johninnit

I’ve just finished reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”. I don’t really recommend it – he spends 232 pages repeating a good idea for a magazine article – this one in fact ( but of course, don’t let that put you off buying a copy via the tigmoo book club). Basically he suggests that a new business model is on the verge of becoming mainstream – that of the eponymous “Long Tail”.

Up til now, commerce and (hence) culture were governed too much by hits, rather than niche interests. A distribution curve in any market shows most of the take-up clumped in a few products on the left of the graph (Head), and a large number of niche products with hardly any sales (Tail).

This is because of the physical difficulties involved in connecting the supply to the demand – it’s only worth doing it on a big scale. However, new technologies have democratised the tools of production (eg: YouTube), democratised the tools ofdistribution (eg: eBay), and connected niche interests with niche products (eg: blogs). The Tail is now longer and fatter as a result, and makes a very viable proposition, with the total number of niche sales from many products eclipsing the total number of hit sales of a few products.

Chris claims there could be a Long Tail for pretty much every market if you look hard enough and find an appropriate product, an appropriate variety of options for the product, and an appropriate channel to distribute, so it set me thinking about the Long Tail of the labour movement.

Unions have pretty stumpy tails. Getting a lot of people together to do the same thing is pretty fundamental to their makeup. I think if we’re to take on a lot of these ideas, we might end up with something rather different – perhaps something like the soonish-to-be launched SEIU (the US Service Employees International Union) web community Qvisory.

Check it out – not a lot on the site so far, but what I’ve heard is pretty exciting (for a union tech nerd like me…). SEIU are trying to engage young non-members – people who currently have no interest in unions and don’t see a relevance. They’re planning to do this by not trying to control it too much, and playing to the areas where SEIU’s interests and their interests overlap, which includes stuff on how hard it is to be yoof in the US today – things like like financial (especially debt management) and health care (SEIU campaign hard on the woeful state of US healthcare) advice.

Qvisory will be a forum where these people can engage, contribute and help themselves and each other, without being overly pressured to join a traditional union. Indeed, SEIU see the potential benefit as being popular youth engagement with their national agenda (big win things like fundamental pensions and healthcare change), rather than a straight organising drive.

Qvisory will be something that users make and mould for themselves, along with SEIU, an appropriate product, with flexibility for everyone’s interests, and with a democratic and scalable distribution model. Not a union, but an application of similar principles to a different situation. I think (and hope) it could do very well.