[P2P-F] Fwd: Internet, social media and labour - a Trotskyist view

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*Peter sez*

This comes over to me - on a first and no doubt superficial read - as a
traditional Marxist view of both cyberspace in general and the significance
and potential of information and communication technology (ICT) for labour
protest in particular. This leaves largely intact the middle part of the
argument, dealing with the impact of ICT on the labour process and the
ambiguous implications for contemporary trade union struggle. This I find
pertinent and challenging for labour's cyber utopians.

I talk of 'traditional Marxist' 1) because of its distinction between the
material and the immaterial, with cyberspace explicitly or implicitly
presented as the latter, and 2) because of its defence of the traditional,
in-place, form of labour self-articulation, the trade union, as the
primary, indeed the only one.

Concerning cyberspace, this might be a novel terrain of the social - and
therefore of the struggle against alienation, which includes that of
classes - but it is no more immaterial than the screen image of a train
entering a station, which so frightened audiences around 1900.

Concerning the traditional trade union, this seriously besieged form of
worker self-articulation arose with the spread of capitalism and has
historically changed form with changing types of product, of production
processes, managerial methods, spaces and movements of production activity
and the nature of ownership.

It seems to me that to insist on the form of labour self-articulation that
took shape at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries is to condemn the labour
movement to a battle it has been losing against the informatisation of
capitalism, its globalisation and its paleo-liberal attack on labour
everywhere. Defence of the traditional trade union (combined with the
traditional complaint concerning 'trade union bureaucracy') is also to
forget that only 20% of the world's workers are organised in such. And that
new international labour movements are increasingly informed by, dependent
on and making assertive use of ICT.

Other opinions, as always, welcome. Indeed - given my superficial read -
they are necessary.

*Now read on...*

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 9:12 PM
Subject: Internet, social media and labour - a Trotskyist view
To: Chapullers OrsanS <orsan1234 at gmail.com>, Eric Lee <
ericlee at labourstart.org>, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>




International Socialism
 The internet, social media and the workplace Issue:
141<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?s=contents&issue=141>
* Posted: 9 January 14* Martin Upchurch

There have been heated debates on the left over the last few years on the
role of the internet and social media through web based communication
(WBC). In an article in *International Socialism* two years ago Jonny Jones
reviewed these debates and correctly highlighted the dangers of
overestimating the impact of social media on social
movements.1<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_1>While
new information and communication technologies, including social
media, have undoubtedly aided the organisational efforts of social
movements, they have not created them-and it would be technologically
deterministic to put the cart before the horse in assessing their value.
Writing from a Marxist perspective against “techno-centrism”, a leading
academic on social media, Christian Fuchs, has criticised explanations of
rebellions in which social media is perceived as the engine, claiming it to
represent a “fetishism of things…a deterministic instrumental ideology that
substitutes thinking about society with a focus on
technology”.2<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_2>

The tendency to inflate the value of WBC as a motor engine of movements
reflects a body of thought which over-emphasises the societal impact new
technology may have had in encouraging spontaneous protest and societal
change. For example, Anthony Giddens, from a postmodern perspective, has
argued in *Runaway World* that “instantaneous electronic communication
isn’t just a way in which news or information is conveyed more quickly. Its
existence alters the very texture of our lives, rich and poor
alike”.3<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_3>Manuel
Castells, in his monumental trilogy *The
Information Age*, also places information technology as the root of modern
social change, whereby the net replaces hierarchies as the dominant form of
social organisation, and the individual constructs her self-identity within
the same technologically based
process.4<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_4>A
vision of work in which material production has evaporated into a
weightless world is also presented as “postmodernisation” by Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri in *Empire*, where they argue that there are now no fixed
boundaries or territorial centres of power. Instead we are bounded by a
world where power lies “both everywhere and
nowhere”.5<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_5>This
new world is dominated by service work and “immaterial” labour, which
itself embraces universal cultural “products”, knowledge and communication,
to such an extent that industrial production:

has been informationalised and has incorporated communication technologies
in a way that transforms the production process itself. Manufacturing is
regarded as a service, and the material labour of the production of durable
goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial
labour.6<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_6>

Such approaches, of either the postmodern or postmodernisation variety,
sidestep or corrupt not only the material basis for change, but also the
importance of the agents of change historically rooted in class formations
and class struggle. In his book *New Capitalism* Kevin Doogan describes
such sidestepping of class as an academic expression of *dematerialisation*,
whereby the “death” of distance and time lends to the concept of a
weightless world, in which there is a separation of motion and matter. In
such a vision we appear to move beyond technocentrism into a world where
the transmission of knowledge becomes a fetish in itself. This is despite
the important fact that “the production and consumption of knowledge
remains materialist even if its circulation is
immaterial”.7<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_7>

