Planting Liberally

A few weeks ago I took a look at examples of unions using Facebook, partially inspired by Change to Win's Smack the CEO Facebook application. Over the last few days, a mini-revolt of sorts has rolled through the Facebook labor activist community, and I've got good news: our side won!

The story begins with Derek Blackadder, a Canadian labor activist. Blackadder tried using Facebook to organize a group of workers as his friend, and ran up against Facebook's friend limits. Despite Derek's best efforts to stay within the bounds of Facebook's rules, he was eventually and summarily banned from the social network. John Wood, an activist in London, sprang to Blackadder's defense, posting to his blog about the story and eventually starting a Facebook group to petition for reinstatement. Eric Lee, who helps run LabourStart, sent an email to LabourStart readers encouraing them to join the group and email Facebook administrators.

The response was quick and effective. Within eight hours of Lee's email, over 2,400 Facebook users signed up for the group (membership now stands at 2,683). Within a day, Blackadder had been reinstated.

This brouhaha, happily resolved, comes right in the middle of a debate within the labor community about the value of using Facebook. Indeed, Lee previously wrote a critical post about the use of Facebook, Bandwagons and Buzzwords: Facebook and the Unions. Lee's post was largely structured around the limitations of Facebook groups, which were at the time the most obvious way of organizing campaigns on Facebook. Wood responded in kind, sort-of defending Facebook. Wood's point is that while Facebook has its limitations, unions can still reach a lot of people there, and that we're still in the early days of figuring out precisely how to do that.

In light of this most recent campaign to support Derek Blackadder, I think it's clear that at least some good can be accomplished on Facebook. I also think both Lee's and Wood's posts appear a bit dated. Now that Facebook has allowed organizations to create pages, to ease up on the limitations of emailing more than 1,000 people at a time, and has begun to allow its applications and platform to talk to one another, we will soon see that many of Lee's original frustrations with Facebook are not as relevant as they once were. Clearly, it's true that Lee is correct in arguing that using a third-party system primarily enriches the owner of that platform, but that doesn't mean that the use of the platform can't help unions at all.

More than that, I think labor activists need to think more broadly about how to use Facebook. I'm not sure why this is, but it seems to me that most labor organizers think of Facebook as a way to gather support for a political campaign. Both Lee and Wood draw examples from the world of political organizing, not labor organizing proper, in making their arguments. Few activists seem to recognize the potential for Facebook and other social networks to help organize workers, in other words, to do the heavy lifting of union organizing online.

To me it seems that social networking broadly, if not Facebook in particular, is a technology ideally suited to union organizing. It's a space largely removed from the control of the employer (unless your employer is Facebook or Microsoft, I suppose.) It's a viral medium which taps into pre-existing social connections, many of which are work-related. And it gives users a wide variety of mechanisms to express their thoughts about life, thereby giving them a chance to vent about work-related issues. Finally, Facebook is famously dominated by young folks, and, as we saw in the BLS numbers released on Friday, just under 5% of workers 16-to-24 are unionized.

Clearly, there is room for the labor movement to grow on social networks, and not just on Facebook. (In fact, with danah boyd claiming that there's a class divide between Facebook and MySpace users, perhaps especially not just on Facebook.) We are a far way from figuring out how to do that, but I have some thoughts, some of which I've outlined in my earlier series on using the Internet to strengthen the labor movement.

These days I think that the labor movement will need a many-tiered sructure of web sites and social network outreach mechanisms to effectively organize workers online. Each tier draws prospective members more deeply into the movement: the first tier is for members who are mildly supportive of the labor movement generally, the next tier is for members who are irritated with their workplace and vaguely interested in unionizing it, the next tier for members who are keenly interested in starting an organizing drive, and the final tier for workers whose workplace is under an active organizing or contracting campaign. Naturally, different kinds of mechanisms would be suitable for each tier. A simple site like Younionize might suffice for the first tier, while a much more sophisticated, action-driven microsite might be most appropriate for the last tier. Of course, the details have yet to be fine-tuned, but I think this basic structure adequately fits both the way in which many people interact with the labor movement, and the way many people use the web.

I'd love to hear more thoughts on how unions can use the web, social networking, or Facebook in particular, to organize workers. I think these are important tools which are thoroughly under-utilized, and I think their proper use could help continue the union movement's slow but hopefully steady expansion.