I haven’t been a member of a Labour affiliated union for nearly ten years now – my current union don’t even have a political fund, let alone one that affiliates to Labour, but something really irks me about the latest Tory billboard – criticising Labour for taking union money (no, the one above is my take on it, not the original, which you can see here).

If the Tories are honestly able to believe Michael Ashcroft wants to give them his tax-dodge savings purely out of civic duty, rather than attempting to buy any kind of influence, it should hardly be too big a leap of faith that millions of union members might voluntarily give small change every month to Labour, collected through their unions.

It’s not because they want Derek and Tony to lean on Gordon in industrial disputes or that they think it will get them all a pay rise. It’s for the same reason that the unions started the Labour party. The party is a part of the labour movement, and it represents the interests of the ordinary working majority in the UK. Members of around a quarter of UK unions give funds to Labour in this way, and for this reason.

83% of Unite’s members seem to think that giving working people a stronger voice in politics is worth getting together and pooling a few pence a week. I think that’s pretty honest cash, that Gordon should be proud to be able to call on.

UPDATE 19/3/10: Carl has some good points on union party funding at Stronger Unions.

So when I was asked to do an essay on union activists and social media for US academic journal WorkingUSA, I was a bit panicked. Luckily I managed to work it out by developing a presentation on many of the themes I wanted to cover, so I could test it out with different audiences first. The final essay “Connecting Activists” is now published in the current issue of WorkingUSA – go buy/loan a copy now!

I have to admit to finding academic journals a bit odd. You get asked to write something many months before it appears, as there’s a pretty complicated process to go through, with every submission approved and then final articles reviewed by the editorial board (who are all rather busy people already). The final article (with properly referenced footnotes and reading) is then included in a magazine that has a limited circulation of specialists, who pay quite a bit to subscribe online and in print, their institutionally paid subs covering the not inconsiderable expenses of all that work.

So you end up with something that can’t be searched or shared to help make new connections with other people who might find it useful, has a lot of extra background baggage nobody’s going to check, and in any case is already a bit out of date by the time anyone does see it. The social media activist approach suits me much better – occasional gems hidden in a huge pile of throwaway ideas, available to people who never knew it was what they were looking for.

I made the mistake of mentioning to my three-degreed wife that maybe academia should maybe give up on journals and just start some blogs instead to speed things up, and to her my thoughts sounded much more wacky than established academia sounded to me. So if you build your own argument on something, how do you know it’s a constant if the source might get commented/updated/deleted? How will people trace it back to see if what you’re doing stands up? How much of your own time do you need to invest to work out whether something is kosher, if it isn’t already peer-reviewed? And how are you going to ever measure anything properly to see if you were right or not? Well, I consider myself told, ho hum, and I need to make a bit more of an effort to engage with this kind of learning.

I’m giving a presentation on this theme (social media and union activism) later via web conference, so had to nip out and buy a webcam earlier. Whatever other faults Microsoft may have in their webcams, they make up for it by thinking of book-resistant me, with a nice big day-glo green cover over the USB lead, telling me to for chrissakes see the quickstart and install the software before just cracking on and plugging the thing in as I was about to do and screw up my system. So, by rather laboured analogy, sometimes a more ‘activist’ approach to networking mightn’t be the best idea, and a bit of distance and academic scrutiny could do us the world of good.