Interview

No Quick Fix

Interview with Peter Lewis

Online pioneer Marc Belanger explains why the Internet, on its own, will not save the union movement.

	Marc Belanger in Melbourne

Marc your main message today was that unions will ignore change at their peril. On a global scene how are we meeting that test?

It's a hard question. I don't think we are meeting it very well. In fact, I think if you look at unions as organisations - they are a dying breed. And if you look at companies that are going to be able to get through the electronic revolution, they are radically changing themselves. They are not the same kind of organisations that they were five years ago, and unions have to do the same thing. Except that we are entrenched in our traditions. We have traditions of doing things that we hold too dearly. We are going to have to change, because as I was saying this morning, there are groups of workers now - there are very few permanent groups of workers with the contracting out and such. We are going to have to find ways of finding those groups that coalesce around certain projects, which is why I raised the point of looking at the artists union just dying - so it seems to work for them.

On that point, unions, it seems to me, have recognised the threat of casualisation and the fragmented workforce, but their response has been to resist it . Is that the right response?

That is the first response. The first response of a trade union is always negative to changes. And rightly so, because when new technologies are introduced it is by employers. They are introduced with much hype and they are introduced with all positives. Because, why would you introduce anything that's not a positive. So our reaction as trade unionists is to say: "Hold on there are not - it is not all positive - and here are the negatives. And so we become a sort of debating partner in the conversation, holding the negative side. But then, as we hold the negative side, we internalise that negativity and we don't turn around and say: "Hey we better start looking at the positives as well."

In Australia particularly, we are having difficulty attracting younger workers. Is that an international trend?

Oh absolutely.

Do you think that negativity is the reason behind that?

I think we portray ourselves as industrial unions in an electronic age. We were designed during the industrial revolution. We have been kept together because of industrial organisation. We, in fact reflect the industrial way of organising. We reflect our employers. A lot of worker unions are big and huge because a lot of workers are big and huge.

But what's going to happen to us now when the employers change. Are we going to change in the way they do, becoming electronic unions, becoming unions that attract people when they coalesce in projects? Or are we going to die?

If you look at the statistics, we are a dying breed. The United States has a unionisation rate of maybe 10 per cent. If you take away the public employees, you're looking at five per cent of the private sector. The unionisation rate in the United Kingdom has dropped dramatically since 1980. The unionisation rate in Canada for some reason that I'm not so sure of, has remained stable at about 30 per cent of the big employed workforce. And they've been able to do that I think because there's something in the Canadian and the Australian mentalities that says: Yeah, beat them down but you can only beat them down so far, because we believe that they should be there. That's what we should be doing with all of them. And I think young people have to be introduced to that - with a different word - with a different vocabulary.

That we are NEW. That we adopt new technologies. That we use technologies in creative ways. That we do not tie people to particular classifications. As soon as you say that to a trade unionist you say: Oh my God! You can't get rid of the classification arrangement. Yet the classification rates - descriptions have disappeared. And so, we can do it. And I know we can do it because of the kind of trade of conversation that's happening at this conference.

If we take the position that, yes, we need to adapt from industrial age organisations to information age organisations, what would you say the three steps that could be taken now that would send you the message that yes, we are making that transition?

I would get some money together to promote some new messages. I would be starting to advertise in computer magazines saying: This is what we do. This is how we do it.

Secondly, I would start using some of the tools that the electronic/virtual companies are using to attract information. These companies attract information in many different ways. There are questions of privacy there that we have to debate on as unionists. But we can collect information on a whole bunch of people.

And then we have to start customising our information to members. Because people will not only say "That is a good thing to do - and of course you are doing that" because that's how they will be treated by everybody else in the world. And if they are not treated in customised information ways, by their unions, they won't - they'll think that the unions are not in play.

Of those three thing, I didn't hear you mention "access" and there is a big debate going on within the union movement in Australia at the moment. How important is access to the internet and what sort of responsibility should unions take in ensuring that access takes place?

Access is of course a huge discussion but whenever you talk with practitioners about access, it's always, always dividing up into two sections. It's the immediate access question, where access does not exist, so yes, we have to be taking very active positions in getting access, but in the back of that conversation always the realisation that access is going to become universal. It will become like the telephone, so everybody will get it. Now we have to start designing the world for it. Our world for that.

So should the union movement be tying itself to a commercial organisation to spread internet access amongst its membership? Is that a useful strategy?

It depends on a huge number of factors. What's the commercial outfit? Why are they involved? What do you get out of it? What is the advertising that is directed at it? But at the end of the day we have to find new ways of partnering so that we can get computers to working class people.

Tell me a bit about Soli-Net. You've been going for over 20 years. What changes have you seen in that time?

Last time I was in Australia was 1993. I had to define what a modem was. People looked at me very strangely. I was from a different world. People were very polite, but at the end of the conversation it was: He's talking fantasy. He's talking another world that we will never be a part of.

Now I come back, just six years later, and everybody knows, not only what a modem is, but how to use modems for creative trade union activities. Any one of the people in this conference could have stood at the front there and been a presenter of creative ways of using the technology. That's a huge difference that is.

