After two years of virtual union life, confined to small boxes on the screen, in a context of major media transformations, the question arises for any union: how to communicate with members?
Countless trade union publications have accompanied the history of our struggles, from the most modest to the most professional: Union Life, Au Coton!, The Steelworker, The Forestry Voice, To overcome, In motion, The Beaver, so many forgotten titles, badly preserved, which bet on The power of words and tried to say: It concerns you!
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But are these newspapers read by others than the most militant (and the bosses)? Are they too “intellectualized”, thereby removed from concrete working conditions and daily lives? Too concerned with justifying “union lines”, fearful of contentious issues and threatened by a certain jargon?
When I dive back into the pages of the publication Le Work, the magazine for the ordinary world published by the CSN in the mid-1970s, I was impressed by the diversity of voices that were heard there: educators, professors and social workers in an article on “the fate we » ; three testimonies on the oil crisis; trade unionists, workers, lawyer, police chief, CEGEP students and other figures from Joliette in a report on the consequences in this small town of two local strikes; news on food clubs, a real estate cooperative and popular committees in Abitibi-Témiscamingue; brief news on about twenty strikes in progress (another era!); the mail of a dozen readers with very contradictory and sometimes very direct positions. “It’s high time that the ordinary guy is represented, that what he has to say is published so that the administration knows that we are aware that we are being screwed,” writes a Montreal civil servant. This is in addition to a long interview with “a miner’s wife from Thetford” who doesn’t have her tongue in her pocket.
I do not wish here to idealize a formula, but to emphasize the fact that we hardly hear these snippets of personal speech, this concrete information on the life of union members, except exceptionally on social networks.
Perhaps it is time, moreover, to have a significant trade union presence escaping the too tight control of “public relations” on these networks. This is blatantly obvious in the eyes of Éric Gingras, who published Plea for a current trade unionism (Somme tout, 2021): “We have to imagine being masters of broadcasting: Facebook live, simultaneous video broadcasting on the Web platform, image coverage on social networks, story on Instagram, series of live tweets, etc. “, he argues. Let’s stop clinging to press releases and press conferences of yesteryear, he tells us, even questioning the relevance of the ritual recourse to demonstrations.
Without having the same enthusiasm as the latter for digital unionism, the unions must question themselves on the ways of informing the members, of involving them in the debates, of making known internally and externally the concrete reality of labor and the role of trade unions in struggles for social and environmental justice. Reflect, therefore, on ways to combine coffee break chatter, face-to-face and virtual assemblies, printed matter, videos and social networks, and this, in a conscious diversity of tactics and without the desire to control everything from above and ‘advance.
In this regard, on April 29 and 30, UQAM will be holding discussion days on trade unionism on the theme “Building bridges, winning victories”. The event is jointly organized by the journal To port! and Lutte commune and the Union of Professors of the University of Quebec in Montreal (SPUQ). To register : https://www.ababord.org/Construire-des-ponts-rremonter-des-victoires.
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