Labor in Illinois

Web logs (a.k.a., Blogs): Easy Online Publishing

The term blog is a contraction of web log. A blog is a website on which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Since its appearance in 1995, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world. (adapted from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLOGhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLOG). The act of writing posts for a blog is known as “blogging,” and a person who writes or contributes to a blog is known as a “blogger.”

The easiest and cheapest way to set up a blog is though the free service called Blogger www.blogger.com, which is owned by Yahoo! It takes about 5 minutes to register and set up a basic blog, and an evening of fiddling to get things just the way you want them. There are several other programs and services for bloggers, but in my experience Blogger is the easiest to start with, and is flexible enough to expand with your needs. Blogger hosts a wide array of blogs: personal diaries and political rants, artistic projects, and organizational blogs. If your local has the financial and technical support, you may want to host your blog on your own computers.

Blogs can work as a central place to post information about your union—in this case they are just a convenient and inexpensive way to have a website. But the potential of blogs to spark discussion and move people to action is more important. Blogs can be a place to foster discussion about issues of concern to union members. They can even invite the public at large to enter a dialogue with unions about policy issues that impact union members lives.

To be a discussion forum, you must enable the comment function. WARNING: if you choose to have comments, you should be ready for negative, and even hostile comments. There are ways to limit malicious comments, and to create a delay so that the blog editor can view comments before they go live. However, you don’t want to make your readers think you are censoring them. This is a sure way to turn them off and create more hostility. During the New York City transit strike last December, the union set up a blog as a back up to their website. For the first several hours of the strike they left the comment function on with the result that they received over 600 comments, many of them extremely hostile. By noon on the first day of the strike, the union turned off the comment function.

Some Examples of Union Blogs

American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE): UnionBlog . AFGE has adopted a very open approach to blogging. Readers are invited not only to comment on official posts, but also to write their own posts. AFGE also has a side project hosted on Blogger: The Katrina Files .

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has a blog dedicated to one issue: the federal law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB: Let’s Get It Right . In the words of the site’s editors: “The NCLB Blog was established by the AFT as a forum where public education advocates, policymakers and others can exchange information and express their opinions on NCLB and related issues.” The blog EdWise is operated by the AFT’s New York City local. It includes many links to blogs written by teachers.

Starbucks Workers Union and Retail Worker are projects of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Both sites are a good example of how the blog format can be used to organize union information and serve as a virtual gathering point for geographically a dispersed workforce. The site also has a heavily used forum section.

Cleveland, Ohio, Central Labor Council hosts a blog written by its executive secretary, John Ryan of the CWA . John Ryan’s Blog, as it is titled, is somewhere between a personal soapbox and an online newsletter. The blog allows anonymous commenting, and gets some nasty, antiunion comments. But it gets more genuine comments that engage with the author’s posts.

For more information see…

Sharon R. Pinnock, “Organizing Virtual Environments: National Union Deployment of the Blog and new Cyberstrategies,” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 8(June 2005): 457-468. Also at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/wusa.