That unions are in trouble in the United Kingdom, United States, and many other advanced countries is incontrovertible. While many analysts see little hope for unions to recover strength, studies of how unions are using the Internet suggest that this picture of inevitable decline is wrong. Today virtually all national unions and most large local unions are online in the United States and in the UK; they use the World Wide Web and other information technologies as part of their normal operations. All international unions are online.Union use of the Internet has grown at an extraordinary pace. The public-sector union UNISON established the first union website in the UK in March 1995, but there are now over three hundred union websites in the UK and dozens of activist sites. Leading-edge activists see the Web as an important avenue for modernizing unionism, and for bridging the gap between an increasingly heterogeneous workforce and collective activity and solidarity. Whether unions will succeed in this activity and rebound as important labormarket institutions depends on how unions use the Internet to do the following: provide services, connect activists globally, bring labor disputes into cyberspace, organize and build virtual unions online, and empower workers.
