Organized Labor and the Internet:

An Alternative Pathway for the New Economy*

Writing 30 years ago, Alvin Toffler contended that "today as never before we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams, and prophecies - images of potential tomorrows. Before we can rationally decide which alternative pathways to choose, which cultural styles to pursue, we must first ascertain which are possible. Conjecture, speculation, and the visionary view thus become as coldly practical a necessity as feet-on-the-floor 'realism' was in an earlier time." (Bantam ed., p.463).

Taking Toffler at his word, now, 30 years later, the New Economy's landscape of tomorrow must include a remarkable possibility - one so far out as to have thoroughly eluded any attention from an otherwise encyclopedic Alvin Toffler 30 years ago: Thanks to the availability of the Internet, the Labor Movement in America is busy re-inventing and reviving itself, a development with mind-boggling implications for the New Capitalism of the New Economy.

Given its enormous task in tracking dues receipts, fringe benefits, and contract details, Organized Labor was quick to match corporations in employing main frame number-crunching uses back in the 1970s. But until recently, this is where matters remained. Unions were very slow in the 1980s to employ PCs, and looked with suspicion in the 1990s on laptops, Palmtops, and the Buck Rodgers like. Many grey-haired macho union leaders regarded such items as costly, complex, unreliable frills, the sort of fey toys real men had nothing to do with (they refused to eat quiche for the same sort of asinine reasons).

Today, all of this has changed - thanks to the ascendancy of a new younger and more sophisticated type of labor leader, the clamor of union dues-payers for the modernization of their unions, the ubiquity of computers in and out of the workplace, and the pervasiveness of computers in the general cultural scene. Survey data suggest more union households have a home computer than is true of all American households. Little wonder, accordingly, that 26 of the largest and most progressive unions have taken as a portal the workingfamilies.com IPO offered by the AFL-CIO, and more of the Federation's 67 unions are expected to sign up in short order.

Rumor has it the AFL-CIO may soon offer a free union-made Hewlett-Packard computer to members of its 67 affiliates, and with 13 million prospective takers, the marketing base here is an impressive one. Businesses are likely to clamor to access this vast buying public, and the AFL-CIO promises to vett all such would-be advertisers where their behavior regarding Labor is concerned: Companies friendly to Labor get access, others, do not.

America is also likely to host an enormous increase in the political clout of Organized Labor, already the largest social movement in the country. Drawing on the instant messaging and rapid information-retrievable strengths of the Internet, the unions are already showing far more acumen and demonstrable "muscle" at the polls than ever before. Should they get well-deserved credit for Gore's narrow victory in November, 2000, (or for winning key House seats against a narrow Bush triumph), their preeminence in political matters will long be assured.

Best of all, grass-roots activists are busy using the Internet to reinvigorate Labor from the bottom up. They are creating their own high-energy listserves outside of Labor officialdom, and they are busy exchanging ideas, gripes, and dreams much as visionaries have done since time immemorial - though this time empowered by electronic power greater than any earlier thought possible.

Over the next five years the American Labor Movement - increasingly more sophisticated in its creative use of computer possibilities - will probably outfit every "footsoldier" with a wearable wireless computer, thereby making each a moveable "office" of consequence. A vast network will probably knit together union officers, staffers, and field agents into an "army" of consequence, and millions of new admiring members may join the ranks.

Much, of course, hinges on the response of the American business community. Progressive elements therein already appreciate how much more there is to gain from accommodation than from unlimited warfare. The best and brightest firms respect the right of employees to chose their own form of representation - which may be a union dedicated both to the well-being of employee and employer alike.

Encouraged by years of high payoff field demonstrations, many of which are ripe for celebration on over-due Web Sites, far-sighted businesses are increasingly offering productivity-focused "partnerships" to mature unions eager to define a new sort of "win-win" labor-management relations for a New Economy. Word of this is being spread via Labor listserves and chatrooms, the latter often bristling with healthy skepticism and debate.

Almost as telling as Labor's ability to forge a cooperative relationship with progressive employers is a related drama also likely to play out over the next five years - and also conspicuous by its total absence 30 years ago from Toffler's classic book. Labor Unions around the world are beginning to sense unprecendented possibilities via the Internet for forging far-reaching alliances. First dreamed of by Marx and his allies in the late 1800rds, the notion of a workingclass International is once again captivating unionist around the globe - and this time the infrastructure is cheap, ubiquitous, and genuinely empowering.

Many American unionists already use a web site - labourstart.org - as their homepage, and they learn from its 24-hour coverage of global labor news how very much they have in common with brothers and sisters about the planet - a consciousness-raising change of very uncertain impact. If employers and governments begin to take Labor into full partnership, the new global alliances among unions can yet be turned to everyone's advantage. But if the class war of yesteryear persists, the new alliances could raise the stakes and ensure more costly conflicts than good for any of us - women, children, and other living things, as the saying used to go.

*Based in part of ideas in Art Shostak's book, CyberUnion: Empowering Labor through Computer Technology; M.E. Sharpe, 1999. Art is a Professor of Sociology at Drexel University, Phil. PA., and an adjunct professor at the AFL-CIO National Labor College, Silver Spring, Md. His 19 books include Robust Unionism, For Labor's Sake, The Air Controller's Controversy, and others.