation Vula, ANC, Johannesburg, available at: www.anc. org.za/ancdocs/history/vula.html Be´langer, M. (2001), The Digital Development of Labour Organisations in Africa, ILO International Training Centre, Turin. Bridges (2003), Taking Stock and Looking Ahead: Digital Divide Assessment of the City of Cape Town, 2002, bridges.org, Cape Town. Castells, M. (1996), The Information Age, 3 vols, Blackwell, Oxford. Cooper, L. and Carr, T. (n.d.), “Can on-line learning in higher education help to promote an on-line community of practice in the workplace? The case of trade union educators”, unpublished paper, Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town, Cape Town.

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Daily Despatch (2001), 13 July. Esterhuysen, A. (2002), Networking for a purpose: African NGOs using ICT, in Rowing Upstream: Snapshots of Pioneers of the Information Age in Africa, Sharp Sharp Media, Johannesburg, available at: www.sn.apc.org/Rowing_Upstream/ Greene, A.M., Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2001), “E-collectivism and distributed discourse: new opportunities for trade union democracy”, available at: www.geocities.com/unionsonline/ e_discourse.htm International Telecommunication Union (2003), World Telecommunication Development Report 2003: Access Indicators for the Information Society, ITU, Geneva. International Telecommunication Union (2004), African Telecommunication Indicators 2004, ITU, Geneva. ITWeb (2004), “FXI slams Telkom over Hellkom”, 13 August, available at: www.itweb.co.za/ sections/telecoms/2004/0408131116.asp?S=Business&A=BUS&O=FRGN Lee, E. (1997), The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism, Pluto Press, London. Lee, E. (2000a), “How the Internet is changing unions”, Working USA, available at: www. labourstart.org/workingusa.shtml Lee, E. (2000b), “How the internet empowers, democratises and internationalises”, The Shopsteward, Vol. 9 No. 2. Naidoo, R. (2000), Unions in Transition: COSATU into the New Millennium, NALEDI, Johannesburg. Weekes, A. (1999), “The state of labour media in South Africa in 1999”, available at: http://lmedia. nodong.net/1999/archive/e30.htm (Charley Lewis works as a Lecturer, Researcher and Consultant at the LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, where his areas of focus include: labour, work and ICT; telecommunications regulation, and ICT policy development. Formerly a high school teacher, computer programmer and head of IT for the Congress of SA Trade Unions, Charley has developed and taught a number of telecommunications and ICT courses since joining the centre, and presented at several conferences. He has also managed several ICT projects (including the production of a set of videos on ICT development projects), written a training CD-ROM dealing with online research and advocacy, and has undertaken research in a number of areas, including internet diffusion in South Africa and e-learning in the labour movement. He holds a Master of Commerce in the Management of Information Systems. E-mail: [email protected])

Epilogue The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet The crises of labour demand imaginative strategic thinking. The consideration of the internet and associated information communication technologies (ICTs) is vital to this process. As Hyman (1999) has suggested, with tantalising aplomb, the virtual agora of the internet may well be a place where greater liberty and creativity might be released, perhaps freed from some of the many restraining and disciplinary mechanisms and procedures that stifle creativity and invite passivity. It has already been revealed that the coordinative capabilities of labour across the globe have been radically enhanced with the advent of the internet. The Liverpool Dockers and the Wharfies of Australia demonstrate through their internet-based campaigns the power of labour in counter-coordination in respect of global capital, while other labour-organised internet-based campaigns are found throughout the developing and developed world. The debate about the potentialities of internet-based technologies for labour has now engendered considerable reflection. The earliest contributions came from organic intellectuals and practitioners on the margins of the labour movement (Bailey, 1996; Lee, 1997; Waterman, 1998; Shostak, 1999). Although perhaps slow to respond, centres of union power have begun to engage, through developments of union presence in cyber-space and promotion of further strategic thinking (Hogan and Grieco, 2000; Diamond and Freeman, 2002; Taylor, 2001). While the generation of discussion within trade union circles continues (Darlington, 2003), a community of academic researchers are pursuing the debate- generating new ways of understanding, exploring the nuances of the empirical and considering the implications for the actions of labour and the reproduction, transformation and even displacement of extant organisational forms, processes and politics. It has been established that ICTs are an important set of tools for labour. There is now a widespread availability of communication technologies which can be utilized at relatively low and distributed cost and accessed in transit and from the home, with processing and storage capacities that are growing exponentially and which can be readily deployed for the receipt, storage, auditing, manipulation and broadcast of information globally. Visibility and transparency are sharpened, with consequences for the processes of auditing individual and institutional performance (Hogan and Greene, 2002), to effect forms of meta-governance (Grieco, 2002). The capacity to retain, reassemble and refer to collective memory presents the possibility to attenuate the costs of “forgetting”, while the contribution of the multitude of labour voices to such processes can be recorded in a disintermediated way in popular archives, free from institutionalised policing. Through the release of unheard voices a form of polyphonics may be brought to bear where the creativity of the “outsider” can inject flagging institutionalised labour collectives with the imagination necessary to innovate (Carter et al., 2003). Imaginative communicative strategy can also be developed by trade unions to service and organize members outside of the territories controlled by the opponents of labour and to resist the logic of residential dispersal (Freeman and Rogers, 2002). Through allowing for asynchronous communicative exchanges, the

