Flint – as in Michigan! Lead in the drinking water and the community, public and nation is outraged.
Union Plumbers from Local 370 and around the state volunteer thousands of hours in thousands of homes thru-out the community. Unions doing what we do best – our jobs and stepping forward in times of emergencies.
You name the disaster, from weather to infrastructure, to man-made – we are there helping out our neighbors in our communities.
And yet who knows what the UA did this outside of the area? Past some short lived local coverage on the local news and entirely passive use of social media – mostly done after the fact – very few!
President Hite, and all other IP’s for that matter – consider. A mass texting program is incredibly inexpensive to have and use, even with the entire membership. How inexpensive @.03 cents per text x 350,000 members = $10,500 buckaroos! And texting costs can be lower than .03 cents each, depending on what you want the texting platform to do? Texting platforms can do a lot, and they are used routinely in all other facets of North America except the Building Trades.
“IF” the UA would have had a very basic use of this platform up and running – a simple and very straight forward 160 charter text would have gone out to the entire membership instantly within seconds/minutes of this tragedy to hundreds of thousands members. In that text could have been links to a mobile website giving further instructions and guidance to the membership on what the UA best felt would be the way to respond to this tragedy and crisis.
That few hundred thousand members sharing that text in many different and diverse ways would have turned into millions and established the Plumbers, and by extension the UA Plumbers as the expert in this tragedy and crisis, and who to turn to and trust regarding this.
Add another text with giving membership guidance and instruction via a link to a training video about how to use Twitter for this; and in the future many other uses of Twitter, and the UA would effectively own this subject and lead the news thru-out North America. No BS – and once you have this many Twitter accounts – political, training, recruitment, legislative, business uses all are within our sights. Pure real power to deploy and build upon. Numbers beat money every time.
Who better than Plumbers know how extensive this issue is. And precisely where the next Flint is?!?
Contrast the effort of the UA putting tens of millions into other marketing initiatives, branding, TV, radio, etc. vs. 1/20th of that money into aggressive and structured social platforms powered by the membership, with a big time payoff in jobs, public perception and trust on who should be rebuilding this infrastructure! And yes 1/20th is the correct figure. I know what the hell I’m speaking about – the UA “would” have had the foundation of an incredible infrastructure in place called its membership to then leverage and own the coverage and set the agenda of this and pending disasters.
When are the Building Trades going to come into the 21st century & play big?
The UA could have gone in many effective directions establishing authority over this in the social media and public – but one that would resonate immediately is a slogan and commitment that “we live in the communities and drink the same water you do” or another variation of that! We can say all we want internally about how bad ass we are, however we want the public and construction community to know that we are bad ass, because we own the message and agenda!
As the membership is connected and leveraged with increasingly effective granular messaging and engagement. Then and only then can we transform the UA/Building Trades into a force to balance workers rights and wage inequities, and that of big construction and business and raise market share. This IS NOT Value on Display, it is the membership acting as a MOVEMENT and protecting communities and workers!
This is the tip of the iceberg of what joining the 21st century can do to re-establish the middle class with the trades providing the backbone and leadership.
In upcoming blogs we are going to write extensively about the failing infrastructure of North America.
It is by design Brothers & Sisters – by design – (kind of sounds conspiratorial) – being allowed to massively fail!
Just “follow the money”! Republicans, and quit kidding ourselves, many Democrats are letting the infrastructure fail by choice.
When it is incredibly bad and the public cries out to fix it – every worker protection will be jettisoned by design to get funding and movement on massive infrastructure legislation and funding. If we can run 2 unfunded wars at the cost of 2 Trillion dollars – we can do infrastructure which has a real payback.
The public will care less about union and worker issues and just want the infrastructure issues to be fixed; so they can drink the water, drive on the roads and bridges and get electricity and more.
Not only will the public pay massive bucks for these projects, huge amounts of them will be privatized! “Follow the do-re-mi”!
The R’s & most D’s are starving out by design delaying the infrastructure on behalf of their corporate task masters. Follow the Money! More to come!
“if you see a good fight – get in it”
Danny L Caliendo
Organizer
Labor Rising/Labor Combat
