While going to having meetings on Zoom was obviously the right step at the beginning of the pandemic, it might be time to go back to in-person meetings. Here are two critiques of online meetings, one from Berkeley mostly about what’s important about in-person meetings and one from Oakland about anti-democratic uses of online meetings.  They have been edited for space.  How are meetings being conducted in your local? Should meetings continue to be online? We want to print short responses in our next issue.

Berkeley  “ I think that online meetings are overall bad for union democracy, especially if you are part of a minority faction or caucus within the union. While it’s true that site-reps can write in advance to union officers and request items to be added to the agenda, in practice in my union the Exec Board meetings are usually packed with agenda items set by the officers. When there are votes on issues, which sometimes come out of the blue, even during in-person meetings, there may be a relegated short time for discussion but the ball is kept moving so quickly that there is little chance to caucus with like-minded members. This situation is worse during online meetings, because you can’t spontaneously communicate with other members. Being able to have “side conversations” and interject feelings and ideas are important! And I think this can be done respectfully and is part of democracy too. But it’s difficult to do these things in online meetings.

Another reason is simply that I think having face-to-face relationships with your union “brothers and sisters” is really important. In our online meetings, close to one-third of participants don’t even have their camera on! Are they even actually there? As I recently said to my fellow site-reps, there are no virtual picket-lines. We need to know each other to be able to work on something together. We need to have relationships with each other beyond just seeing a bunch of faces in little squares on the computer screen. Have you noticed that zoom meetings tend to lack humor? I don’t think this is a  coincidence.

Perhaps in some situations they are preferable. But not for a political organization that is trying to be democratic and encourage relationship building and active participation. I mean, I get that online meetings are “convenient,” and some folks even frame it as an equity issue. If you are totally fine with the direction and focus of your union, fine with the agenda, the contract, etc, and you see union meetings as simply a way of getting informed from the top, or of getting directives from the top, then I can see why online meetings are more attractive.”

        —Gerry Jamin, Berkeley teacher and BFT union site rep

Oakland “At first, OEA Rep Council had functional chat, which allowed for some of the conversations we used to have in person.  Anyone could see who was on the stack, and where. But since then several changes have been made that have meant that officers control meetings in ways that would not be possible in-person.

• Chat is muted so that attendees may only message the officers directly. Nobody can see what is messaged to the officers.
• Members are muted and must be given permission to unmute by officers. Officers immediately mute members when their “time” is up
• There is no way to know who else is on stack ahead of time. 
• Officers use “voice votes” to approve their agendas, use their time to speak at length about any of their own initiatives and information, use points of privilege and points of information, use “response to questions” to speak on their points, etc
• Reps do not have any opportunity in the main meeting or in breakout groups where we can discuss proposals, debate, share information, etc.
• Two members of the Rep Council have been “thrown out” for raising their voices, something that is much easier to do than in real life.  (Would tempers have flared if there were a visible stack?)”