A task that confronts us, therefore, is to bring such theories of
weightlessness and dematerialisation down to earth by examining the impact
of communication technology in the everyday concrete existence of the
workplace. More importantly, we need to examine these technologies in terms
of processes of class-based struggle. In so doing we need to do more than
rehearse the debates concerning the fetishisation of social media and
social movements within the general cultural sphere. It is imperative to
focus on the impact of communication technology in the workplace, at the
point of production, if we are to fully understand its implications. A
number of issues are of concern to contemporary Marxist analysis. First is
the power of employers to use communication technology to intensify work
through changes in the labour process. Second is the potential liberating
power of communication technologies for collective workplace organisation
against the employer through trade unions. Third is the effect such
technologies may or may not have on tipping the locus of power between rank
and file and bureaucracy within the trade unions themselves. In addressing
these areas of concern some reflections will be provided on current
industrial disputes where new communication technologies and social media
have been a central feature.
Routinisation and standardisation of work

For Marx, technology is a tool used by individual capital to produce
reductions in the “socially necessary labour time” that capital must
achieve if it is to remain competitive. “Socially necessary” refers to the
labour time required under normal conditions with the average prevalent
skill and intensity that determine the value of commodities. Individual
capitals can thus gain by upgrading skill, increasing work intensity and
reducing unit labour costs by improving productivity. Similarly capital can
increase the length of working time expected of each worker in a week or
year. The former acts to increase rates of relative surplus value and the
latter increases rates of absolute surplus value. Socially necessary labour
time is not a fixed absolute and is constantly moving in determining the
parameters of value, so individual employers want to try to exceed the
notional average to gain a competitive advantage. This is the root of
competition between capitals, which reduces to continuous efforts by
individual capital to intensify work in order to maintain or increase rates
of exploitation.

In modern management this process is taken to its logical conclusion by
construction of a “bell curve” in “performance management”. In this
practice the bottom 10 percent of performers as identified by their
appraisal scores are regularly culled in an organisation, in an effort to
raise the overall level of performance. As Jack Welch, the retiring CEO of
General Electric and an advocate of bell curve measurement, stated in his
final shareholders’ letter, “We must remove that lower 10 percent, and keep
removing it every year-always raising the bar of performance and increasing
the quality of its
leadership”.8<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_8>Thus
the modern workplace has seen a shift towards individual performance
measurement and performance related pay, not only in terms of measuring
physical output but also in terms of attempting to measure abstracted forms
of labour through soft competency measures such as ability to work with
others in teams, attitude, “innovation” and “leadership”. This process has
been accompanied with attempts to introduce “lean” production management,
typified by the elimination of waste and buffers in the production process,
not only in manufacturing but also in public services and
education.9<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_9>“Doing
more for less” has become the leitmotif of the new workplace. One
key feature of new communication technologies in the workplace is the
opportunity it presents to employers to further routinise and standardise
everyday work tasks, and to simultaneously measure work performance in
order to “weed out” the less productive. Labour productivity is enhanced,
either through intensified work or by replacement of everyday tasks with
technological innovation.

Of course, such processes of technology-related work intensification and
measurement are not new. Efforts to standardise times and tasks follow
practices first established in the inter-war years such as the application
of the Bedaux system of measuring work and time, and Gilbreth’s time and
motion study. Both systems deepened and extended F W Taylor’s system of
“scientific management” whereby an ultimate division of labour was
constructed under full management control. The effects on the labour
process were enormous: by intensifying work effort, deskilling and
establishing norms of output they acted to create standards of working by
which capital could adjust to the socially necessary labour time in the
production of manufactured
goods.10<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_10>In
the post-war period such forms of measurement rapidly expanded into
service and clerical work, whereby the time taken to complete even the
simplest work tasks was measured against banks of photographs for the task
created under the Methods Time Measurement system established in the United
States in 1948.11<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_11>

Digitalised communications technology takes the process of work measurement
a number of steps further. First, instead of self-filled work diaries, or
time and motion inspectors, work output and speed can be measured remotely
and instantaneously.12<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_12>Thus
the work output of checkout assistants at supermarkets can be measured
by collating the swipes of barcodes, and the insurance or tax office
“clerk” no longer works on a single claim but is confined to one discrete
task which flashes up on her computer screen only to be replenished
immediately as soon as the first task is completed. In such a way
monitoring through computerisation not only fills in the “porosity” of the
working day by restricting personal opportunities for down time but also
reduces discretion of the individual worker by removing context from the
decision-making process. Reducing porosity in the working day can even be
taken to include time allowed, or rather time not allowed, for normal
bodily functions such as going to the toilet. Warehouse workers and
forklift drivers at Tesco, for example, alleged that radio-linked (RFID)
armband tags were being used to monitor work rates and identify those staff
spending too long in the
toilet.13<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_13>In
Ohio a security firm has gone one step further and implanted RFID
chips
in two of its employees.14<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_14>

