THE DARK SIDE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR UNIONS

Although information technology (IT) is widely seen as beneficial to unions, it has a dark side that is seldom recognized-the three serious challenges that IT (primarily the Internet and the Web), pose for unions. First, persons in the emerging IT workforce will often be physically and psychologically distanced from their workplaces and employers, and this may reduce their chances of being successfully organized for collective bargaining. Second, employers may use IT to develop intranets (their own internal Internets), and in this process of voice substitution, they may take over the traditional voice role of unions. Finally, as unions react to employers' intranets by further building their own Web pages, they may change their relationship with their members. Far from empowering unions, IT may create serious and possibly unsolvable problems.