Every effort is made to improve member participation in union policy-making. It will make all of its officers and staffers accessible to members via e-mail, and promise personal responses within 72 hours of a message's receipt. It will update its infotech infrastructure regularly. It will take pride both in being at the cutting-edge, and, in making a special effort to take the membership there with it. These six attributes should help put labor unions on a par with the CyberCorps rapidly coming their way.
Unions uniquely blend humanistic, ethical, and materialistic con-cerns.
They should be able to produce a distinctive set of infotech-use rewards, one that will have the citizenry sit up, notice, and applaud. They should be able to get Americans to think of unions, and not just of corporations, when they think about successful cutting-edge 21st Century organizations. They will insist the vast majority of union members are outside the infotech loop, and that this CyberUnion prescription is therefore irrelevant. In rebuttal, proponents can point out ever more unionized workers co-exist with infotech, and especially with computers, at work. Even if the average unionist's living room does not presently contain a PC, the work station probably does.