Second, new communication and web-based technologies allow the employer the
opportunity to extend the reach of monitoring and surveillance beyond the
more easily measurable work output into all aspects of work. Such extended
reach has been assumed by some theorists (we shall return to a critique
later) to justify use of Foucault’s *Panopticon* effect borrowed from
Bentham’s earlier writings on
prisons.15<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_15>In
this depressing and Orwellian scenario the envisioned prison tower,
which enables all prisoners to be seen by the guards but which cannot be
seen by the prisoners, is used to express hidden obedience in the
workplace. It is argued that surveillance and monitoring induce
internalised effects in employees whereby compliance is created even though
the monitoring is
unseen.16<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_16>In
this perspective, new technologies increase the intensity of this
effect
through their extended reach over and beyond the traditional tools of
compliance and control.

In addition, we have seen a rapid spread of web-based monitoring into
professional and service related work, where output measures are less easy
to define and more qualitative in nature. For example, the UK coalition
government since 2010 has sought to increase the use of targets and
“standard” setting in schools as a method by which to encourage “choice” in
the sector and to intensify teacher workloads as a cost-saving exercise.
Targets and scores are now openly published, thus commodifying both the
school and with it each individual teacher’s “output”. In terms of
target-setting an ICT system for monitoring student performance
(SIMS-schools information management system) has been widely introduced
throughout the school system. SIMS monitors student behaviour and
attendance (linked to automatic text messages to parents and carers if a
student is absent); creates a Schools Workforce Census of teachers’
professional qualifications and training and records students’ marks and
achievements throughout the school year (giving the teacher an “alert” if
not filled in on time). In such fashion information held on the teaching
staff and their individual students is universal.

Most importantly, SIMS acts to “colour code” the achievement marks of the
students set against expected grades based on past achievement. These
“expected” grades are outside the control of the individual teacher as they
are set at line manager level and measured for consistency across schools
(taking postcodes into account) by external advisers. In this way students
falling behind their “expected” grades are immediately identified, as are
the teachers who are teaching the below expectation students. Should an
individual teacher record too many codes of the “wrong” colour this will be
made apparent to the headteacher through monitoring of the system. This
information is then fed through to the performance objectives and targets
set in the appraisal system, and can be used as both a disciplinary tool
and as a potential indicator for performance related pay. In Marxist terms
what emerges is an attempt, however clumsy and proxy, to measure the
“abstract” labour of teachers and to utilise this measurement as a
yardstick of socially necessary labour
time.17<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_17>No
matter that the quality of education to pupils might suffer, as
teachers
are now incentivised to focus on “borderline grades” and pay less attention
to low achievers in the class. What count for the government are targets,
outputs, and competition within the new market created by agendas of
competition and commodification.

Similar processes can be found in social work, whereby targets are set for
child adoption and protection, or caseload turn-around, irrespective of the
need to ensure that the right decisions are made with due professional
consideration.18<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_18>In
both cases a by-product of the process is an increased sense of
alienation of teachers and social workers, as they are restricted in
exercising professional judgement and forced to work more intensively and
without considered reflection by cutting corners in order to meet
targets.19<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_19>
New technology and workplace surveillance

The ability of WBC to enhance opportunities for commodification of
information comprises the third area where change is apparent. In
particular the rise of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has
given employers an extra opportunity to monitor, spy upon and ultimately
discipline and control employees. Running in parallel are government
efforts to monitor and spy on email and social media conversations by use
of keyword driven technologies such as that used by Operation Tempora at
the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ. Twitter was launched in 2006, but now
records over 360 million daily tweets, while Facebook recorded its one
billionth user in October 2012, before losing 10 million users early in
2013 as privacy concerns began to worry users. In this brave new world of
online social media, virtual “images” are bought and sold as opposed to any
“physical embodiment of what they represent” in terms of value and
labour.20<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_20>A
process of commodification of culture is therefore engendered.

