Technology
helps on the picket line
by Alan Zisman (c) 2005 First
published in
Columbia
Journal November 2005
As a Vancouver elementary school teacher, over the past few weeks
I’ve been deeply involved in my union’s job action. As I
write we’re preparing to vote on the mediator’s
recommendations; but it’s not too early to note a few ways that
technology has had an impact.
I acted as a ‘zone captain’ for my local (Vancouver
Elementary School Teachers’ Association- VESTA); every day a zone
captain visited each shift at each of the approximately 200 picketed
work sites bringing news and announcements and fielding questions from
the picketers. Compared to our last lengthy strike (in 1993), a big
change was the impact of cell phones. At least one picketer seemed to
have a phone on every line; when there were major news announcements
those phones started ringing. This was both good and bad—news got
to the line faster, but so did rumours. Some of the zone captains had
cell phones and could be in instant touch with the local office or hear
from their picket lines when there were problems, but many of the zone
captains were driving around with no way to reach them in a pinch. Next
time, we need to plan how to make use of cell phones in a more
organized way.
My local’s website (
www.vesta.ca)
was updated regularly, sometimes several times a day. Because of this,
many members came to rely on it for information. (The local’s
website averaged about 10,000 hits for each of the past three
days—not bad for a local with about 3,000 members). The
commercial news sites tended to lag behind, often featuring news
stories that had been left behind by a rapidly changing situation. An
up-to-date website can be an important tool for any organization, but
if it features stale news, its usefulness quickly declines. Kudos to
Vesta’s Glen and David for keeping their union local’s
website up-to-the-minute.
Union locals needed ongoing access to membership lists from the BCTF;
this time around this was done online, enabling the locals to update
the lists in real time. I set up a bank of older, scrounged computers
at my local’s office so that a bank of volunteers could get to
that data as needed. We found that the old hardware did just fine for
that; many home, organization, and business users are replacing
computers that still have lots of potential for basic Internet access,
word processing, and more.
More could have been done online, however. Union locals were expected
to download picket rosters, print them out, then fill out these paper
forms by hand, eventually sending them back by mail or fax. This was
cumbersome and time-consuming and should have all been doable as an
online form.
Business and government has been busy using technology to help make
their operations more streamlined and efficient (though, to be fair,
too often they’ve thrown a lot of money at technological
‘fixes’ that simply made things more cumbersome and
ineffective). Unions, non-profits, and other popular organizations
rarely have money to toss at high-end solutions. But they can often
still use technology as a low-cost but effective tool; Vesta’s
bank of recycled computers cost nothing, for instance. And keeping the
local’s website up-to-date took ongoing volunteer time but cost
no more than leaving it with old, stale news and announcements would
have.