By Fellow Worker Richard Myers - November 23, 2004.

Modern organizing efforts may benefit from a full range of new communications tools that never before existed. These tools also entail risks that we may not fully appreciate.

Emails used for sensitive communications may be discovered on company computers.

Someone may participate in an email list, and then decide to rat out fellow workers by simply forwarding critical emails.

The company may place a spy in the group being organized. Collected emails provide the company with evidence.

Here are some basic precautions you should take while organizing your workplace

• To the greatest extent possible, organizing should be conducted in person. (But it is also understood that the younger generation has been raised with email, they rely upon it, they will use it. So it is important to protect your communications.)


• Employees should receive the usual cautions about not discussing the organizing efforts over company phone systems or using company computers. (Wal-Mart is not alone in monitoring such communications.)


• Any email list that is not secure should in some fashion declare itself as not secure. Indeed, this should be considered the default status of lists, for even lists that are made up entirely of trusted individuals will have a home somewhere, and the messages may be accessible over the web.


• During any organizing drive, the company name or identifying information should be kept off of all lists, by whatever methods are necessary. This could be outright prohibition, but it might also be accomplished by using a code name for the company.


• Employees ought to create a secondary email identity which cannot be tied to their primary email identity. This should be used for all email discussions relating to unions or organizing efforts. The organizer(s) responsible for such communications forums should be informed of who is who, but no one else.


• An email list of employees at a particular company intended as a "bitch list" may be very useful in the organizing campaign, but it should not be used to talk up the union.


• If employees who are potential union members are invited to an online forum populated by union members, they should be (perhaps selectively) moderated to avoid accidental publication of sensitive information. Any discussion about a particular organizing effort should be kept in very general terms.


• Any employee or union lists that deal with a particular company ought to be kept off of sites like Yahoo. Yahoo has provided info about worker identity to corporations in the past, particularly relating to trading company stock.


• All email is (to varying extents) insecure. Private email (that does not go through a list) may be less insecure, but any email travels through many systems, and every system has a systems operator with the power to read every email.


• In particularly critical communications, organizers should explore solutions such as PGP, which will keep everyone but the government from reading your email.

The best advice is to think before acting. These simple precautions may require a little extra work initially, but in the long run, they can make all the difference in the world.