Rocking the Boat - Organising For A Change

This blog aims to be a place for discussion about a simple and unavoidable fact; our trade union organisations tend to do what they were built to do. If we want unions to make a permanent and real shift towards organising power and impact, we have to first change the unions to make them fit for that purpose.

It is an analysis formed from direct and indirect experience in the UK, USA and Australia. That collectively, the “organising agenda” although now almost ubiquitous in union leaders’ rhetoric, speeches and publications, is yet to deliver a real and permanent shift towards membership growth, power or impact.

This blog adopts the principle that we learn more from our failures than our successes; from our many missteps we know what to do, and what works. We need to choose to change our organisations to do it.

It is now apparent that layering a thin veneer of organising politics on an organisation built and equipped to do something very different offers limited hope for growth in membership and power. However orthodox and pure the politics and doctrine of the organisers involved, and whatever organising ‘messiah’ they follow, if their own organisation remains designed merely to provide a service to its members for a fee then failure, continued decline and recrimination are baked in.

Electing new leaders versed in the language and ideas of bottom-up organising can of course help drive change and is to be encouraged. But the deep change we require can never come from leading from the front alone however good the leaders' rhetoric. And certainly not in organisations dedicated and committed to the enticements and short term rewards offered by their addiction to managed decline. This addiction is often revealed through a deeply held belief that a unions decline is everyone’s fault but the union itself – enabling us to excuse ourselves from responsibility for it. Leaders who fail to defeat this counter narrative will fail to embed organising. (More on this in future blogs).

So those of us committed to the politics of union organising must also get involved in the organisational politics of where we find ourselves; make the space for organising by making and driving organisational change.

This blog will invite perspectives from those in this fight for change in unions right now – and those who helped lead the way in previous decades. As part of this it will of course deal with the evolution of organising theory and practice in the new jobs market we are in today - and contribute to the further development of what we now mean by the “organising agenda.”

But it will continue to contend that the politics of organising and organisational politics are permanently intertwined and to deny this is to plan to fail.

Let’s get organising for a change

Martin Smith

January 2021