Unions on line:
the emergence of
e-forms of collectivism and solidarity.
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The development of information communication technologies has created new opportunities for the global organisation and coordination of labour. Following on from social movements in other sectors of civil society, the discussion of global unions is now a credible discourse .
At the same time as new information communication technologies create the ground for global unions, they also permit traditional unions to better engage and interchange with their local bases. There is a dynamic of relocalisation afforded by the new information communication technologies.
The coordination capabilities of the new information technologies also permit new forms of the organisation of labour at the local level - 'bootleg' industrial action by those not in agreement with traditional union leadership becomes more possible and the advent of 'ten minute' activist funding technologies (click and donate) become the device by which such action can be sustained. This page has been set up for purposes of relaying and archiving these developments in the interests of labour.
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Now published and available electronically: Special issue of Critical Perspectives on International Business (click here), Vol1 Nos 2/3 May 2005 The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet Guest Editors: Margaret Grieco, John Hogan and Miguel Martinez-Lucio. Traditional trade union structures have been slow to realise the capabilities and capacities of the new information technology in respect of the globalisation of labour. Yet the co-ordinative capabilities of international labour with the advent of the Internet are radically enhanced as the actions of workers in the international transport sector demonstrate. The Liverpool Dockers and the Wharfies of Australia demonstrate through their Internet based campaigns the power of labour in counter-coordinationin respect of global capital. Other labour organised Internet based campaigns are found throughout the developing and developed world, this special issue documents the emergence of new globalised labour communication strategies in the context of a globalising world of commerce,business and governance. |
| For information on the Global Unionism in the Information
Age: Information Communication Technologies and Effective Bargaining
session (Panel Chairs: John Hogan, University of Hertfordshire, UK and Peter
Nolan, University of Leeds, UK )at the meeting Global Companies,
Global Unions, Global Research, Global Campaigns, held in New York
February 9-11, 2006. click here
For session program and papers click here For information on the meeting on Trade Unions in the information age organised by John Hogan, Steve Fleetwood and Peter Nolan click here For information on the cyber union stream Imagined solidarities: labour and the “Information Age” (Coordinators: John Hogan, University of Hertfordshire, UK, Miguel Martinez Lucio, University of Bradford, UK Margaret Grieco, Napier University, UK and Cornell University, USA) at the upcoming meeting Industrial Relations in Europe Conference, to be held in Slovenia, Ljubljana, 31st August - 2nd September, 2006 click here |
Consolidated bibliography: Unions and the Internet. Click here for Hogan consolidated bibliography - 25.10.2003
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On line data bases, projects and materials
Technology for on line trade unionism:
On line reports:
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Case Studies:
The internet and world wide web enable labour to recollect its history from a range of sources and accounts which have been fragmented by the formal recording processes and past power distributions of society. The event history link bullet pointed below provides a first approach into the way that the experiences of labour in the mining history can be reassembled. It provides access to the direct voice of the mining community and its constituent parts.
A similar historical base can be put together for 'the Navvies' who died in their numbers in the construction of the infrastructure of mainland Britain.
And a similar record can now be put together for the Mexican 'los braceros' who were contracted as labour to the United States by the Mexican government and who are still owed wages.
Women's industrial history has often been referred to as 'invisible history' or a 'missing record'. History 'made invisible' through official registration and recording processes can now be recollected and rendered visible once more. The experience of Scotland's herring lassies (or herring quines or herring girls depending on the dialect of the many localities through which they travelled on their work) begins to take shape on the world wide web as the holdings of various local museums become available for networking into a data base:
Women were also involved as migrant seasonal labour in the hop fields: women and children from cities worked annually within agriculture. The orthodox literature stresses the sedentary life of women and the early separation of the industrial from the rural in the development of industrial urban life. The re-collected archive of materials available on the world wide web challenges both these orthodoxies:
| Newsdesk: press items on unions and internet
use. |
This site is managed by:
John Hogan,
University of
Hertfordshire
e-mail at john_hogan@talk21.com
and
Margaret Grieco,
Professor of Transport and Society,
Napier
University
Edinburgh EH10 5BR
e-mail at
m.grieco@napier.ac.uk
and
Visiting Professor, Institute for African Development,
Cornell
University
e-mail at mg294@cornell.edu
and
Anne-marie Greene,
Industrial Relations and Organisational
Behaviour Group,
Warwick Business School,
Warwick University
Coventry,
CV4 7AL
e-mail at irobag@wbs.warwick.ac.uk
and
Stephen Little
Head, Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise
Open University Business School
Milton Keynes, U.K.
s.e.little@open.ac.uk
Last updated: 26 February 2006
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