Last weekend's blog post on the eBay sellers boycott generated some very interesting comments, and I want to follow up with some more thoughts on organizing online workers.
As background, I've been arguing for a few months now that labor unions should do more to organize online workers. The argument goes that folks whose primary income is derived from activities as diverse as blogging, eBay auctioneering, Second Life merchandising, and so forth, compose a new industry segment which is already quite large and will grow in the future. Furthermore, despite the fact that these individuals are hard to organize due to the nature of online work, their livelihood is essentially at the mercy of a small group of executives at web companies like eBay and Linden Labs. Therefore, they comprise a group who have important collective needs, and who would benefit tremendously from workplace organizing.
While I still think most of this argument holds up, I'm less and less certain that a traditional labor union is the best vehicle for organizing online workers, for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is that online workers are not actually employees of the companies whose services they are working with; they are consumers of those services. Thus, the eBay sellers "strike" is not a strike at all, but a boycott. The more I think about this round peg/square hole problem, the more I believe that the solution is to just build a round hole. In other words, alongside a thriving labor movement, we need a powerful and well-organized consumer movement. Follow me across the flip for more, and tune in tomorrow for some practical follow-up.
The problem of organizing online workers is, in a sense, just a special case of the problem of organizing consumers generally. Consumers are notoriously hard to organize, since in many cases, they don't know one another. Whereas workers at a factory or an office see each other every day and have multiple chances to get to know one another, consumers of a single business generally don't, and indeed, many prefer it that way. Consequently, the consumer movement tends to be far less organized than the labor movement. Consumer groups tend to form in an ad hoc way around a specific issue, make some noise about that issue, and perhaps win a couple of victories before flaming out. While occasionally consumer groups become institutionalized, even regularly lobbying government around a key set of pet wonky issues and scoring a few important victories, they rarely make much noise on the electoral scene or gather significant and long-lasting commitments from their "base", as labor unions regularly do.
In fact, the differences in organizational power between the labor and consumer movements can be traced back to the legal rights afforded the one but not the other. Whereas workers have the right, under the National Labor Relations Act, to organize and force their employer to negotiate a contract with them collectively, consumers have no legal right to force the businesses they patronize to bargain with them collectively.
Nevertheless, consumer culture is becoming an increasingly important part of daily life. The extreme form of this trend, perhaps, is found among online workers, who derive their livelihood by consuming online services. But there are no shortage of consumers who, while they don't make a living as consumers, nevertheless derive a substantial part of their identity from being Starbucks snobs, Harley drivers, and everything in between. Dozens of books have been written about consumer culture and brand identity, including Juliet Schor's The Overspent American and Naomi Klein's No Logo.
I think the growing prominence of the Internet in daily life, and particularly the dominance of a few huge brands, like Google, Facebook and eBay, in many peoples' online experience, calls for the development of a more active and energized consumer movement. The Internet has created a long tail of consuming relationships into our lives. In a single day, I could conceivably spend a great deal of my online time at Google, Yahoo, and Bloglines, a moderate amount of time on Facebook, much less time at Powells, and an infinitesimal amount of time at places like the local coffee shop's website. As we add up the patterns over time and across a wide swath of web users, we end up with what's bound to be a very, very long tail of online consuming relationships. From the individual's point of view, we end up creating more accounts, and checking off more license agreements, than we can possibly remember.
More than that, the Internet gives us tools to organize ourselves as consumers in ways which were unimaginable a few years ago. These tools run the gamut from the consumer's blog, which allows consumers of a single brand to find each other, and to the corporate MySpace or Facebook page, which allows consumers to talk back, publicly, to the company whose products they rely on. Conceivably, we could even include the tools of open source software development in this list - after all, these tools allow software consumers to fight back against the policies of closed-source corporate software developers by directly competing with them.
On the whole, what we have are the ingredients for a more energetic and systematic consumer movement. I think we now have an historic opportunity for consumers to band together in order to sway corporate policy on a regular basis. Indeed, events like the eBay sellers boycott and the Facebook Mini-Feed and Beacon revolts could be seen as the early harbingers of a new consumers movement, or as a natural continuation of the open source revolt of the 1990's.
This kind of consumer movement will require the creation and development of a series of well-organized consumer membership associations, capable of representing consumers of companies ranging from Nike to eBay. Such associations would make it their business to maintain a regularly-updated list of consumers of a given brand or product; to build community amongst their members; to notify their members of corporate policy changes; to organize boycotts, to informally negotiate with cooperative corporate executives, and so forth. The funds for these associations would probably be derived from dues, meaning both that the associations would have to produce some kind of tangible benefit for their members, and also that these associations would necessarily represent only the most enthusiastic consumers of a given brand or product.
I think the development of this kind of consumer movement would be extremely beneficial to the labor movement, in the long run. On the one hand, the labor movement could provide organizers and others with experience when the time to boycott or take other actions comes along. On the other, the consumer movement can assist the labor movement in applying pressure to companies with bad labor practices. In fact, in some cases the consumer movement can do one better than that. Since some consumer groups (like a hypothetical eBay Sellers Association) will necessarily include businesses in their membership, those groups can make union-neutral corporate policy a prerequisite of membership, and thereby pave the way for more organizing victories. Of course, this kind of relationship is bound to have moments of tension - for example, in cases where consumers don't sympathize with striking workers, and don't choose to respect picket lines.
While I don't think it makes sense for labor unions to be actively involved in creating consumer membership associations from whole cloth - it's just too far afield of their core mission - I think it's absolutely incumbent on the progressive movement as a whole to be involved in germinating and nurturing an active consumer movement which acts in solidarity with the labor movement. Such an alliance, if properly organized and engaged, could be a powerful counter-balance against the creeping encroachment of corporate policy in our daily lives.
I'm not, incidentally, totally sure of the legal merit behind these ideas, and I'd welcome feedback from legal experts who know a bit more about things like anti-trust law and interstate commerce regulations. More than that, I'd be interested to hear what other folks think about the idea of organizing consumers into institutionalized membership groups capable of building community and lobbying corporate executives when necessary. What do you think?
