Organized labor has always been Net-savvy, taking early advantage of e-mail and the World Wide Web. I recall around 1995 when Charles Pizzo, who specializes in labor-oriented communications, presented a session at a conference in which he displayed some online tactics that revealed a level of sophistication that outpaced the businesses for which their members worked.

It’s a matter of perspective when wondering whether unions have been slow to jump into blogging. On the one hand, I’ve been expecting to see union blogs for a while now. After all, corporations have blogs and it’s not like labor to follow business in leveraging a new channel. On the other hand, the percentage of businesses with blogs is miniscule and, in the grand scheme of things, blogging hasn’t been around that long.

The Los Angeles Daily News reports today that the Engineers and Architects Association, a significant player among LA unions, has launched a blog that so far is being used to target incumbent Mayor James Hahn. The union has endorsed Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the politicians challenging Hahn in the mayoral race.

The blog, Blog City Hall, is missing many of the hallmarks of a typical blog, including RSS feeds and trackbacks. It is riddled with bad grammar and spelling errors (Fleischman Hilliard instead of Fleishman Hillard, for example). And all items—both posts and comments—are anonymous. So far, the blog has only a few posts and scant comments. But it’s easy to see from this early example how unions can tap into the blogosphere as a new element in labor campaigns. Already adept at getting their messages out quickly, unions can use blogs to increase the speed of communication. Blogs give the average member an opportunity to weigh in. And in the case of Blog City Hall, it’s not likely that Hahn or other city officials will respond with blogs of their own.

The launch of this political blog should give businesses that haven’t started already a good reason to both monitor the blogosphere. In a larger sense, though, it suggests that companies should look at blogging as a means of communicating with and engaging its employees so the union blogs will have less to talk about.