The chair asked for questions from the floor. The first came from Peter Skyte of MSF who introduced himself as a trade unionist and a member of the British Labour Party.
Peter Skyte (MSF): How will the future information society be shaped for the benefit of society rather than controlled by narrow economic and commercial interests? At the European level, the Bangemann Report did not involve any input from the labour and trades union movement. However, it did contain a reference to opening discussions with the social partners: the trades union and labour movement as well as employers.
Dr. Peter Johnston has already stated that the unions have been slow off the mark, but four International Trade Secretariats have been trying for some time to get involved in those discussions.
As of December 1994 there had been no response from the European Commission. How is the movement to address this,given the apparent reluctance of the EC to become involved in this discussion?
At the national level, the Labour Party Commission on the Information Superhighway has two members from the movement directly representing trades union interests, including myself.
What issues should be addressed by bodies like the Commission and how do we ensure that we achieve the desired outcome?
Jake Ecclestone (NUJ): I was surprised earlier to be told that the movement should be making more effort to be involved, and I agree that Bangemann had been solely concerned with business interests. The Commission has not included any women, trades unionists, artists, writers, politicians, or social workers.
Events are moving very quickly in Europe, and we were being shut out of the process.
Unions in Britain have to know what is in the Bangemann Report, and through the European Federations to be able to exert pressure on the European Commission.
The Bangemann Report's proposals are not the way forward for those concerned about more than profits and market forces. Bangemann seems to be proposing to sweep away all regulation. This is a matter of concern because removing regulations over the media could lead to more Berlusconis or Murdochs.
Plurality of voice and of information need to be protected. Britain does not have many regulations to lose but the rest of Europe does, and we should take this very seriously.
David Souter (NCU): That the Bangemann Commission is an industrialists' commission concerns me less than that it is all white and all male. However, it is because the Commission is dominated by industrialists that Conservative governments have decided that the issue is worth considering.
Policy-making bodies should be visionary in a practical way. It is pointless having a vision that nobody believes in. The technology has to be realistic and should address the difficult question of investment. It must look at a regulatory framework that encourages commercial investment and this includes releasing BT and Mercury from the constraints on what they can and cannot deliver over their networks. I am not worried about the "Berlusconi problem". Berlusconi's control is exercised through monopoly and by preventing people doing other things over his networks.
It is not possible to control the Internet: nobody does and anybody who tries is not going to succeed. The technology of the superhighway is one that makes access easy and cheap, and if we are organized, we can use it as a tool to fight back against monopoly capital. It is not a threat, and we should be seizing this opportunity.
The labour movement can do this too, by addressing how to gain public access to the information superhighway for people on low incomes, for community groups, for schools, and for initiatives that stem from grass roots rather than from big business.
[The chair then recognised Dr. Peter Johnston who wished to answer from the floor some of the specific criticisms which had been directed at the European Commission].
Peter Johnston (CEC): The Commission gets the blame for a lot of things that are not its fault. The Bangemann Group is in fact a joint nomination between the member states and the Commission, and there were very difficult discussions with member states on its composition.
What was important was that it should be made up of people who would have an impact on the subsequent Head of State's meeting. To a degree, it did have this impact and so served its purpose. However, Bangemann is not the only group in existence. Its follow-up activities will involve much wider groups of interests. Now that there is an action plan proposed by the Commission and endorsed by the Council of Ministers, the Commission will be able to support these activities. We now have a much greater ability to broaden the debate and bring in the labour movements throughout Europe as active participants in the debate.
At his confirmation hearing in Parliament at the end of last week, Mr.Bangemann came under further pressurefrom the Parliament to ensure that there is a proper representation from the labour movements and the broader political and social spectrum in the Commission's activities on the information society, and he has committed himself to ensure that happens.
I am aware that I annoyed some participants earlier in the day by urging them to get more involved when they felt they had been trying for some time. There are various ways of getting involved in European activities without always going through official representation. One way is through the Economic and Social Committee, an institution of the European Union in which the labour movement is well represented. Other European activities, notably the research and technology development activities, are just as important as the more formal discussions and have served a very valuable purpose in stimulating a broader debate involving industry and other organizations at a more practical level.
Tony Lennon (BECTU): The Bangemann Report was produced predominantly by business people, and reflects their interests. However, European governments were looking at networking and information technology prior to the report. There are two reasons for this. First, in terms of economics, information technology is here already and without any intervention from governments except for assistance given in the US to the academic institutions. Second, the reason that governments are bound to take an interest in the information superhighway is because it allows people to talk in ways in which they (governments) cannot possibly control. This must be very worrying for them, given their liking for telephone control and opening people's mail and so on.
