Jason over at the newly rejuvenated Communicate or Die has been coming up with some great posts of late – recommended reading even for us on the wrong side of the pond. I liked his distinction today between rough democracy and formal democracy, in trying to explain why unions are hesitant about going ‘open source’ in their involvement of members.

He thinks unions firmly enshrined democratic processes (formal democracy) can sometimes be in danger of making a fundamentally good thing so firmly enshrined that it wears itself into a rut.

Jason sees an older tradition of informal (rough) democracy in America, of ongoing full and frank discussion on an informal basis, which he feels has been sidelined over time in unions and in politics in general:

“I think that one great way to avoid that fate is for union leadership to use these new technologies to communicate interactively with their membership. To see what people are thinking. To have regular discussion and debate. To allow for candidates for union office to talk directly to members during election periods. To take what’s best from the old union tradition of rough democracy and reinvent it for the modern era. To create what we might call an “open source culture” for unions – in the same way techies have been fighting to open up software code for use and modification by everyone. In the hopes that genuine, long-term discussion and debate between union members and union leadership might be just the thing to help unions become more responsive and more relevant. And that this in turn would help spark a period of reformation and renaissance for the labor movement.”

That’s a nice way to position the difference between the forms of consultation and collaboration a union could use. I don’t think it’s hard to understand why unions often don’t like to reach beyond their rigid representative democratic structures.

One thing at the top of their minds on this side of the pond at least is always that less than 70% of the UK population are online, which means over 30% are automatically excluded from anything you provide online only, and that is a big bad. This means online is seen as legitimate only when used an enhancement to union comms rather than a replacement, and in the case of democracy it’s doubly so – it has a use in helping to improve the efficiency and relevance of the formal process (improving turnout and lowering costs), rather than in seeing where other totally new (and most likely chaotic) opportunities lie.

I only half agree with this. On the flipside, maybe 10% of union members actually go to branch meetings. Is that discriminating against the 90% who don’t, and depriving them of their democracy? No, of course not, but I think it can be argued as well as it can for online.

For activists, the democratic structure of a union is pretty straightforward. For most people though, it’s arcane and scary. A lot of people who don’t yet strongly identify with the union get spooked by the thought of going to a meeting and arguing their case – it’s just something outside their comfort zone.

Look at industries where there is very little history of unionism, or amongst the digitally-native generation-M now coming into the workplace. There are whole swathes of people, never members of a union, for whom our tried and tested democratic channels are totally alien. By coincidence, many of these people are also entirely at home with online social networking for example, which is the first place they turn to to run any aspect of their personal (and increasingly professional) lives.

A digression by way of slight example, the TUC’s online community for shop stewards, www.unionreps.org.uk, is home not just to the most committed reps who want to network and improve their skills, but also to a number of brand new reps in their twenties from non-traditional union workplaces. They’ve never been in a union before and now find themselves catapulted into a frighteningly responsible position. Where is the most natural place for them to go to work out what they need to do? The rulebook? Their FTO? Or maybe an online social network run for reps and by reps.

In this case it could be argued that sticking to the formal ways of doing things is discriminating against the n00bs or the overwhelming majority who just don’t work that way. If it’s fair enough to say “But that’s a cop out – if they really want the benefits that a union brings, they should at least put themselves out to attend a meeting on the other side of town and learn to debate publically, even if it makes them feel a bit uncomfortable”, then isn’t is also fair game to say “they should at least be willing to go to a computer in their local library or any of the other UK Online centres the Government has made freely available for them, and learn to debate online”?

We need to engage everyone in unions, and also everyone who could be in them. I don’t see it as a case of one size fits all, either online or off, it’s about trying to make the most of what everyone is able to bring to the table.