The recent groundswell of wage militancy across the public, private and privatised sectors has been more than a decade in the making. After years of discussion about re-energising the collective nature of our organisations and moving away from selling services to members for a fee, Unions were perhaps better prepared to harness this new willingness to fight for pay justice than we might have been.
The challenge of decades long wage theft, made worse by profiteering energy companies driving an inflationary spiral, does not lend itself to a “servicing” trade union response but a collective organising one centred on workplaces. Now is the time for the “organising agenda” to deliver on its promise
Using the standard organising performance measures of membership growth, stronger union structures and a union impact members can feel and touch, many unions can already show marked success even with pay disputes still unsettled.
Now is the time, when we have enjoyed some organisational and industrial progress in dispute, for honest reflection on what to do better next time and how were going to do it. And how this analysis should inform new organising and bargaining training and support for workplace activists that is fit for purpose. Nine key elements have been identified by union builders across the movement:
1. Getting Ballot Ready. The core purpose of a union in a workplace or industry is to be ready to win a ballot of its members with a decisive majority – and demonstrate that readiness to the employer. This involves a degree of record keeping, workplace mapping and leadership that has been revealed to have fallen short. Training, support and staffing must be shifted to ensuring activists are building this knowledge . We must aim to build a high density of members and supporters in each workplace and then demonstrate that we can deploy that power to the employer.
2. Building Super Majorities. We must now end the temptation to allow the legal ballot thresholds to define our members aspirations. Aiming for 50% of members voting in a strike ballot and then 50% voting in favour suggests a commitment to minority action and almost inevitable defeat. Instead our aim should be to show that in any ballot we are confident of achieving 75% majorities. And the question for each group of workplace leaders to answer is what do they need to start doing today to achieve that result in one or two years’ time.
3. Parallel Local Bargaining. The reach, power and effectiveness of national bargaining structures is eroding very fast. Most bargaining agreements are sparsely populated in terms of membership densities. Pay Review Bodies are becoming very common and exist to replace bargaining with begging. For all our philosophical aspirations for national bargaining the current structures rarely deliver these days for either the unions seeking to build power or for the members seek decent pay and conditions. We have a choice – to cling onto the wreckage of the sinking ship of national bargaining structures or build new structures in the same way as we did before – from the bottom up workplace by workplace sector by sector and on the basis of power. National bargaining structures cannot be rebuilt from the top down. We need to redevelop the skills of our activists and workplace leaders to prepare and submit local pay claims – either independently or in parallel with national bargaining where it exists and building the union win lose or draw. Our activists and leaders need to acquire or reacquire the skills to do so
4. Tackling structural wage theft. Despite the Equal Pay act and the Human Rights Act, there is an epidemic of long standing pay discrimination particularly on grounds of sex and race across both the public and private sectors – and even in industries such as Local Government where there are national bargaining and pay review structures specifically designed to prevent this. These sexist and racist pay gaps must be called out for what they are and tackled industrially through organising and bargaining - with legal claims to support. Workplace activists can be trained in spotting wage theft, formulating organising and bargaining claims and campaigns first and then support by union lawyers to formulate parallel legal challenges in support. The industrial organising and bargaining should not be undertaken merely to support legal action as this tends to act to further hollow out the union
5. Refocus on industrial power. Building power and influence for the union “brand” in social or broadcast media, in political spaces, and legally through ambulance chasing mass litigation is trying to build the union on quicksand. Our activists at work and our lay leadership can be trained in how to build power that can be used to get results rather than just seek to buy, beg or borrow power from others. A laser focus on building membership growth, stronger leadership structures and having an impact members can see and touch can be developed through training and support
6. Big Bargaining. The ownership of workplace campaigns by those most affected by the exploitation is a critical part of successful union building. Where union building fails or bargaining produces little it is often because this principle has been forgotten and the union has slipped into seeking to deliver results FOR its members instead. Techniques to build membership density, engage all those affected by a workplace campaign and clearly demonstrate the power of the union in the workplace in conflict - through a core democratic approach - can be learned by workplace activists. We can only rebuild our effectiveness from the bottom up and from the inside out - and the techniques to do so can be learned.
7. Re-learning Leadership. (Looking for Leaders (msmithorganiser.wixsite.com); Developing Effective Leadership (msmithorganiser.wixsite.com) New approaches to building and developing leaders can be learned and adopted with the specific intention of encouraging workplace leaders to lead from the back and not from the front – and for the professional union organisers to have a plan get out of the way of the members leaders as soon as feasible. Paid Organisers should avoid social and broadcast media profiles for themselves and should seek invisibility in favour of letting member leaders take centre stage.
8. Freedom from Fear campaigns. The current generation of platform working, digital HR, rostering and monitoring adopted by employers such as Uber, Amazon, Evri, Deliveroo and then across many care and education providers has presented challenges to our traditional organising and bargaining structures. Union Building in the Platform Economy (msmithorganiser.wixsite.com) After an embarrassing early period of unions calling for these new ways of working to be boycotted and banned some progress has been made to secure right to organise and access agreements with many platforms. The next generation of AI is however around the corner and will likely push the high water mark of changing working conditions even higher – and further into parts of the labour market as yet untouched including transport, manufacturing, legal, healthcare and education urban services. A critical analysis of access and organising agreements reached so far and a plan to reach out to this expanding workforce in every sector is required and can be developed with workplace representatives.
9. Political Lobbying. Now is the time for union members to be clear what we really want in terms of rights at work rather than being told what we might get from a future Government. We should aim to manage the politicians’ expectations upwards particularly in relation to the blight of bogus and forced self employment, the unfair share of working hours and pay so low it is subsidised by the dole. We should not manage union members expectations downwards to suit an election strategy of triangulation to win by default under FPTP. The democratic campaign and industrial techniques set out above should be applied to election campaigning through community organising. To gain and maintain union activists support politicians need to turn up in the life of their communities over the long term, focus on those who don’t normally vote and sound like they know what they are talking about. Workplace leaders and union builders have a voice and a responsibility to engage directly in lobbying elected politicians and unions political education should pivot on this task.
Our job as union builders is two fold – support our members in building and then expressing their industrial power where they work to get a fairer share of the income and secondly to keep our collective organisations together when we are in dispute to be able to fight another day.
We can no longer afford to be taken by surprise by almost permanent below inflation pay offers, on going outsourcing and job splintering. These have been facts of working life since 2008 and will likely continue to be so.
There is still no final victory or defeat for union builders. But our aim remains to continually re-design our organisations in action and re-earn our right to represent and organise in changing times. This must feature more explicitly in new activist training and support if we are to continue as a movement rather than a monument.