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communication technologies can be used to alleviate time-space poverty and provide alternative points of entry into modes of deliberation and decision making, thus providing for the possibility of intervention and extended participation in collective organisation and action, along with new ways of collective identity and action formation (Greene et al., 2001). Finally, within the context of global business, the capacity of global reach is examined as a means to build more effective patterns of international solidarity (Bailey, 1996; Lee 1997; Waterman 1998). This special issue set out to build on these extant understandings. It documented the emergence of new globalised labour communication strategies in the context of a globalising world of commerce, business and governance. The articles took a variety of forms and reflected the variations in communication intensities and activities which are a product of the unevenness in globalisation itself. Within the pages of the special issue we have seen the product of the researches of field leaders such as Freeman, Fiorito and Cockfield whose researches have focused primarily on connectivity within the wealthy West. As important, from the perspective of this special issue, we found the accounts provided by other contributors of changing communication practices within South Africa, Malaysia, Mexico and the Balkans. There is great variation in patterns and the reader will no doubt have had to work along with the authors to encompass the complexities of counter-coordination in both its more developed and its emerging forms, but the journey is worth the effort. The hyperlinks provided in the articles should be visited and weighed in the knowledge that sites are frequently changing and archiving practices which provide the stability of the printed world have yet to be widely adopted. Each article is a request to join a journey and its printed typeface is only one level of experience. We hope that, within this space of a special issue, we have provided sufficient stimulation to attract other scholars and activists to the recording, reviewing and relaying of counter-coordination. Margaret Grieco, John Hogan and Miguel Martı´nez Lucio

References Bailey, C. (1996), “The evolution of a web site for labour”, CMC Magazine, November. Carter, C., Clegg, S., Hogan, J. and Kornberger, M. (2003), “The polyphonic spree: the case of the Liverpool dockers”, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 34 No. 4. Darlington, R. (2003), “The creation of the e-union: the use of ICT by British unions”, available at: www.rogerdarlington.co.uk/E-union.html Diamond, W. and Freeman, R. (2002), “Will unionism prosper in cyberspace? The promise of the internet for employee organisation”, British Journal of industrial Relations, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 569-96. Freeman, R.B. and Rogers, J. (2002), “A proposal to American labor, the nation”, 6 June 2002, available at: www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20020624&s=rogers Greene, A.M., Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2001), “E-collectivism and distributed discourse: new opportunities for trade union democracy”, paper presented at the TUC/LSE Conference on Unions and the Internet, 12 May. Grieco, M. (2002), “Introduction”, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (Eds), Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse, Ashgate, Aldershot.

Hogan, J. and Greene, A.M. (2002), “E-collectivism: on-line action and on-line mobilisation”, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (Eds), Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse, Ashgate, Aldershot. Hogan, J. and Grieco, M. (2000), “Trade unions on line: technology, transparency and bargaining power”, in Donnelly, M. and Roberts, S. (Eds), FUTURES: Proceedings of the 2nd Scottish Trade Union Research Network Conference, STUC, Paisley. Hyman, R. (1999), “Imagined solidarities: can trade unions resist globalisation?”, in Leisink, P. (Ed.), Globalisation and Labour Relations, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 94-115. Lee, E. (1997), The Labour Movement and the Internet: the New Internationalism, Pluto Press, London. Shostak, A.B. (1999), CyberUnion: Empowering Labor through Computer Technology, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY. Taylor, R. (2001), “Workers unite on the internet”, Financial Times, 11 May. Waterman, P. (1998), Globalisation, Solidarity and the New Social Movements, Mansell, London.

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