What would happen if 1 million Verizon Wireless customers pledged to switch to Cingular Wireless, unless Verizon agreed to allow its workers to organize a union?
Today, the Working Life blog compared union relations at Cingular Wireless, Verizon Wireless, and Verizon wireline. After the Communications Workers of America and Cingular reached a neutrality agreement, CWA has been organizing Cingular workers at a rapid clip, with about 30,000 workers represented today. Meanwhile, compare Verizon wireline and Wireless:
As our reader pointed out, "Most folks don't realize this but Verizon Wireless is vehemently anti-union. They are the Wal-Mart of communications. After many years of organizing efforts, only 50 technicians are union represented at Verizon, Despite the fact that at the core (wireline) Company, they are highly unionized. Verizon has kept a steel curtain of seperation between these two units. On the core side they seek cooperation and heap praise ,at wireless we are scum suckers."
The first thing that occured to me was to change my cell phone provider - since I'm with Verizon (the coverage is pretty good in Boston.) Of course there are lots of problems with that - some of my friends have Verizon, and I get free minutes with them; I'm just plain lazy; etc. Not only that, my isolated boycott would be essentially meaningless to Verizon Wireless.
The answer to (some) of these concerns, I think, is an "online boycott petition." An online boycott petition is a website where consumers pledge to boycott a particular company in order to force their hand in some company policy or another. In this case, consumers boycott Verizon in order to secure a neutrality or card check agreement by some date (6 months from the date the petition drive starts, let's say), which CWA or some similar union would then use to start organizing those workers. To be fair, I am stealing this idea pretty much wholesale from Joe Trippi - he discussed something very similar at a Harvard Law School Democrats conference back in April.
To be effective, lots of people need to sign these petitions; enough people that they would make an impact of at least 1-5% on the company's sales. The one million number I mentioned above is just grabbed out of thin air, but it sounds reasonably impressive.
That means several that online boycott petitions are useful mostly for companies operating in the consumer goods and services. They're also probably most effective for new economy goods and services, like cell phones, cable service, personal computers - products whose purchase is highly correlated with being online. Finally, highly competitive markets in which users rarely switch brands - cell phones being a perfect example - are ideal, because a loss of one consumer hurts most keenly in that sector.
Of course, there's nothing binding about the petition. It's a game of chicken. If one million people sign the petition, it's entirely possible that only 5 follow through on the boycott if Verizon Wireless doesn't play nice. On the other hand, it's also possible that 750,000 follow through, in which case Verizon has a whole pile of trouble on its hands.
A million-strong boycott petition would be a tremendous starting point for further action too: one could imagine further (offline) action which the petition signers could be asked to take, e.g., attending a Democracy for America meeting, starting a union in their workplace, registering to vote in a national election, etc. You could even imagine some pretty nifty campaign uses for all that data, since most of it would be heavily concentrated in major cities. Most exciting to me is the potential to bring workers and consumers together in an online community. I think that worker-consumer alliances are our best bet to break the stranglehold of corporate power in today's environment.
Now, this all sounds great until you realize that a million petition signatures is pretty hard to get. So we need to think up some new ways of getting a massive number of people to sign petitions. I would suggest that the first few petitions may not go so well - these things take time to figure out - but I think we'd hit on some success at some point. Promising avenues for gathering petition signatures are one-to-one organizations like churches, unions, and Democracy for America grous. But new ways of putting political messages in front of consumers would have to come to the fore - for example, utilizing online group software like LiveJournal or Friendster. And of course, some emails from some of the huge national advocacy groups wouldn't hurt.
At the end of the day, I think we'd have a fascinating new tool for balancing the power of corporations: an online worker-union alliance, and a whole pile of newly organized workers.