It is not just time and place of work that is eroding through the fleeting
and flexible logic of networks, but labour itself is made controllable by
its suppression to targets and abstract standards of performance and
behaviour. Thus employers may use individual tweets and Facebook profiles
as pre-screening before interview, picking up on our identities (however we
may wish to construct them) and indiscretions, recording the types and
number of friends, and scanning photographs and “likes” to build up a
picture of social and political habits, gender, age and skin colour. A
survey conducted in 2011 by the US Society for Human Resource Management
found that 56 percent of companies surveyed used social media scans before
engaging in recruitment trawls, up from 34 percent in 2008. A quarter of
organisations explore social media profiles before offering
jobs.21<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_21>The
perniciousness and subjectivity of this process are plain to see. A
further study in the US found, for example, that social media profiles
which exhibited that an individual had a liking for alcohol consumption
made them less likely to be offered a job than those whose profiles
emphasised family
orientations.22<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_22>

Of course, while employers use social media to their own advantage they are
also aware of the threats it may pose to their authority and ability to
control work time. As an attack on so-called “cyberloafing”, employers have
now moved en masse to ban social media on workplace computers. A survey
conducted in the UK in 2010 reported that 79 percent of the 1,765 employer
respondents have now banned social network sites on their
computers.23<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_23>In
2009 Portsmouth City Council banned its 4,500 employees from using
social network sites such as Facebook after finding that the staff logged
on to the sites up to 270,000 times a month between them (on average
equivalent to three times a day). The council says that staff can apply to
have their accounts unblocked if they use them for work purposes. Such an
exemption might include a fraud officer carrying out checks on claimants to
ascertain their lifestyles are what they claim they
are.24<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_24>

However, coercion and Taylorisation as forms of control are not the only
ways in which compliance and consent may be manufactured in an
organisation. As Michael Burawoy suggested in his book *Manufacturing
Consent*, employers may offer the “illusion of choice” to employees as a
subtle form of co-optation.25<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_25>Rasmus
Johnsen and Marius Gudmand-Høyer have turned conventional “control
and compliance” arguments somewhat on their head. Instead of being coercive
and alienative forms of constructing subjectivity, such processes of
target-setting and organisational moulding of the employee may
(depressingly) serve to fulfill a sense of “lack” in the
individual.26<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_26>In
other words, even though soft human resource management tools of
control
linked to communication technology may lack “humanity”, and engender
alienation by quantifying abstract labour, it might be the very process of
observation, target setting and feedback which instils in us a sense of
worth.

Such potential insights have been enacted (albeit by default) by some
employers who, rather than fear the internal uncertainties and threats from
WBC, have embraced the technology and sought to utilise it to create an
organisational atmosphere where the related sense of lack is converted for
the benefit of the organisation. Indeed, the drift towards all-embracing
digitalised information on ourselves is reinforced in the Quantified Self
movement whereby individuals constantly self-track their vital health signs
(blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, etc) and plot them against their
self-observed moods or immediately after eating, physical exercise or
sexual activity.27<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_27>Smartphone
applications such as Vine now allow individuals to share
immediately a range of information not only on their current activity but
also on their immediate surroundings with their personal networks in a
constant stream of video. While some may argue that such developments
liberate the individual others will sense employers and corporations
sniffing at the potential
use.28<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_28>Health
insurance companies may take particular interest. IBM already has a
tool to identify “unhappy”
employees.29<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_29>

It is not only before the employment contract is offered that the boundary
between personal and work lives has been blurred by the onset of WBC and
social media. Returning to the case of teachers, the current workload
dispute has been partly fuelled by an insistence by the government that
teachers adhere to new “Teachers’ Standards”. The new government issued
standards, effective from September 2012, aim to “assess teachers’
performance against the standards to a level that is consistent with what
should reasonably be expected of a teacher in the relevant role and at the
relevant stage of their
career”.30<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_30>Headteachers
are expected to refer to the standards when making their
judgements and to implement those judgements through the appraisal system.
The colour coded SIMS information, described earlier, forms part of the
performance assessment alongside a range of 25 competencies, which include
a section on personal and professional conduct. It is this latter clause
which affects the private sphere of teachers’ lives beyond the boundaries
of the school gate and which focuses on “not undermining fundamental
British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty
and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and
beliefs”. There is no further definition of “fundamental British values”
given but the inference is that any action outside the political mainstream
might fall foul of an individual headteacher’s judgement.

Most trenchantly, the issue of teachers engaging with social media such as
Facebook and Twitter more generally is very much to the fore. Argyll and
Bute Council in Scotland has already banned its employed teachers from
blogging about work after an incident when one head of department in a
school blogged about three boys with Asperger syndrome in her
class.31<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_31>The
case sits alongside other more high-profile dismissals of bloggers or
internet-based social networkers that have already occurred in the UK, with
employees of Waterstones bookstore, Argos retailers, the Prison Service,
and Virgin Airways, to name a few. Such “inappropriate” use has usually
involved alleged abusive remarks by employees directed at clients,
customers or service users. However, for teachers and lecturers the problem
of separating the public from the private is particularly severe. A US
based sociology professor, for example, perhaps naively, allowed “friends
of friends” to see her Facebook musings about students, leading to
complaints from students. The professor was suspended, and, as her
university policy document correctly if not sympathetically stated, social
media sites “blur the lines between personal voice and institutional
voice…privacy does not exist in the world of social
media”.32<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_32>

