Netting Union Members Won’t Be So Easy

Can organized labor double-click its way to recovery? Union leaders who met in Los Angeles this week for the AFL-CIO’s 23rd biennial convention are betting it can, announcing a plan to link millions of AFL-CIO members and other workers on the Internet through a common portal called https://www.workingfamilies.com. The labor federation hopes to use cyberspace to mobilize the American work force for political action and union organizing purposes.

In concept, the idea brims with potential, but more likely it will backfire and actually hasten the decline of unions as an economic force.

Unions have been in a downward spiral for decades. In 1950, they represented 35% of the American work force. Today, membership stands at just 14% of all workers and less than 10% of employees in the private sector.

Since assuming the presidency of the AFL-CIO four years ago, John Sweeney has pledged to reverse this decline, putting his prestige and millions of dollars of his members’ compulsory dues on the line to make it happen. Yet while there have been isolated organizing victories, the new union recruits amount to a drop in the bucket compared to the nation’s overall employment growth. In fact, unions must enlist more than 300,000 additional members each year over the next six years--and keep all the ones they currently have--just to prevent further slippage in their share of the work force.

Faced with such oppressive mathematics, union leaders are embracing the Internet as the chosen tool of recovery. Ironically, the more success they have in enticing members online with promises of cheap computers and low monthly access fees, the more difficult it will be to maintain their solidarity.

The Internet is the empowering tool of the entrepreneurial worker and the independent thinker. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that those who are frequently online tend to be more contrarian in their opinions, libertarian in their politics and individualistic in pursuit of career and financial goals.

While many interests in society, including the business community, dream of harnessing Web power to move members in a singular direction and rally them to a common cause, all are faced with the same reality--the Internet has proved to be a far more effective divider than a unifier. Even when users are drawn into cyberspace through a common portal, once they cross that threshold they embark on individual journeys along millions of distinct pathways, personally customizing the Web sites they visit, the information they access, the people they interact with and the products and services they buy.

This iconoclastic Internet culture contradicts and will undermine the vision Sweeney and the AFL-CIO seek to recapture, that of a highly regimented work force that holds the same views, supports the same politicians, maintains an abiding confidence in big government and marches in union to the direction set by their leaders. The federation’s top brass will likely discover that the most enthusiastic users of its new Internet service will be the renegades among labor’s ranks--those who differ with the leadership and audaciously challenge its policies and management practices through a deluge of unwelcome e-mails.

Union Web surfers also will learn that access to the Internet and information technology have made it easier and cheaper than ever to start their own home-based businesses. Union members will join millions of other Americans who are augmenting their incomes through entrepreneurship and holding open the dream that someday they may become successful enough to say to both their employer and their union: Take this job and shove it!

It’s already happening. About 15% of the American work force is self-employed--a share equal in size to the unions--and https://www.workingfamilies.com will more likely expand the ranks of the former rather than the latter.

And as union members access the Internet to monitor the growth of their pensions and use the Web to build their own investment portfolios through online trading, they will become part of today’s mass migration from Main Street to Wall Street. This experience will bring with it a new appreciation of their own stake in the continued profitability of the very corporations their union leaders often vilify.

As one who believes that the original mission of the American labor movement has been essentially met and codified in law, and that the unions’ still considerable power in politics and public policy is a negative influence on economic growth and opportunity, I hope that https://www.workingfamilies.com is wildly successful. Then John Sweeney will go down in history as the Mikhail Gorbachev of the labor movement, doing the right thing for the wrong reason and unintentionally setting his people free.