My job – Industrial union secretary
I work for IG Metall, Germany’s industrial union within the international umbrella IndustriAll for the employees in the metal and electronical industry, iron and steel, textiles and garments, wood and plastics industries. I was hired 2021 for the organizing project in the district of Bavaria, with a special focus on IT and high technology workers.
I am deployed to the Munich Metropolitan Area office, where I consult union members and works councils in a row of companies ranging from telecommunication services to information technology to the sensor and radar industry. In these project companies I organize processes to grow the union among professionals. The other side of my job description is to identify, organize, and support cadres in companies without a works council in order to found and elect new works councils. So far, I was able to support tech workers in robotics, automotive, medical technology, and renewable energies.
My tools
Mainly I make use of the Microsoft Office suite, including MS Outlook and MS Teams. During the Corona pandemic, digitally mediated communications became the main avenue to reach out to members and works council representatives. Developing communications via E-Mail and MS Teams (or Zoom) video conferences, engaging via PDF-based digital leaflets made with MS Word or presentations made with MS PowerPoint take up large parts of my workday. Self- and team organization is aided by MS Outlook calendar as well as via MS Teams chats and groups. Further administrative work, such as creating statistical overviews or organizing membership data, is supported by MS Excel and customer management systems such as ADITO. Exchange between union secretaries, and archiving is moving right now from a team folder on a shared networked hard drive to MS OneDrive.
Communication on the spot is facilitated by mobile phone calls, Meta’s WhatsApp messenger and other service providers such as Signal or Telegram. Larger files, such as ready-to-print documents, or confidential information, such as work-related documents and legal papers, are being exchanged via CryptShare.
From time to time I create digital media for campaigning and member information. Here I rely for desktop publishing on Adobe InDesign and for mobile phone video editing on Kinemaster. For documenting events such as web-talks I use the video features of Meta`s Facebook or Alphabet’s YouTube.
In order to research materials as well as in order to inform members about union services and political positions, I make use of my unions Intranet site, the Extranet union representative portal, and the mobile phone apps for works council training by the union education institute and the member app with current articles and basic digital membership services. In the future the Munich office will utilize the expanded digitalized services on the re-launched website from appointment calendar online, to chat bot, to online collective bargaining tariff calculators and pension insurance calculators.
Five new tools to use
Up to now I listened to presentations of asana, but had not the chance to make use of the app. The tool is a collaboration and workload management application. Automated workflow and task division, team calendars, prioritization of tasks, streamlining of team communications, and flagging of tasks as ready, done, or failed is all possible with this app through a web-based or mobile app-based front end. In my daily work I can employ asana in more complex works council foundation projects to coordinate legal, logistical, and communication partial projects and to keep a whole team in the loop despite a necessary division of labour. Another possible use might be the coordination of electoral campaigns for the trade union list in existing work councils or for the interaction in collective bargaining teams from the strike action team in the company to the bargaining representatives sitting across the employers. Nevertheless, there is a possibility that the introduction of this tool alongside existing tools for communication and exchange as well as the complexity of the tool itself might me of risk to be become a larger part of the overall project workload in comparatively smaller or shorter projects.
The app iAuditor is new to me. The functions revolve around check lists, documenting entries with photos and the possibility to tag responsible persons to tackle problems, including setting deadlines for repetitive as well as emerging tasks and fixes. A possibility to use iAuditor could be to streamline preparations, safety measures, and executions of mass rallies and demonstrations: Especially the large-scale events at the beginning of collective bargaining rounds with thousands of members require basically the infrastructure of a music concert. Stage, electronics, mobile toilets, helpers, lighting, banners, flags, etc. have to be set up, checked, maintained during the event, removed, and inspected/ debriefed afterwards. Here iAuditor could substitute generic check lists and double as a trouble-shooting coordination tool. Another possible use could be as a check list and as a trouble shooting tool for conferences and seminars – here limited to standardized formats.
I know of Tumblr as a classic micro-blogging service. Digital media from text to video or links can be shared, scheduled, or completely automated. Opposed to Twitter or Instagram, I can directly upload a variety of file formats and limit the audience and expand the circle of editors. If we were to put Tumblr to daily use, an avenue could be to use a Tumblr log as newsletter of a works council or a union company chapter. The chronological ordering of posts gives the reader a sense of newsworthiness and movement. The broad media support allows for announcements, uploads from public events or seminars, distribution of documents, as well as keep readers up to date with relevant links to media sources or other union websites. Tumblr might find limits in very large data sharing environments – it can not replace Alphabet’s Google Drive or MS OneDrive. It is limited also when a company already makes use of one of the big commercial systems, such as MS SharePoint or wiki-style solutions like Confluence, which decrease the likelihood of users accepting yet another platform.
Wix is a browser-based website builder, mainly set up as a WYSIWYG editor. The tool gives a certain range of pre-set design choices, pictures, and functions – such as a contact form or an appointment calendar. A website made with Wix can be a simple digital greeting card or a full-blown commercial web portal. We as a union could make use of this tool to provide a mean to communication to company chapters. At the start of an organizing process the team can have a quick, professional looking website which can grow over time to include information about events, political demands, member service offers, questionnaires, as well as campaign materials. The modular system allows further to include the corporate design of the union. The basically independent websites nevertheless need to be maintained and might grow as well as die with one “generation“ of activists. It might be a logistical reality, that a simple social media account will be a more manageable way of communication for many smaller union chapters.
