No one's exactly sure who came up with the idea for Labor Day.
Some facts are not in dispute, though. The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, l883.
The Knights of Labor were the first to settle on the first Monday in September for Labor Day. That was in 1884. Several municipalities made it a legal holiday. In 1887 the state of Oregon was the first to grant legal status to Labor Day. Other states followed, and in 1894, the US Congress passed a bill making Labor Day a national holiday.
The US choice of early September is unique. In other countries similar holidays are mostly celebrated on May 1 is the day chosen to honor workers, following the lead of the International Socialist Congress of 1889. And in the US, this day has become more of a holiday marking the end of summer, than anything overtly connected with the labor movement or workers.
Still, it's a good day to take a quick look at the labor landscape and see if the seismic force of the net has caused any changes from prior Labor Days.
Just a few years back there were pundits suggesting that the net was one of many things that would bring about the end of unions as we've come to know them. The theory was that we were on the verge of a new, knowledge economy. Workers would all be happy independent contractors with no need of a union.
Union membership numbers seemed to support that view. From 1992 through 1996, the number of union members in the US declined fairly steadily. Then in 1998, the numbers went up, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It's turning out that unions may be in for a new period of growth as workers and the unions themselves react to changes in the workplace and learn about the tools technology offers.
The recent strike by workers at Verizon (formed by a merger of Bell Atlantic, GTE and Vodaphone) was fought, in part, over the issue of whether the unions (the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) would be able to try to sign up nonunion employees coming in to the newly merged company. The unions won the right to unionize nonunion divisions of the company as soon as 55% of employees sign union cards.
There were other issues in this strike that bear watching. One was Verizon's ability to transfer work from union units to nonunion ones. Another, and a big one, were working condition issues.
This is big because call centers are becoming the sweat shops of the Digital Age. Remember those labor issues from years back about speeding up the assembly line and unrealistic work quotas. They sound strangely familiar -- déjà vu all over again, if you will - as many call center operators face systems that expect them to handle a call every three or four minutes with two second breaks between calls.
And there are still the old standby issues of job security and seniority and wages and benefits. That New Economy is looking a lot more like the Old one every day.
So what about those independent workers? As I write this, unions for writers and actors are on strike over issues of how they'll be paid for their work. At dot-com startups a whole generation of workers are shaking their heads groggily and discovering that stock options in a company that may not survive aren't much compensation at all, and that maybe a bit of negotiating for a decent pay and benefits package might be in order. And Working Today looks less like a nonprofit lobby and more like a union every day.
The landscape is definitely changing. Unions are changing with it. Let's look at a couple.
Start with strikes and look at how the web was used by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) during their recent and bitter strike at Boeing.
When the strike began on February 9, the union got right to business on the website, posting picket duty schedules. Later the site told striking workers how to apply to temporary health insurance, offered job search bulletin boards, a strike handbook, and tons of news.
The union used email to get the word out. That's far faster than postal mail and saves money, too. Every email that replaced a postal letter saved (by union estimates) about a buck.
Where SPEEA may have set the standard for other unions is in the amount of information on the site and the mix of both "official" union information and discussion. The discussion boards (in private areas) were the most used parts of the site, letting members react to news and share opinions.
Those password protected areas let the union share sensitive information but they do more. They allow the "official" part of the union to get prompt feedback from the rank and file in ways not possible before.
If SPEEA is a model for using the web during a strike action, then the vaunted American Federation of Teachers may do the same for day to day union activity. The AFT's site is a font of information with special sections for all kinds of teachers and even a special section for new AFT members.
Unions are using the web to tell workers about the benefits of union membership, sign up on email lists for more information about joining, and even joining and paying dues. At the University of California, recently, instructors and librarians developed what they called an "online picket line" sending requests to Regents to maintain library funding. The AFL-CIO even has its own portal site called Working Families.
Unions are finding that the ease and speed and reach of communication using the net and web can be a powerful lever for their efforts. Like businesses, they're discovering that web communication is not only faster and easier, but often cheaper than paper-based communication.
But unions (and other membership organizations) are just beginning to explore how the net/web is changing their own dynamics. No one knows exactly what it will mean to have as much participation as the web makes possible. No one knows what impact almost immediate member reaction will have on negotiation processes. No one knows how the quantity of communication will change the quality of communication or negotiation or day-to-day management.
The biggest experiment out there right now is being run by an auto maker - Ford. Back in February, Ford announced that it was giving a free (as in zero dollars) PC to each of its 300,000 employees. They would also be able to get Internet access for five dollars a month.
The article flurry surrounding that announcement concentrated on whether this was a "altruistic" gesture or compared the PC offer with Ford's move in 1908 to raise the wages of production line workers to five dollars a day.
The real issue, though, is what all this means for Ford and its relations with the folks who work there. There are sure some possibilities for outbound communication from Ford directly to workers. But what I want to see is what happens when it's possible for a Ford production line worker in Dearborn to talk to one in Ohio and for them both to chat with one in Sao Paulo.
The fact is that we don't know what all this means, but we can be pretty sure that the way Ford employees relate to the company and to each other will be very different five years from now. That's about the same level of knowledge we have about how unions will be affected by using the net to communicate internally.
As in many other things, Peter Drucker may have said it best. He said that we can only be sure of two things about the future. We can be sure that we cannot predict it accurately. And we can be sure that it will be different. So the world of the net and labor unions.
This feature appeared on 4 September 2000
