Trends in Union Corporate Campaigns - US Chamber of Commerce

though labor itself had higher standing and more influence abroad
than in the U.S. Driven by the pace of economic globalization,
and facilitated by the Internet, those bonds have grown closer in
recent years, and it is now commonplace to find unions in different
countries working in concert to pressure an employer (for example,
through a global day of protest against IBM in 2005), 38 to find the
industry trade secretariats of the International Confederation of
Free Trade Unions collaborating in industry-wide campaigns on
a global scale, and to find unions using leverage in one country
to pressure an employer in another, as in the campaigns against
Quebecor and Wackenhut Security (see Table 1), in both of which
parent companies in labor-friendly countries have been pressured to
bring U.S.-based subsidiaries into line.
Spinning the Web. Finally, we should take note of the increasing
role of the Internet in corporate campaigns. Unions and their
allies make extensive use of the Web—for fundraising, for
mobilization and event coordination, to inform members or
prospective members of their actions, to disseminate information
about campaign strategies and tactics, and for the full range of
such activism-support mechanisms that are generally well-known
today. Perhaps most notable among these are the now routine
establishment of Web sites for every campaign that comes along,
and sometimes even for individual executives or board members
who are targeted for special attention, and the creation of virtual
surrogates, or organizations that exist only in cyberspace and only
for the purpose of supporting a given campaign. But one less
visible use of the Internet in these campaigns may be the most
important of all. For one way in which corporate campaigns have
evolved over the years is in the ease with which power structure
research can be accomplished today simply because much of the
information that once required expensive and time-consuming
searches of publications and public records can now be completed
quickly and conveniently using resources available online. The
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Trends