Regarding public policy forums, I'd like to recommend that this does not mean waiting eighteen months to produce a pamphlet. We need policies now. Political parties could take a brave step and say, "Here is something that in many ways equates to the roads system and is simply a means of getting information from A to B. It is in everybody's interest that the process should be free and should be viewed as just another means of connecting people."
We should be aiming for a system that avoids "toll roads" on the information superhighway and enables everyone to join in rather than just empowering that section of the population which can afford to use it.
Political parties should not pretend to know what is going to happen, because no-one does. However things develop, it will be the usual range of big businesses such as publishing and the media who will be providing the services to people in their households through an electronic tube that comes up from the pavement. If this situation is allowed to develop to the point where, for instance, newspaper and television and radio ownership has developed in Europe, we will have a huge problem. For this reason governments must promote clear ownership regulation on any information superhighway services that are eventually provided.
Public money will have to be pumped into an information superhighway that provides community-related, socially beneficial services and activities. This country spends approximately z1.7 billion a year on public service broadcasting. At the moment, we have no vision whatsoever of what the equivalent of that might be on the information superhighway.
In 30 years' time it is quite likely that the main means of receiving electronic information will be through the information superhighway or whatever network is built. For that reason, we should be thinking about the public component now, we should be thinking about how creative, artistic, intellectual products may be put on that system, not merely to make money, but to improve the quality of our lives.
Political parties ought to ponder the question of how the information superhighway is going to change the democratic function and process itself. The development of printing and paper technology led to the universal plebiscite in democratic countries, voting by secret ballot and, clearly, a change in the way we were governed. Will the abilities of people to access information from any point in the world, lead to a change in the way our democratic structures are organized? It is quite clear for unions that the way people are beginning to work will change how they (the unions) organize. For many people, the workplace is going to disappear and the big, factory-gate meeting at the start of the morning shift is a thing of the past.
For unions, this is obvious. For political parties, there is going to be an immense change over the next few years. We ought to be thinking about that now, because whatever changes there are to the democratic process should remain democratic, instead of being made by newspaper proprietors and business interests who want to undermine democracy rather than empower us.
Lastly, communicating electronically greatly restricts our ability to be prejudiced: it is not so easy to be prejudiced against someone whose gender, colour, age, or disability is not visible.
Mick McKigney (Wakefield MDC): I'd like to raise the issue of Oftel consulting on the re-regulation of the framework of the telecommunications industry. It has been a neglected subject in the conference so far, and would have a significant effect on both consumers and workers in the industry.
I find it depressing that so much attention had been focused on paper: the Bangemann Report was a paper, not a Directive of the European Commission. We should be trying to influence the law. What the trade union movement needs to do is get itself organized, because by the time the policy makers produce another paper, it will be superseded by Oftel's new way of doing things, which will probably have more influence.
No-one could have predicted the technological advances made since the introduction of the PC in 1981. We cannot second-guess the technology, but we can influence some of the regulatory environment and some of the legal aspects. This is what we need to be doing, both in the UK and at a European level. We need to be making a serious input to this debate.
David Souter (NCU): I agree that regulatory issues are very important and that the labour movement has never taken them seriously. They are part of privatisation legislation and are the part of that legislation that enables us in future to have a serious influence on the management of the utilities. The Oftel document is potentially going to transform the way in which universal service is perceived, for example, in the communications industries, and will make many other changes. We need to be making a serious input to that.
Another issue that should be addressed is the massive responsibilities and powers of the regulators of utilities, they are less accountable than the chairman of a district council leisure committee.
Colin Bourne (NUJ): The workshop "Organizing Without Workplaces" raised the problem faced by the NUJ. There are almost no newspaper companies which recognise any trade unions. A system needs to be developed where e-mail is the first thing we think of when we talk about communicating with members. Other means can come later as they are slower and usually more expensive. Most of this day they has been spent discussing how important telematics is and how useful it is. But delegates are still thinking of what else they might use it for, when the real answer is to use it for everything.
The union movement is not just dealing with organizing teleworkers and other people who work from home. It must also start thinking about organizing workers whose employers will not allow unions on to the premises, and they are increasing in number both here and in Europe. The worrying thing about the European Works Council Directive is the idea that many people seem to have about works councils. They believe that works councils will be the salvation for workers in Britain because they do not have many employment rights. However, employers are setting up works councils not as a mechanism for giving workers a voice, but as a mechanism for keeping trade unions out of the workplace. This means that, in order to go on providing independent advice and help, unions will now have to do it away from the workplace.