The tool emaze is offering related capacities as Wix but offers a larger range of digital uses. Beyond websites, emaze offers presentations, albums, and e-cards. Finally, the tool offers an e-learning generator based on click-through presentations, quizzes, surveys, forms, and an automated “wizard” showing progress and students’ grades. We could make use of emaze in our daily work maybe as an alternative to MS PowerPoint in order to create presentations and similar. But definitely the e-learning features can become important when small teams need to study the legal and communicative tasks from forming a union group to calling for works council elections towards establishing a council. Beyond the actual social and interpersonal skills needed for processes in union activism, the basic legal milestones, rules of assembly, etc. can be turned into info graphics, followed by quizzes and little tests. Aa hindrance to use emaze as a training tool could be the legal exactness of the information given, generating feedback loops through the union hierarchy for setup and for future changes of the tool.
Social Media
In order to propagate event dates, journalistic articles on union topics, share pics on May Day and other relevant union activities around Women’s’ Day, Liberation Day on May 8th, or Anti-War Memorial Day as well as to support pro-workers’ rights buzz I actively use Meta’s Facebook via a personal account as well as Twitter. More rarely I use a personal Instagram account to post pro-union pictures or behind-the-scenes insights from union activities or trainings. Relevant organizing communications and teamwork is facilitated through Meta’s WhatsApp and, more rarely, Telegram. I as an organizer use social media in general to show the availability of the union to the target group of tech workers.
Main benefit of classical (public) social media is the potential outreach beyond the membership base, the possibility to include narrative and personal elements into our public relations and – although rarely – the instant feedback of members or of the public to our themes and topics. In the future I assume, that location based social media services as well as recommendation aggregators will increase in importance.
The critical aspects of social media such as aggregation of personal data, intransparency of algorithms deciding about visibility, or the risk of doxing by hostile users are of course omnipresent. More specific problems for us as a union arise as older, less digitally inclined, members of the union experience a clash of expectations. They might see memes as not serious enough for “the” union, they might criticize personalization of politics, or rebuke the notion off publicizing the daily work. Creating different versions of a public image – here at example via membership magazine versus social media presence – could create political tensions when communications cross.
Elements of successful digital applications
By means of a literature review, Lupton proposes, that games, business, education, and lifestyle apps seem to be the most successful apps in Apple’s app store (Lupton 2020). The successful apps seem to be “designed to deal with a specific micro-problem” and “offer entertainment and convenience” while success is based on market penetration, visual appearance, and gamification (Lupton 2020). Ho and Hsi propose a quality model for mobile apps containing software quality, information quality, and service quality (Ho and Hsu 2022, 22). Based on statistical methods used on customer reviews they show the interlinking elements influencing user experience, at example recurrent need to update, mixing of advertising with app information services, and business-specific functionality.
While I see some benefit in both approaches, I might add the element of (lack of) predatory features such as data-grabbing and in-app sales in the middle of a user experience as a necessity to go on working. The high percentage of scam apps out there narrows the consumer focus on monopoly brands with clear information what costs what. Independent, open-source alternatives seem to have not found an angle to survive in the app ecology and its reliance on large amounts of users.
Successful apps in the context of the unions further require some assurance, that no involuntary labour has gone in the coding of this app. Ideally, an app is coded by a cooperative or by a company bound by collective agreements and employee co-determination.
Self-reflection
Despite working mostly digitally, this exercise made me aware, how limited the range of apps is, which I actually use on a daily base. Most of these apps would have been called programs in the bygone age of stand-alone personal computers and do not even fulfil the definition of targeting a micro-problem. From desktop work to communications, I use massive systems and platforms. Maybe this reflection will lead to more awareness for non-monopolistic alternatives. These are nevertheless limited by the European and German data protection legislations: A great app made by Indonesian students can not be used if the data generated is not stored in secure servers in the EU.
Another realization about the smaller apps from Mural to Miro showed me, that these publishers face the same problem as media outlets: If I need 5 or 10 apps, I probably will look for a larger suite by Google, Microsoft, Adobe etc. where I pay one prize for a whole package instead of overpaying on all the different functions separately. Thus, market entry for new players on the market becomes even more difficult – especially in the context of large corporations and hierarchical organizations such as the industrial unions.
A last thought is that actually most of my work product and my ability to do my work is dependent on services by companies I do not know the status off. I do not have the overview; how financially stable a service provider is or whether in case of bankruptcy my data – comparable to my money in the bank – is in any way protected from being destroyed.
References
Ho, Shu-Chun, and Yen-Ping Hsu. 2022. ‘Paving the Way for Digital Transformation: Investigate Customer Experiences of Using Mobile Apps’. Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems 14 (1): 18–39. https://doi.org/10.17705/1pais.14103.
Lupton, Deborah. 2020. ‘The Sociology of Mobile Apps’. In The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media, edited by Deana Rohlinger and Sarah Sobieraj. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.