United We Bargain

We bargain when the employer knows we can stop the job and deliver effective strike action supported by the majority of their workforce.

After years of managing decline, the question in each partially unionised workplace today is what do we have to do now to build majority support across the whole workforce of 80% or more for action in the future?

Five key signposts to build unity:

Rebuild Relationships. Relationships in the workplace between members, their leaders and often between leaders in many cases need to be actively refreshed renewed and rebuilt in order to achieve a consensus for changing our approach and a collective decision to build majority support. Union officials should actively de-centre themselves from monopolising leadership roles at physical meetings and in digital spaces to avoid crowding out the members. Individual member representations should be conducted by active members and leaders to ensure their full engagement with workplace issues

Refresh the union conversation: The tendency to individualise union support and focus on personal services more than promote the collective in the face of individualised working practices has been attractive to unions in recent decades but has been the wrong approach. Language in our meetings, on our websites and in our literature and public statements that helps the employer present us as a third party organisation to working people has a serious corrosive effect on the unions ability to build majority support. We must guard against phrases such as “the 4th emergency service” “on your side” “experts in the world of work” or “delivering for you” as they simply do the employers job for them of dividing us. Instead we must aim to start the union conversation again with the Organising Question to all those affected by exploitation where they work: “What do you want to do about it?” The organising question helps a group of workers to focus on the reality that our members have the choice to accept their exploitation or build their power to take it on themselves. In each workplace we can work out how to convert individual fear into collective confidence; uncertainty into clarity and doubt into hope. And understand the employer is working to do the opposite

Analyse our Power: And act accordingly. In too many workplaces total union density is too low for the employer to feel our power. In others we are supported by a significant proportion of a workforce but lack the representative structures to convey that power to the employer. In such situations we need to pick our campaign tactics accordingly and avoid pretending to a power we don’t have. If we are in fact an insurgency at work and not an established union we need to act on that basis and have the tactical conversation between members on what other industrial and community levers we can deploy to win pay concessions as we build majority support among the whole workforce for strike action. We must avoid two traps: firstly to act as an established union despite only minority support and secondly the temptation to wait to act while we build power. To avoid managing decline and being captured by the employers Human Resources Department, we must embrace the principle that we build as we act and build from where we have power first – bottom up, inside out.

Escalate our Structure Tests: Our unions need more leaders at the workplace and these leaders should continually test and retest their mandates and earn and re-earn their right to lead. Union democracy and our rule book should be turned from impediments into allies in building unity. Few if any of these skills can be learned in a classroom. An explicit constituency for each elected leader ( whether defined by geographical area, work process or community and language) is a valuable tool to support this process especially in the run up to a ballot. But majority support for the union can be built with escalating structure tests that mean leaders engaging, listening, discussing and mobilising the workforce where they are. Escalating Structure tests should be judged on that basis, should always involve a call to collective action to the workforce and be planned to be slightly more challenging at each stage. Typically these may start from leaders simply identifying themselves as such with published photographs and phone numbers, to collective sticker/badge days, open newsletters to the whole workforce, signed petitions and noticeboards; solidarity meetings around every grievance/disciplinary hearing; through to forms of industrial action such as short sit ins, workplace lobbies, co-ordinated sickness absences; workplace ballots and votes on pay claims and offers, and ultimately strike action. We need more leaders. Some thoughts here: Developing Effective Leadership (msmithorganiser.wixsite.com) and here Looking for Leaders (msmithorganiser.wixsite.com) of how to find them

Inclusive bargaining. An effective way to demonstrate our growing majority support in a workplace to the employer and ourselves is to involve everyone affected by the bargaining process in the bargaining process. This may mean local pay claims and campaigns in parallel with national claims and campaigns or to seek more locally than the floor national bargaining provides. In any event direct democracy visibility and accountability between our members is now an essential element of modern day bargaining. In the formulation of a claim, the delivery of the claim and the negotiation around the claim we must commit to do it publicly and in front of the whole local union – with the employer confronting dozens of their staff representing the union at every negotiation rather than a small handful or even juts the union official.

We can have confidence that working people seek the same support from unions in todays atomised jobs market as they always have – collective action to improve pay and conditions. We confuse our own organisation, and even the employers when lose sight of this and attempt to separate organising from bargaining, or representation from campaigning. They are bound together, a part of each other and two sides of the same coin. Our bargaining as well as our organising must adapt to the new reality of an atomised labour market where work is more of a commodity than ever before.