Planting Liberally

The declining power of unions has had a devastating impact on the American worker and on our ideological landscape. A few decades ago, about 1/3 of workers were unionized; now that number hovers at about 1/8. As a result, fewer and fewer workers are turning their workplace grievances into communal action. Instead, they internalize and individualize their problems, assuming that, for the most part, other workers don't face the same problems, or aren't interested in helping each other face those problems.
As it turns out, as in so many other cases, the power of the web to create community can be a great help here. The creation of workplace blogs will help workers realize that they have common cause with one another.
A workplace blog is simply a blog which focuses on the issues which crop up within a workplace. The workplace can be anything from a single shop to a large multinational corporation. For purposes of gathering sufficient readership, such a blog would probably work best in the context of a larger corporation.
With workplace blogs, anonymity can be extremely important, both for the blogger and the commenters. Fear of reprisal is real and justified in many cases. Blogging is not an easily anonymized practice, however. On the one hand, there are a variety of technical tactics for discovering a blogger's identity, such as comparing datestamps and IP addresses using SiteMeter logs. Aside from that, there is the simple fact that in a small enough group of workers, it's easy enough to determine who is posting based on the voice of the posts and the kinds of arguments made. So workplace blogging is something to pursue very carefully.
Workplace blogs need not (and probably should not) focus entirely on worker complaints. Within any company, there are all sorts of different internal news items which workers will want to discuss. These include personnel changes, new product releases, overall direction, etc. Of course, some of these items could be clearly related to some grievance or another, or they could be simple fodder for chatter. As with any community blog, it's important to discuss all of these issues, and some that are only tangentially related to the workplace. The best workplace blog is one which best simulates the proverbial water cooler.
Perhaps the best-known workplace blog is Mini-Microsoft, an anonymous blog written by a fairly disgruntled Microsoft employee. Mini-Microsoft blogs about a variety of topics, including (to take a recent sample): the latest version of Office; remarks by Steve Ballmer at a recent conference; comings and goings of upper level management; and the way the company botched the PR around Vista. The style is that of a snarky everyman, who loves to hate the company he's working for, but probably won't leave anytime soon. It's easy to see how a blog like this could quickly become a hit at a corporation whose image (vis a vis new recruits, anyway) is almost Stepford-perfect. (Full disclosure, I was a Microsoft recruit long ago.) Another workplace blog along these lines is Starbucks Gossip, which has a somewhat different perspective and tone.
Employers can play the "workplace blog" just like employees can. For example, Life at WalMart is the pseudo-blog published by WalMart in an effort to spread good PR about itself. Naturally, the stories are one-sided in favor of Wal-Mart, with recent post titles including "I want to thank a Sam's associate for outstanding customer support.", "I still can not believe everything that the company has allowed me to achieve" and "Wal-Mart does care about the associates and I will always be grateful for what my call center did for me and my family!". The one-sidedness of the blog is its potential downfall, of course; even the most loyal of employees have some complaints which they want to see validated. Unfortunately, none of the main anti-WalMart websites - WalMart Watch, Wakeup WalMart, or WalMart: the high cost of low prices - include employee blogs to get out the other side of the story.
Another set of online communities worth investigating are the Myspace Co-worker groups. There are currently nearly 42,000 company groups on Myspace. To look at just a couple of examples, the American Eagle Outfitters group includes about 17,000 members, and the Disney Cast Members group includes nearly 9,000 workers. Unfortunately, these groups don't include any way for the members to communicate with one another (aside from one-on-one messages), but these groups include a self-selecting set of people who identify through their employment. Anyone thinking of starting a workplace blog should think about using a Myspace group in order to gather an audience.
In an age where employers have developed sophisticated union-busting techniques, online worker communities are a promising source of communal workplace organization. A workplace blog, Myspace group, or other online community will never replace a union. But such a community could be an important intermediate step. If a group of workers or an existing union local wants to organize a shop, a cheap and easy way to measure the potential strength of a bargaining committee or bargaining unit would be to start a workplace blog, and to see how much the grievance posts resonate with workers. If there's sufficient enthusiasm from the other workers, a more focused and intensive campaign, including card signatures, house meetings, and other one-on-one tactics, could begin.
Finally, workplace blogs are excellent raw material for trying out Andy Stern's industry-by-industry organizing strategy. Stern's theory rests on a tacit assertion that workers can join together not just within a single shop or company, but within an entire industry. In other words, Target employees don't just identify as employees of Target, they identify as workers within the department store industry. This assumption actually is quite accurate, for certain industries. Fast food restaurant workers, retail clothing salespeople, and other workers who are predominantly young adults, do indeed appear to identify by their industry. Why not try to tap into this culture using a cluster of similar blogs? For example, imagine a set of "Retail Hell" blogs, one for each of the major chains of clothing stores (Gap, Banana Republic, American Eagle, etc.) If these blogs take off, they could feed one another's popularity, and be the jumping off point for an industry-wide organizing campaign. Better yet, the grievances identified by the campaign could be informed by the comments and posts on the blogs.
Union organizing is, in many ways, mechanistically similar to Saul Alinsky style community organizing. It is grounded in house meetings, one-on-one conversations, and other types of in-person tactics. That is wonderful, and it should not stop. But new communication technologies mean that it's possible to augment in-person tactics with cheap and effective online tactics. Unions should take advantage of this new medium as soon as possible.
Last New Blog Friday entry: Blogs that hound the right