Tony Lennon (BECTU): I agree that the mass workplace meeting is a thing of the past. Unions must embrace the technology. If they don't they will miss great opportunities not only in keeping up with the work that members are doing, but also the opportunity to greatly improve communications with members. In my union there is a lot of freelance working. In most cases it is done, not from home but from a mobile workplace.
The main problem faced by BECTU is that casualised, freelance workers feel that they have no need to communicate with the union, because the nature of their work leads them to believe that they are not part of a collective entity. Telecommunications can be used to try and improve this situation.
Very few people in the trade unions know how teleworking and the whole area of information technology might change the working relationship with members. Most people seemed to assume that if a worker is teleworking, say, for a bank, they will be still doing so in ten years time.
BECTU's experience in an industry where the workplace does not matter is that as a worker you don't have a direct relationship with a large business entity. You have a sporadic relationship with lots of different employers and, very often, the only direct relationship is with a third party who is in effect selling on your labour. The same situation probably applies in other media sectors such as journalism. This is a very different vision from the one being prompted by some companies. It poses the question of how unions maintain relevance and power when workers are brokering their labour, possibly through a third-party.
There is now a great deal of convergence of software and standardisation on graphical interfaces and so on. One day it might well be the case that if you have a Microsoft Office, you can work without the need to travel.
Manipulation of information will be standardised in a way that will not demand great specialisation in the affairs of one company. An example of this are film camera operators: to a large extent it does not matter who they work for. They have standardised skills and can transfer with ease from filming a weather forecaster to filming an undersea sequence for a diving programme.
I'll end by reiterating that workers with standardised skills will be mobile among various employers, and this is an issue that unions will have to face.
Jo Seary (BIFU): The banking sector has set up satellite centres predominantly staffed by part-time women workers with poorer terms and conditions than other bank workers. The question is how to represent them. The positive side of this situation is that these people are not new appointees but people who have been working previously in a branch network and have transferred to the telecentres. In this situation, the union is able to maintain links in spite of the move to satellite centres.
Bill Walsh (MSF): The question is what can unions offer when they can no longer offer collective bargaining?
Collective bargaining does continue to exist on a large scale and in some cases is extending, for example in the health service. However, it is important for unions to think about the services they can provide in terms other than that of collective bargaining, of dealing with groups of people in large workplaces who were easy to contact.
The best way of finding what these new groups of workers want is to ask them. There is already evidence that teleworkers are organizing into groups as they clearly see a need for some kind of collective mechanism for representing their interests. This supports the notion that teleworkers want representation and the unions are not providing it. People in regular employment who have the opportunity to move from a conventional to a less conventional teleworking arrangement are much easier to deal with, because unions can still negotiate with their employers. The bigger challenge comes from the large groups of people who are not employed in the conventional sense.
The issue is not one of organizing without workplaces, but of organizing people who have no contracts of employment, who are self-employed and are in fact running their own small businesses.
The first thing unions have to do is to change their attitude towards these people and not turn their backs on them. They need all kinds of help: for example, they need advice on contractual arrangements and on their relationships with the people who provide them with services. They need legal support, insurance, tax advice, pensions, health and safety advice and information. They may want trade unions, as large organizations with bulk purchasing power, to help them obtain equipment, training and technical support.
They will certainly want information of various kinds. The unions have lots of information which can be useful to people who are bidding for contracts. Often these bids are with organizations with which unions already have involvement through the representation of their workforces. Such people need a voice. They also need access to people who can influence opinion such as members of the British and European Parliaments.
The trade unions are already engaged in most all of these are activities. They have head office departments which provide support to people in conventional employment. They now need to expand these services to other groups of people.
We need to think very seriously about the access that people will need to our services. At the moment, it is easy to provide trade union services to people who work from nine to five, Monday to Friday. Many of the people involved in this new way of working will want to contact unions at different times and we must make sure we are more accessible than we have been up to now.
Mike Holderness (NUJ): I'd like to tell a little story about a publishing company that recently sent out a new contract which it wished to impose on its freelance contributors. Because the company was a publisher of computer magazines, most of the contributors had access to a computer bulletin board system. They immediately posted messages about the company and within two days several dozen journalists had agreed that they would not sign the contracts.
Within three days, people were saying to each other, "Why don't we get together and negotiate with the management?" A while later, people were saying, "Why don't we get together and have a central body that we sell our work to, which then sells it on to the publisher, so that we have some negotiating clout?" This could mean, in principle, that every freelance journalist in the country will be going through a single agent.
I resisted the temptation to inform my colleagues that they had just invented trade unions!
There is a tendency in this sector to organize spontaneously but a major questions about that incident remains; what does it have to do with the National Union of Journalists? It happened regardless of the NUJ. Although the union is supporting the move, it was initiated by people responding to an immediate need. It remains to be seen whether this is permanent.