The most high profile instance of an employer’s use of social media against
employees came in the 2011-12 British Airways (BA) cabin crew dispute. The
cabin crews’ tightly organised union Bassa (an affiliate of Unite) had
organised 22 separate strike days and was beginning to have a real impact
on CEO Willy Walsh’s ability to run the airline. In a desperate retaliatory
move one weekend BA management moved decisively against both Bassa and
individual supporters of the strike in a series of disciplinary moves aimed
at the use of Facebook, email networks and text messages. The strikes had
begun to force BA onto the back foot, so much so that BA were forced to ask
pilots to volunteer for cabin crew training to act as strike-breakers. As
pilots were being recruited BA made its move against the union activists.
More than 40 cabin crew were disciplined as a result of their support for
the strikes and 15 were dismissed.

Of the disciplinary cases 18 were connected to Facebook postings, text
messages, emails and postings on Bassa or the airline pilots’ Balpa online
forum, with three of the 18 specifically concerned with private Facebook
postings to “friends”. The union suspected that BA’s internal security
force, Asset Protection, had been involved in preparing these cases by
covertly gaining access to private postings in email, Facebook or text
message form. Despite the bitterness of the strikes, and what could have
been said in the “heat of the moment”, the majority of postings chosen for
disciplinary action were mild in content. An example is a female cabin crew
staff member who asked on Facebook for a list of the pilots who had
volunteered for training as strike-breakers. She was charged with bullying
and harassment and given a three-year final warning, demoted one grade and
barred from promotion. Another male cabin crew member said he had a list of
“volunteer” pilots but did not know what to do with the list as “he knew
one of them personally”. He was dismissed. A second male staff member was
dismissed after he used the word “scab” in a text message sent in error to
someone he thought was a friend.

Pilots posting much more derogatory material against the strikers received
no disciplinary action, or at maximum mild rebuke. An example is a male
pilot and Balpa representative who posted on Balpa forum “F**k off Bassa
you lying malevolent bunch of hypocritical self-serving c**ts”. He received
an informal verbal warning. All of those dismissed were known to be active
strikers and these included a female cabin crew member and Bassa
representative who was sacked for “gross misconduct” for the “way she
represented” each of those members
disciplined.33<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_33>

Such is the “dark side” of employers’ use of WBC and social media to
monitor, spy and discipline worker activists. But what of the other side?
Can workers collectively use social media and WBC to organise and fight
back against the power of capital?
Distributed discourse?

The self-disciplining effect of the Panopticon envisaged in the workplace
and beyond by Foucault has already been described. For some commentators
this nightmare is reality, with predictions of apocalyptic total management
control in the workplace as every move and every mistake by employees is
monitored and instantly recorded with the aid of information technology.
ICT and WBC, in this perspective, increase the intensity of this effect
through their extended reach over and beyond the traditional tools of
compliance and control. Two academics at the London School of Economics,
Sue Fernie and David Metcalf, for example, refer to the effects of computer
telephony as rendering “perfect” the control in the hands of management in
a call centre environment.34<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_34>

Their account of such an Orwellian nightmare has been rebutted by Phil
Taylor and Peter Bain, who focus on the resistance offered by employees
within call centres by individual or collective acts of sabotage and
defiance.35 <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_35>The
authors identify a contradictory process defined by the tension
between
quality and quantity of service which allows for call centre workers to
overcome the constant monitoring, either by individual acts of resistance,
by the use of humour or by joining trade unions to fight collectively for
better working conditions and pay. Measurements of both quality and
quantity are, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on employee goodwill
rather than simple obedience if labour power is to be converted to the
maximum surplus value. Orwellian scenarios must therefore be tempered with
an understanding of how workers fight back against such subjugation.

We must also consider the impact that WBC has had on the ability of
employees to “turn the tables” on employers by monitoring and exposing
employers’ own (mis)behaviour and corporate
negligence.36<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_36>Facebook
and Twitter offer an unmediated and immediate tool for this
“synoptic” effect and even a form of “reverse panopticon” whereby employer
and corporate behaviour might be moderated. For individuals, the
opportunity, means and propensity to whistleblow on the employer may be
correspondingly enhanced, adding to already existing employer uncertainty
towards policy approach. Most existing legislation on whistleblowing
continues to be framed to address “conventional” forms. However,
internet-based activity complicates matters. Instead of whistleblowing
through third parties (such as the traditional media, trade unions,
government regulators or employer-supported ‘hotlines’), WBC enhancement
allows the immediate release of (unverified) information to a worldwide
audience. Such information is therefore unmediated and unrestricted and has
exploded not only in the Wikileaks/Bradley Manning/Julian Assange and
Edward Snowden cases but also more generally in exposures of employer
malpractice and corruption.

