Union labelling information for everyone who wants it

Union product labelling has taken a couple of dramatic steps into the digital age in Canada. There is a long tradition across North America of helping progressive shoppers identify union-made goods and services when they shop. As early as the 1880s many unions commonly marked their goods – labels in clothing, signs in shop windows, union ‘bugs’ on printed goods, stamps and other marks on product labels. Famously in the 1920s and 1930s the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which dominated the needle trades across North America in that time, developed the ‘Look for the Union Label’ campaign including a song to drive home the message. The appeal for buying union in those early days was to provide some assurance to consumers that the goods they were buying were not produced in sweat shops. The workers who made your dress or shoes or canned goods were paid fairly, with reasonable benefits and a grievance procedure and other protections against high-handed employers or supervisors. This motivation still exists today, though most clothing is now made in Asian sweatshops offshore. Nonetheless, Canadian and US unions have traditionally printed lists of union-made goods in their city or region for distribution mainly to union members. In many regions special Union Label Trades Councils were formed for this purpose. The AFL-CIO and the Canadian Labour Congress both supported these initiatives, and the US organisation still publishes a union-made list though it is not comprehensive. In Canada there was no serious attempt to create a national list mainly because of the significant logistical challenges involved. Compounding the problem is the virtual disappearance of union labels in clothing, cards in shop windows and union bugs on consumer products today. The entreaty to ‘Look for the Union Label’ is futile. All which explains why, on January 1, 2012 we launched ShopUnion.ca. The website solves the distribution problem because our database is available to anyone anywhere with a computer, tablet or cell phone. It also solves the ‘union label’ problem because it uses product and manufacturer names rather than a tag, logo, sign or label to identify union-made goods. And we have made a point of collecting other regional or local lists whenever we can and dumping that information into our data base. Additionally, the data in the web site can be updated and changed on the fly, a major advantage over print. The web site uses the same search metaphor as Google. Items are identified with a list of key words, and users are encouraged to use the simplest, most common name for what they want. The site gives you the name and location of the business, its web site and the union. We post listings of products made anywhere in North America which are generally available for sale in stores across Canada and the United States. We do not pretend we have every union product made, but we are set up to accommodate as many as there are, and we are relentless in our search. We rely heavily on unions to share with us the names of companies they have under collective agreement. We have also sought out information on condiments, canned goods, breakfast cereals, snacks, candy, beer, wine, drugs and other such products which are quite often manufactured by large unionised companies. We then write a set of key words which represent the items or services they produce, and mount it in our data base. Listing services requires us to offer a region-specific search. It is not useful, for instance, to get a list of taxi cab companies in Toronto if you need a cab in Vancouver. Aside from listings, the two major challenges in managing ShopUnion.ca is attracting visitors to the site and playing the bills. We have found that social media and the communications apparatus of unions are our most productive means of informing progressive shoppers of the existence of the site. It is a free service to them, so that reduces the barriers to contact considerably. And our surveys have demonstrated to us that there is indeed a pentup demand for information on unionised goods. When people know where to go, they sign on. We...

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