Online Bargaining and Other Surveys

I keep returning to the theme that if members deal with their curling club online, they expect the same accessibility from their union. A key point of contact/communication for most local unions is the setting of bargaining demands and priorities.

Meetings, phone trees and all that remain crucial, in large part because we need to be as interactive and as personal as possible if we’re going to organize in the process, not just get answers to questions. But paper surveys never really offered that opportunity, so they’re easily replaced.

I know of some large local unions that have had their own online survey systems in place for a while. This option is slowing percolating down to smaller and small unions as reasonably-priced commercial services become available. By far the most popular of the commercial services is Survey Monkey: www.surveymonkey.com/.

Better yet, some national unions are starting to offer a service like this. Use it.

And think about other ways in which you can use surveys to organize inside your union.