In presenting this counter-mobilising perspective, some commentators have
returned to Foucault who links language, discourse and power in an “order
of discourse”.37<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_37>This
perspective presents a case for opportunities for collective action
from below in a process of “distributed discourse” enhanced by the
networked effect of providing counter-information and campaigning against
the hegemony wielded by capital in globalised production systems:

Global organisation and coordination need no longer be solely the province
of large companies, governments and international agencies. Global
communication is now a routine everyday practice and it provides for a new
speed or velocity in campaigning and
bargaining.38<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_38>

It is also claimed that distributed discourse has the power not only to
upset power relations against corporations within the global economy but
also in the trade unions as rank and file networks can utilise WBC to
challenge the bureaucratic conservatism of trade union leaderships. An
oft-quoted example is the case of the long-running Liverpool dockers’
dispute (1995-8), and their use of the internet to create solidarity
networks beyond the shores of the UK. It was argued that a polyphonic
discourse of the oppressed and excluded was the key to undermining
authority because such diffused discourses “are different from the
discourse of power”.39<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_39>The
order of discourse in trade unions, it is argued, is constructed by
union leaders and expressed through channels of communication that
reinforce leadership, hierarchical authority and the centralisation of
power. The distributed discourse enabled by WBC, according to the model
proposed by John Hogan and others, would thus break the cycle, and allow
alternative voices to be heard from below and alternative discourses of
struggle to emerge.40<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_40>

The advent of internet based communication, and then more interactive Web
2.0 technology, did spur a surge in trade union use of the web that allowed
space for many commentators to champion the cause of *cyberunionism*.
Contributions to these debates have been generally optimistic in terms of
the potential of ICT and WBC to invigorate collective
action.41<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_41>Shostak’s
recipe for cyberunionism encouraged unions to “get on board” the
new information superhighway, promising a future which “enables unions to
improve their image and vision of a successful 21st century union,
including long-term goals, strategic options, and priorities needed to come
closer to matching their
profile”.42<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_42>This
nirvana of trade union internet professionalism would be achieved
through a programme of action that included-among other things-regular
surveys of members’ opinions “to learn in depth their needs and wants,
their dreams and nightmares”, and to learn from the rank and file by
regular email correspondence with union officers that ‘promises personal
responses within 72
hours”.43<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_43>

Cyberunionism was the promised vehicle not only for enhancing the union’s
communications approach and sharpening debate about industrial strategy,
but also a link to both a new wave global internationalism and a
reinvigoration of the rank and file. A foremost advocate of internet
internationalism is London-based Eric Lee, who established the LabourStart
website in 1997 and had 500 subscribers a year later. The purpose of
LabourStart was to provide a source of information and campaigning for
global labour concerns and disputes. By 2010 the site had over 60,000
subscribers and was offered in 23 language editions with an average of 250
stories per day. PayPal is now used for solidarity fundraising. Alongside
LabourStart, similar sites have emerged across the world such as Radio
Labour, Labor Notes and UnionBook, some endorsed officially by trade union
federations and some independent initiatives from labour
activists.44<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_44>Unions
have also used WBC extensively in anti-corporate campaigning, a good
example being Making Change at Walmart established by the United Food &
Commercial Workers International union in the
USA.45<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_45>Trade
unions themselves have also made extensive use of WBC employing the
full range of multimedia to add impact. However, while union use of WBC has
expanded, there are clear limitations to what “distributed discourse” can
achieve, most especially with respect to strengthening the rank and file’s
hand against conservative trade union bureaucracies.
A tool for rank and file activists?

To rehearse the argument, the proponents of “distributed discourse” suggest
that WBC will enable rank and file union members to organise and to
obstruct the dead hand of conservative trade union bureaucracies by
spreading information and challenging “official” discourse. Or, as Hogan
and others have argued, new distributed technologies might: “not only
permit the reshaping of power between capital and labour but also permit
the reshaping of power within the labour movement
itself”.46<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_46>However,
there are a number of strong reasons to suggest this is far too
optimistic a prediction. First, as Eric Lee himself has alluded to, there
is a limit on the amount of information activists can digest and process,
and internet fatigue may be
apparent.47<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_47>Second,
as others have highlighted, the problems of virtual passivity
encompassed in the phenomena of “clicktivism” and “slacktivism” may give us
a false impression of the power of WBC to convert ideas into action. In
this critique, real time, real space activity is substituted by passive,
virtual and physically isolating activity to the extent it is enacted
through screen and keyboard interaction alone. Slacktivism is cited by
Evgeny Morozov as:

Feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. It
gives those who participate in “slacktivist” campaigns an illusion of
having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more
than joining a Facebook
group.48<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_48>

Micah White describes Clicktivism as a:

Model of activism [that] uncritically embraces the ideology of marketing.
It accepts that the tactics of advertising and market research used to sell
toilet paper can also build social movements. This manifests itself in an
inordinate faith in the power of metrics to quantify success. Thus,
everything digital activists do is meticulously monitored and analysed. The
obsession with tracking clicks turns digital activism into
clicktivism.49<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_49>

Third, and most importantly, in terms of collective workplace action and
solidarity, we must assess the ability of WBC to transcend not just the
content but more importantly the *form of power and authority* in trade
unions.50 <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_50> A
recent review of trade union use of the internet and WBC more generally
concluded that trade union members are “more intense users of ICTs than
their non-unionised
counterparts”.51<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_51>However,
the fact that union activists are more likely to use WBC should
not automatically lead to the conclusion that unions will revive or that
rank and file activists will be able to challenge union bureaucracies more
effectively. We are under an illusion if we believe, for example, that only
militant rank and file activists will make use of WBC. It is just as likely
that trade union bureaucracies or right wing activists will effectively
utilise information networks. Thus in the recent election for Unite general
secretary Jerry Hicks and Len McCluskey both utilised the full range of
platforms (websites, email listings, podcasts, videos, Facebook groups,
tweets) to project their campaign. Sally Hunt, general secretary of the
college lecturers’ union, UCU, utilised email surveys of members to attempt
to reinforce her authority over the union’s left wing activists by
circumventing branches and regional organisations and other democratic
structures of the
union.52<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_52>

Unite at official level used effective WBC to campaign against Willy Walsh
and British Airways in the cabin crew dispute, including videos and spoof
websites (“Brutish Airways”). A Facebook page was also established at
unofficial level in March 2010 called “Support BA cabin crew’s Democratic
right to strike!” which drew in more than 3,500 “likes” (followers of the
page).53 <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_53> The
vast majority of posts on the site were supportive of the strikes, and the
site regularly linked to press reports and, most importantly, fed full
information of flight cancellations during strike days in an effort to
counter the more customer “appropriate” tone and content communicated by BA
management. A small minority of postings were hostile to the strikes, and
went alongside a separate Facebook group for BA anti-strike “volunteers”
established in May 2010. However, this particular site did not manage to
take off and soon fell dormant with just ten “likes”. Probably the most
important electronic forum used during the dispute remained the cabin crew
union Bassa email forum, which acted to consolidate feelings of solidarity
and give the geographically dispersed membership of Bassa a sense of common
identity against the employer. Despite this internet battle the real power
in the dispute rested on decisions taken at mass meetings of the cabin crew
staff, but even this was not enough to ward off the ability of the Unite
leadership under Tony Woodley to push through a deal with BA that
compromised some of the demands established by the cabin crew themselves.

There are distinct limits to processes of distributed discourse. WBC may
well act to engage more people in debate, and counter-information is spread
and digested more quickly. But ability to challenge union hierarchies or
change the direction of policy still rests with winning the majority
argument in collective open debate. In this respect WBC may act as a useful
tool to disseminate information and widen discussion, but may have distinct
limitations in its ability to upset or transform democratic structures of
debate and decision-making.

In conclusion we may argue that, far from being immaterial, the struggle
over WBC and social media at the point of production is very much part of
our material world. WBC and social media can be additional organisational
tools in workers’ armoury against the employer and in the struggle for
socialist ideas. However, it is not an open field. In particular, capital
has mounted an offensive against subversion of its interests and has
embraced WBC further to intensify work and close down the boundary between
work time and personal time, and between the public and private sphere. As
important to understand is that power to act within unions remains
dependent (correctly so) on internal democratic procedures of
decision-making. Social media, precisely because of its open and unmediated
nature, is likely to be at odds with the principle of internal union
democracy.54 <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_54>This
is an especially important point if we wish to understand how the rank
and file may use WBC to challenge both global capital and collaborative
trade union leaderships. Rather than depend on the nirvana of WBC to rescue
collective organisation we must recognise that rank and file independence
and strength are based on really existing networks of militants based at
the point of production, sharing and generalising from collective
experience towards sectional and then cross-workplace solidarity. This
implies a leap of consciousness for which historically the role of
socialists as leaders of rank and file movements has proved
crucial.55<http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch141_55>In
such a situation face to face contact and argument, democratic debate
and mass meetings are the lifeblood of the social trust and reciprocity
necessary to build a movement that transcends the virtual into the real.
------------------------------
Notes

1: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1411>Jones, 2011.