And you are now working with the ILO to spread the technology into developing nations. How important is that for unions in places like Australia?

Australian unionists have to realise, as they do, and very well, that they may have problems but they are nothing compared to the problems being faced by unionists in developing countries where there is no possibility of access right now - and there is no infrastructure, so that we have to take extra steps so that we bring along our brothers and sisters in the international labour movement with us. Because there is as very, very strong possibility that we will divide the world further into information rich and information poor. And one of the ways that that can be done is to bring people to these kind of conferences and also to take the example of the Canadian auto workers: They have an international solidarity fund which is funded by a penny an hour fee to the auto workers, which goes into fund. Those kind of funds should be used for developing technology specific to developing countries.

I used to work until very recently only in the advanced electronic countries, and it was very interesting, but they are now coming along. What is not coming along are the unions in the under-developed world. Because the technology is not designed for that.

For instance, Soli-net, the conferencing system that I ran. There are many messages between the person's computer and the computer that serves out the messages. There's a lot of traffic. But that's OK in an advanced electronic country, where you fast connections. If you don't have these kind of fast connections - which is all of Africa, all of South America, South East Asia, then you are cut off. Now that's not the technology, that is a lack of will in designing the technology so that it meets their needs.

Now, of course the corporations in the United States are not going to design the technology for the poor people in South America, so that means it's up to us. So I want two things: I want messaging systems designed so that there is not a lot of traffic between the person's computer and the server. The server being the computer that passes out the message. That takes money to design. And I want innovative ways of developing technology. A crank up computer sounds funny, but we now have crank up radios, and I want a crank up computer that you crank it up and it gives you power for an hour and a half and when the satellite comes over once a day, you shoot your messages out and you take your messages down and you click off.

Nobody's designing that. Not because the technology doesn't allow us to do it, it is because there is a corporate mindset to the design of technology, which is why this morning I was arguing for more technology organisers. People like you and I that have some ability to understand these things and say technology can exist in different ways.

It's about almost looking at it as information - not just asa medium but also as a commodity and what we are looking at is new ways of delivering the information?

That's right. That's right. We have to find new ways of doing that if we are going to continue international solidarity we can't keep shipping people in. I work for the Workers Bureau of the United Nations International Labor Organisation, the ILO. Right now it's a fantastic programme. We take people from the developing world - unionists - and we bring them to the centre in Italy for a six weeks programme. These people work their hearts out because they don't have educational programmes where they are and they just stock up knowledge and demand more. But it's very limited. We can only bring together classes of 20 to 25 people at a time to teach them about international labour standards. Health and safety and such and so that's why the Workers Bureau of the ILO has higher meaning than others - to look at developing distance education programmes.

Tell us about the Online University - your master plan?

We are talking about an international labour university. Hopefully built by sharing credit and programmes between unions and colleges and universities around the world. The point to this is not only to build up recognition of international issues but to share responses to that so that we can learn from each other internationally how we can respond to globalisation, and build trade unions in that way. This is a topic that is a possibility but will remain only a possibility if we don't start acting on it.

But it's a move away from the notion of industrial age learning that's confined by national boundaries and also confined by national criteria?

Absolutely. That's it. And we've done it. I did it with SoliNet and you could see that it worked and you could see that the kinds of conversations that you have are radically different than when you have them within a boundary with a couple of international desks. When we have an international conference online we have people from many different countries, and it changes the conversation and its perception, and it changes the responses that are developed.

Is it merely involvement, or is there evaluation and marking involved as well?

If we are going to be serious about an international university, then we have to partner with the universities, learn how to develop very strict curriculum - by strict I mean you've written it out - you know what it is - you know where you are headed and what is the middle, the end and all the rest of it is, as well as learning to share credentials around each other.

Now, the problem that we have is that this concept is not only a radical one for the labour movement, it's a radical one for the university community itself. They don't share their credit, they don't do international work, and most of them are going to disappear if they don't get online anyway.

So, how far is this from becoming a reality?

The International Labour College? It's 10 years at least. I would predict five years before it starts teaching classes - ten years before it gets accepted around the world as a place to be, so that workers want to do it. But ten years in internet

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  Issue 40 contents

»	Contracts Fear as Teachers Sidelined
»	Reith Calls on States to Split Entitlement Costs
»	Burrow's Plea: Net-Heads Must Take Leadership Role
»	Ozemail Downloading Leave Entitlements
»	Geeks Claim 400 Per Cent for Millennium Bug Patrol
»	Hospital Crisis Looms as Nurses Set Deadline
»	Pre-Fab Shelter Wins UN Support in East Timor
»	Rail Authorities Back Down on Surveillance.
»	Rio Tinto Black List Exposed at Blair Athol
»	Needle Stick Fears Spark Industrial Action
»	Round One to the Cleaners
»	Telstra's Greed Puts Service at Risk
»	Tragic Death Leads to Lift in Contractor Safety Standards
»	Oldfield in the Pub

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Letter of the Week
»	Republican Post Mortem
»	Aquilina's Horror Award
»	CCT - Destroying Rural Communities
»	Timor Pride Not Cause for Requiem

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