But then I wonder whether it is time to abandon the word "teleworker". There are a number of people whose conditions of work are very different. There are people working for subcontractors who are subcontracting to banks. There are those employed by small, exploitative employers, who are in a totally different position from other "teleworkers" who are effectively individual entrepreneurs. Despite the fact that I am a teleworker, I have less in common with most other teleworkers than with most other journalists. Clarity is needed in discussion about this. Perhaps we need to forget about the technology and look at people's actual conditions at work.
Josephine Bacon (NUJ): I'd like to take up Tony Lennon's point about contracting. Agencies who hire out workers are becoming increasingly common in this country. As a translator and interpreter, I am not only a small business but I am also hired out to other people. I know of some people who are known only to the agencies, and not to people outside their field. The agencies are the first point of contact for both clients and workers, and this makes it difficult for conventional union organization.
As a small business, I agree that the place for small businesses is within the trade union movement.
Also, in the workshop I attended on the export of jobs everyone placed emphasis on the importance of skills and training. I believe we should make training an absolute priority and establish real education and training programmes. What does the panel think?
Tony Lennon (BECTU): I think it's unwise to speculate on the outcome of policy reviews or the contents of election manifestos, but I agree that training is essential. When it comes to basic knowledge of the equipment and the techniques involved in the new technology, the generation that will learn it quickest, will find it most useful and most necessary, is currently at school.... It would be almost criminal not to invest in their skills.
By all means, let us worry about jobs being exported because the technology can move the job to a place in the world where labour is cheaper, but there might be a second reason for jobs to disappear: that it might be impossible to find people with the necessary skills to do them. We need to be concerned about this in the UK and at a European level.
Public expenditure has to include training, and, if necessary, retraining for existing workers who are being displaced in their thousands.
Jo Seary (BIFU): Technology has led to de-skilling, which in turn has led to poorer working conditions and poorer levels of pay. We have to address this issue.
Lynne Gornall (Cardiff Bay Telecentre): I'd like to continue the debate raised by Mike Holderness about which unions people might be in. Union membership has always been related to the type of work people did, but teleworkers might be better served by an organization which covered a generic interest in the rights and benefits and methods of working and of obtaining work, peculiar to teleworking. I wondered who might take this on and how it would emerge. I accept that there is a specialist role for some workers, for example, journalists, who happened to be working in a particular way. On the other hand, if their specific needs as individual workers are not addressed by the NUJ, they are probably in the wrong union.
Bill Walsh (MSF): I'd like to take up this question of what unions might do.
Firstly, the careers education system does not prepare students for self-employment, nor for casualised or contract work. It may not be the most desirable way of working but it is an increasing reality, and people will be better able to face it if they have been taught about how to deal with the situation and how to develop their careers. Perhaps the trades union movement could do something about pushing for that kind of wider career development in the education system.
Secondly, isolated teleworkers do have modems, so one of the best ways to reach them is by e-mail. This is also true of trades unions.
Dave Spooner (LTC): One of the things we had wanted to do at this conference was to get the GMB General Secretary, John Edmonds, to press a button to open the first cyber-union branch or union cyberbranch, advertising it in the national press for any home-worker or teleworker who wanted to join a union. Unfortunately, it hadn't been possible.
Adrian Lanning (EMU): Unless the unions embrace the organizational changes that go with the new technology, and embraced the training programmes required, the technology will be useless. More attention needs to be paid to the provision of skills - possibly basic trade union skills - if bargaining systems are to be introduced, and to the provision of high-quality data provided by independent research organizations. Delivering data is only part of the equation, unions also have to be trained in the use of that data.
[Peter Skyte then gave the conference some background information about the Labour Party Commission on the Information Superhighway]
Dave Spooner (LTC): We have to draw the conference to a close, but there is one short item that might be of interest. During lunch, there was a meeting of the Trades Union Telematics Users (TUTU) group. Perhaps Andrew Bibby will report briefly on the outcome of that meeting.
Andrew Bibby (NUJ): TUTU is an informal grouping of trade unions who have begun to develop e-mail and other services for their members. The meeting discussed ways in which the labour movement generally could collectively make use of technology, and particularly the Internet. There was unanimous agreement was that this was something unions should be doing jointly. The mechanics were still to be worked out, but the feeling was that they should seize the opportunity - the international labour movement and the labour movement in Britain should be on the Internet and soon.
Jake Ecclestone (NUJ): I'm happy to be a contact for anyone interested in the work of TUTU.
[The chair then thanked the panel, the speakers, the conference sponsors, the conference coordinator, and the GMB National College, before formally closing the conference.]