Strategies and revitalisation for survival of trade unions in Africa : the role of Information Communication Technologies
African trade unions are faced with dramatic trade union membership decline and some of the trade unions have seen the need to use information and communication technology (ICT) as a strategy to reverse the membership decline. There has been a discussion based on the way trade unions use the new ICT, particularly the Internet. However, the discussion has been restricted to Anglophone countries. Countries such as Nigeria and South Africa have rendered few studies based on the ICT strategies for trade unions, despite the fact that they recognise the importance of communication and its impact. ICT is an important contribution for union revitalisation. Different researchers state that the ICTs are less costly and faster than traditional ways. The Internet can be used as a means of internal communication within trade unions by offering membership services, e-learning and news. In addition, it can be used as external communication in national and international unions to promote better communication using blogs, chats and Skype or link to Twitter and Facebook (Greene, Hogan & Grieco, 2003). This study aims to monitor unions' Internet use and analyses the website content of trade unions in the top five economies African countries, namely Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Algeria and Angola. The Internet usage and the content of union websites were analysed by using the typology of Rego, Alves, Naumann and Silva (2014). Therefore, the content analysis was applied as Rego et al. (2014) suggested in their study. There have been several studies on the impact of Internet and ICTs on private and public organisations, but fewer studies on the trade union strategies and revitalisation for survival in the new information era in the top five economies Africa countries. The findings show that a statistically significant difference was found between the content, interactivity and form, for instance the probability value is ?<0.05. For this study, one-way ANOVA was used.
Trade unions, trade union membership, trade union density, information era, revitalisation, strategies, information communication technologies, the Internet, websites
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North-West University (South Africa). Vanderbijlpark Campus