Union Recruitment and Organising on the World Wide Web

Within the labour movement claims are made for the potential of the World Wide Web and other information and communication technology (ICT) to reinvigorate a union movement in decline. This paper provides a first step in understanding how unions are interacting with ICTs to recruit and organise members by documenting and analysing their use of one particular ICT, the World Wide Web. Despite the investment of unions in Web technology, to date there is limited academic research on how unions use the web. The first part of the paper examines the various ways in which the Web can assist recruitment and organising. The second half of the paper explores how Australian unions are using the Web. This section analyses the results of a survey of the websites of Australian unions.