Auntie Otter's Idea Hour: Steal This Idea

[akirlu]

I'm partly writing this down here because it was one of those ideas that come to me in the half-awake part of the morning, and I want to write it down somewhere before it evanesces away like champagne bubbles. (The other idea involved a corset- and costume-shop for large ladies, and Merry Widows with built-in boleros and is probably less useful without serious investor capital.) Partly I'm writing to get feedback.

Background: just after the election I got a polling call that was pretty obviously sponsored by my union, SEIU, and pretty obviously aimed at market research for how effective the union was in getting out political information to its members and getting them politically active. And though I think they're pretty good guys, I have to say, in my opinion, not very. Effective that is.

This morning I realized that a big part of the problem is that they're too invested in what is, essentially, a 19th century, top-down model of union organization and communication. They hold meetings, they send out memos (in e-mail form, these days), and try to keep us up-to-date on union-connected political news. And, basically, tell us how to think and feel about stuff. And maybe that works for some people, but it seems to me that if the union wants to leverage its members effectively and act as a better locus for social change and political activism, then it needs to find ways to build grassroots, bottom-up participation among the membership first. Get the members involved and then get them active. And to do that, the union needs to give the members something they want and need. Because the truth is most of us, at least in the University, don't participate that much. Very few go to the meetings; I certainly don't. And while I get the e-mails, they're generally telling me stuff I already know, and saw presented better on some blog or other weeks or months ago. (The Washington State Democrats frankly have the same problem, and they keep sending me e-mail with broken HTML coding at the top of every message...)

So the thing I'd like to see the union try (and other unions as well) is to use their extant web resources to suck people in. Give the people something they can hum that's useful and desirable to them, something they'll keep coming back for. First, I think the union should set up a web intranet Craig's List cognate. Provide a clearing house for members to list garage sales, intramural teams, pick-up games, social events, timeshare condo rentals, couches for sale, and all the little bits and bobs that people want to find other people for. If Microsoft can have an internal list for employees, the union could darned well do the same. Second, start a blog, with active discussion available in comments, and links to other political bloggers, especially local ones, local resources, guides to political involvement, sub-diaries set up for when active voices emerge among the rank and file, and so forth. Make the union as Clue Train friendly as possible. Because in a union that locally covers most of the line staff for a university and a university hospital, you gotta figure there are an awful lot of clueful people who are just waiting for a pipeline to get together and be a social force. But first you've got to give them a reason to be interested. First you have to give them a reason to visit your website regularly and get in the habit of clicking through a lot.

I was thinking about this particularly because I know Janice Murray is trying to get a Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally started, and it sure seems to me that if that could be promoted to the however many thousand members of SEIU, that would be a pretty good base to build some momentum from.

So. I guess I'm off to investigate the union's website and see who I can pitch this too. If anyone wants to steal it for parallel application elsewhere, mazel tov.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The question I have is; are you looking to revitalise an extant union? Or is this a way to build new unions?

Because Sola's boyfriend is a union activist/organiser, and the problem of top-down modelling, combined with the still large need for unions makes it hard (looking at it from the outside) for them to get started.

Because the model already exists, it's hard for some new model to steal the niched, but the sense that (and some of this is merely political) the union organization is interested in the "union" more than it is the members.

That, perhaps, is no small part of why unions are struggling (the active work on the part of those in power certainly doesn't help... and you can't get them to look at the glory days they say they want to return us to; at least not at the strength of unions, progroessivity of the income tax and the smallest gap between poor and rich we've ever had... nope; it was the nasty unions who ruined this country).

TK

[daveon.livejournal.com]

On a compelted unrelated note, I'm in Seattle tomorrow - arriving tomorrow night. Due to piss poor planning on mine and the customers part it'll be a short trip. Do you guys fancy doing anything on Tuesday evening? Are you free?

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Janice is trying to start a Drinking Liberally? Hmm. Wonder why I don't know about this. I need to call her anyway.

MKK

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'm looking at solutions to the problem of revitalizing an extant union. Finding and recruiting membership is not an issue here, because the University is a closed shop for many pay grades. But it's pretty clear that the union wants to capitalize on its membership, and to do that, I think they need to look at a different model of engagement.

Would this work for building new unions, I don't know. I don't even know if it would work for revitalizing an extant one, but it seems promising (at least, as a component in an array of fresh approaches to involvement-building). But I think the principle behind this idea - that you need to find something that people want and need in order to get them to come to you, and offering it to them in a way that gives them control/choice is probably applicable to union building as well. The idea, to put it in a different frame, is to make the union into a hospitable "third place" to its membership, and the details of how to make that happen can vary.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I know because I happened to talk to her about it. She says she got the idea from my LJ. *beam* In a parallel development to Hal, I've been thinking about starting my own "real" blog in addition to the LJ. One of the reasons I think about it is as a place to advertise Drinking Liberally and the Seattle Tun. Although I realize that's backward, since you need to have a readership before advertising for things does any good. For that matter, I think it might be worth talking up at Seattle Democrats and Democracy Now meetups as well. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Go for it!

MKK

[fritz-freiheit.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding cynical, I think that the problem with many unions these days, is, as Terry suggests, the union exists for the union's sake. This means, I would suggest, that the leadership of the union will be resistant to change, particularly from the the rank and file. If the rank and file gets involved, then they might be more apt to change the management structure of the union. Sigh. I think you have a lot of momentum to overcome, but power to you. Unions did come into existence for a good reason, and maybe that reason can be reconstituted.