Tom Lehman
Charles Brown wrote:
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> August 23, 1999 New York Times
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> Corporations Try to Bar Use of E-Mail by Unions
> By NOAM S. COHEN
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> The organizing drive among the engineers at the Pratt & Whitney factory in Palm Beach, Fla., was a home-grown affair. The leadership of the aspiring union, the Florida Professional Association, knew it had a difficult job, and in an early appeal stressed that "just because we are seeking change doesn't mean we're radicals."
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> While they may not have been radicals, they did employ a novel tactic: They sent their appeals to all of the factory's 2,000 engineers at their company e-mail addresses.
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> Susan Greenwood for The New York Times
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> Current and former employees of Pratt & Whitney gather outside the company's main gate in Palm Beach, Fla. From left: Bob Ahbol, Kenneth Coolidge, Zachary Waltz, Carol Rinaldi and Brian Waldron.
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> "We got away with about 10" of the mass mailings, said Kenneth Coolidge, the union treasurer, "before the company found out and objected." Those objections led to the suspension of Coolidge and the union's president, Brian Waldron, for using the company's e-mail system for what was deemed personal business.
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> Last month, more than two years after the suspensions, the union in Florida agreed to withdraw a complaint accusing Pratt & Whitney of using unfair labor practices in return for the company's pledge to allow the limited use of its system for such e-mail in the future. And both sides along the labor-management divide are looking to this settlement for signs of how friendly an environment cyberspace -- particularly the cyberspace surrounding corporate offices and factories -- will be for the labor movement.
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> While some union officials have been emboldened by the settlement, others say they will tread lightly until there is a greater consensus about the rules for contacting employees via corporate e-mail addresses. And all the while, companies are fighting to keep their systems off-limits.
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> E-mail has become common in many workplaces that unions are eager to organize, including those at software companies and in other high-technology industries. And unions have found it an unusually effective organizing tool, one that combines the intimacy of a conversation, the efficiency of mass-produced leaflets and the precision of delivery by mail to work forces that are often widely dispersed.
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> "It saves time, it saves money," said Michael Blain of the Washington Alliance of Technical Workers, or WASHTECH, an affiliate of the Communication Workers of America that is trying to organize software workers in the state of Washington. "We can reach 1,300 people by just hitting 'send."'
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> The union leaders at Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies Corp., who ultimately failed in their drive to organize the Palm Beach plant, said they had used e-mail to respond quickly to management statements. "If you get the information out quick, the bureaucracy has to be more accountable," Coolidge said.
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> Companies may find it galling to see unions capitalize on corporate e-mail systems to organize workers. When nonemployees send e-mail to organize, some say, that should be considered trespass, and when employees receive union e-mail at work, it will invariably be read on company time, a practice that they say labor law should prohibit.
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> "E-mail from unions does interfere with employers' expectation that work time is for work," said Frank Morris, a lawyer who represents management in labor disputes. "The unions are trying to make extraordinary use of a tool that didn't exist until recently for their benefit."
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> Related Article
> In Intel E-Mail Case, Property Rights vs. Free Speech
> (May 28, 1999)
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> Companies also contend that any mass e-mailing, even if about work conditions or union organizing, is an intrusion comparable to the "spamming" done by commercial outfits. Intel recently persuaded a California Superior Court judge to order a former employee, Ken Hamidi, to stop sending e-mail messages to its employees by invoking common law about trespass. (Hamidi has appealed the ruling.) According to court papers, Hamidi sent more than 30,000 e-mail messages about the company's employment policies in six bursts between 1996 and 1998 while avoiding the company's efforts to thwart him.
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> The California court's decision has angered free-speech advocates who say e-mail is useful precisely because it is not trespassing.
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> "E-mail is potentially a solution to a previously insoluble dilemma," said Lewis Maltby of the American Civil Liberties Union's employment rights office. "Employees have a right to organize and employers don't have to allow trespassers. But now employees have a way of learning about unions without trespassing on the employers' property."
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> Some organizers are eager to test how far they can go. "We have e-mailed, and thought about using e-mail in organizing drives," said George Kohl, research director for the Communications Workers of America. "But the context we work in is that we don't own" the company's e-mail system.
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> Tellingly, the union did not contact anyone at a corporate e-mail address during its successful campaign this month to organize 10,000 passenger service employees of US Airways Group Inc. Instead, it relied on a bulletin board at the union Web site, Candice Johnson, a spokeswoman, said. "We don't use corporate e-mail," Ms. Johnson said. "We just think there are better ways to do it without the risk."
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> Russ Bryant for The New York Times
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> Frank Morris Jr., a lawyer, says union E-mail is an interference.
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> A more common use of e-mail at the Communications Workers of America, said Suman Ray, a research economist there, is to build up a network among people already committed to the cause. That way there is no concern of antagonizing noncooperative employees who might inform management about the unsolicited messages.
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> At Microsoft Corp., for example, WASHTECH organizers have collected a list of 1,300 supporters, including nearly 200 people who gave Microsoft e-mail addresses. (While the other 1,100 presumably work at Microsoft and other software companies in the area, organizers said, most gave home e-mail addresses.) "We don't worry about sending to Microsoft addresses," Blain said, although he added that he thought the company had the ability to block out any messages coming from WASHTECH.
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> Referring to the National Labor Relations Board, he added, "That's not the direction the NLRB is heading, and if Microsoft were to discriminate, that is illegal." A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the company's policy.
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> Even at unionized companies, there are no clear guidelines for union access to corporate e-mail systems; increasingly it is becoming another bargaining issue.
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> A shop steward of the Seattle Professional Engineering Employees Association, which represents engineers and technical workers at Boeing Co. of Seattle, was recently given a written warning for sending a message to 80 or so workers about "a workplace issue at that location," said Phyllis Rogers, the union's general counsel. She said the union understood that such communication would be permitted if directed at fewer than 200 people.
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> Ms. Rogers said the union, which represents 25,000 professional workers, mainly in the Puget Sound area, had formed a negotiating committee to address the issue. The union's current contract expires on Dec. 1.
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> A Boeing spokeswoman, Amanda Landers, would not discuss the specific dispute but said that in general, Boeing allowed nonbusiness e-mail only for "incidental, personal use." Ms. Rogers, the union lawyer, said, "We are offended that our correspondence should be considered the same as any other e-mails, because we have a legal relationship with the company."
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> In the Pratt & Whitney case, the company conceded in an e-mail dated July 6 that employees can use e-mail to "initiate a response or reciprocal discussion, relating to terms and conditions of employment, and the employee's interest in self-organization" as long as the use was "occasional, incidental and infrequent." But since that agreement was made without a ruling from the NLRB, which referees union organizing, it is not precedent-setting.
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> "These cases are bubbling up," said Fred Feinstein, the general counsel for the labor relations board, whose office decides whether to file complaints against companies for unfair labor practices. In a recent report summarizing important issues coming before the board, Feinstein made it clear that he considered the right to use e-mail to be protected under the National Labor Relations Act.
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> Feinstein said he believed that in at least some cases, e-mail is best compared to "solicitation," one-on-one conversation typically permitted in factories during work breaks anywhere on company property, instead of "distribution" of literature, which can typically be more closely regulated. (Of course, this presumes that a union's e-mail message would be read by workers during a work break.)
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> Morris, the management lawyer, objected to this reasoning and said unions "have had the benefit of a Clinton-appointed NLRB that has not taken into account the costs." He said it was foolish to apply Industrial Age examples to new technologies and said congressional legislation might be the best way to devise rules to protect companies.
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