2: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1412>Fuchs, 2012,
p386.

3: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1413>Giddens,
2002.

4: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1414>Castells,
2000.

5: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1415>See
Choonara, 2005.

6: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1416>Hardt and
Negri, 2000, p293.

7: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1417>Doogan,
2009, p50.

8: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1418>Go to
www.citehr.com/76182-bell-curve-appraisal-system-employee-database.html#ixzz2THEpZgd9;
See also Gary, 2001.

9: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch1419>Carter and
others, 2011

10: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14110>See
Braverman, 1974, for a classic account.

11: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14111>For a
contemporary version see the handbook of MOST (Maynard Operation Sequence
Technique) Work Measurement Systems (Zandin, 2002).

12: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14112>Two useful
studies are Danford and others, 2003, and Boreham and others, 2008.

13: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14113>Rawlinson,
2013.

14: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14114>Waters,
2006.

15: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14115>Foucault,
1995.

16: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14116>Sewell and
Wilkinson, 1992.

17: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14117>Marx, 1975.

18: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14118>For a
description of such processes in social work see Ferguson and Lavalette,
2004.

19: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14119>Such fears
of target setting have also affected the robustly conservative Police
Federation, who are claiming that government statistics showing a fall in
crime may be misleading, as officers are encouraged to manipulate the
statistics and underrecord crime. See Barrett, 2013.

20: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14120>Grassman
and Case, 2009, p175.

21: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14121>Go to
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/jobs/social-media-workplace-research-roundup#

22: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14122>Bohnert
and Ross, 2010.

23: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14123>Martin and
others, 2011. However, banning social media on work PCs is a fairly
pointless exercise, given the increasing use of smartphones with WBC
technology.

24: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14124>Reported
27 September 2009-see Kisiel, 2009.

25: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14125>Burawoy,
1979.

26: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14126>Johnsen
and Gudmand-Høyer, 2010 p10.

27: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14127>Go to
http://quantifiedself.com

28: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14128>Finley,
2013

29: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14129>Go to
http://phoebevmoore.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/self-tracking-and-the-quantified-man/

30: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14130>Department
for Education, 2013, p3.

31: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14131>Kemp,
2009.

32: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14132>Stripling,
2010.

33: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14133>Information
received from Bassa/Unite.

34: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14134>Fernie and
Metcalf, 1997, p10.

35: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14135>Bain and
Taylor, 2000.

36: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14136>Mathieson,
1997.

37: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14137>Foucault,
1972.

38: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14138>Hogan and
others, 2010, p29.

39: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14139>Hazen, 1993,
p21, and Carter and others, 2003, p295.

40: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14140>Hogan and
others, 2010.

41: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14141>Lee, 1996;
Shostak, 1999; Freeman and Rogers, 2002.

42: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14142>Shostak,
1999, p125.

43: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14143>Shostak,
1999, p113.

44: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14144>For a
review of various initiatives see Shoshtak, 2001.

45: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14145>Go to
http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/

46: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14146>Hogan and
others, 2010, p33.

47: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14147>Lee, 2006,
p16.

48: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14148>Morozov,
2009.

49: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14149>White,
2010.

50: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14150>Martinez
Lucio, 2003.

51: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14151>Richards,
2010.

52: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14152>
http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/28308/UCU+conference+delegates+defend+their+union%26%2339%3Bs+democracy

53: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14153>Support BA
Cabin Crews Democratic right to
strike<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-BA-Cabin-Crews-Democratic-right-to-strike/368528654694?ref=ts&fref=ts>

54: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14154>Saundry
and others, 2007

55: <http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=951&issue=141#upchurch14155>See
Callinicos, 1982 for a review.
------------------------------
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www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ec414700-9bf4-11da-8baa-0000779e2340.html#axzz2TGFIJkpM

White, Micha, 2010, “Clicktivism is Ruining Leftist Activism”,
*Guardian*(12 August),
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism

Zandin, Kjell B, 2002, *MOST Work Measurement Systems*, *3rd Edition*, (CRC
Press).


-- 

   1. *EBook, November 2012: Recovering Internationalism
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>.  [Now free
   in two download formats]
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>*
   2.
*EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical
   Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/> *
   3. *Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global
   Emancipation of Labour <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
   4. *Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
   <http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.> *
   5. *Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement
   Internationalisms. See Call for Papers <http://www.interfacejournal.net/>,
   (Deadline: May 1, 2014). *


   -




-- 
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