By Gareth Murphy, Head of Industrial Relations and Campaigns, FSU | 6 min
Recently, I had the opportunity to present at the Unions 21 Trade Union Renewal event.
I covered the topics of union identity, a topic I might delve into a little more in a later blog post, but for this issue I will focus on the other topic I covered which is what internal trade union conditions are most conducive to union renewal and organising.
The key points in this blog are based on case studies from my PhD research.
The fact that trade unions need to renew themselves and organise is well established and I will take it as a given. Likewise, the external challenges we face like shifting labour markets, poor legislative supports, hostile employers and media, increased indebtedness of workers, technological advances and off-shoring of work are also well established and can help explain the declining density and power of the trade union movement in recent decades.
Increasingly unions are, however and quite rightly, looking internally at what we can do more directly to renew and take on some of these external challenges. This blog will suggest four key conditions for unions to focus on to build an internal culture conducive to renewal and organising, which are:
Active leadership
Strategic capability
Organising full time officials (FTO)
Empowered activists.
A union that can concentrate on these areas will find its pivot to organising and renewal easier than others that don’t.
Active leadership
An active leader in this context is one that first understands organising and is able to recognize the challenges that pivoting to organising brings and is therefore able to mediate against the tensions that emerge from this pivot. They are committed to strategically upholding resources and maintaining long term support for the pivot.
This can be contrasted with the passive leader, or a laissez-faire, who might simply espouse a rhetorical commitment because it’s perceived as the ‘thing to do’, i.e. speeches at conferences on being an ‘organising union’, but has little or no involvement in organising beyond signing off on budgets and expects those below them to deliver change and results for them. An active leader renews commitment to organising on an ongoing basis both within their broader leadership and within the ranks of both the union staff and the elected officers with a view to deepening that commitment within the structures of the union.
Strategic Capability
By strategic capability I mean ongoing development and education on the latest union concepts and tactics to enable the union to experiment, innovate and take necessary risks with a supportive dynamic between active members and union leadership. Creativity in response to workplace, sectoral, national and international developments is needed. The internal skills and capabilities that unions rely on need to be continually developed and renewed, as do roles and jobs within unions to meet changing demands and allowing skills and experience, bottom-up and top-down, to be shared, deepening the overall ability of the union to act effectively. It also incorporates an attitudinal flexibility, a willingness, in embracing new workers and finding solutions instead of being constrained by long-standing union structures and routines.
Organising FTOs
When I say an organising FTO I mean FTOs who incorporate organising methodology into their core work of representing and negotiating. It does not mean the abandonment of ‘servicing’ and it does not stand in contrast to this. It is a FTO who considers strengthening union structure as equally important to a particular industrial relations outcome. For example, it is a FTO who thinks not simply in terms of securing a pay increase for members and taking opportunistic ‘easy’ short cuts to achieve that. Instead, this ‘organising FTO’ is focused on increasing worker participation and involvement with a view to strengthening the union structure in the long term, in addition to securing a good pay increase! Unions need to incorporate this organising FTO approach into the general FTO role and their work in a much more consistent way. Therefore, developing and changing the role of the FTO on an ongoing basis is crucial. Fundamentally, the organising FTO's role must be to encourage local activity and worker involvement so that industrial relations outcomes are more directly related to the organisational strength of the union rather than the FTO’s personal relationship with the employer or the employer's benevolence.
Empowered activists
I also identify the importance of activists because they are strategically positioned to work with fellow workers, have first-hand experience of the issues and consequences of changes, and engage directly with fellow workers and management daily. They are uniquely placed to mobilise and organise workers. Identifying, engaging, training, and keeping motivated workplace activists is essential for organising and renewal. Activists should feel empowered to initiate their own local activity and implement and execute campaigns from the union head office. They need both the freedom to act locally and be supported and rewarded for it but also benefit from direction from FTOs, so activity is strategically aligned across the union. Activists are vital to sustaining campaigns and providing energy that cannot be externally replicated or imposed. Not overly controlling but guiding and assisting activists is a crucial element of the turn to organising. This means being less risk averse as a union and accepting that mistakes or failures are a vital part of renewal and nothing to be feared.
And finally for this blog, it is hard to conceive of any of at least three of these characteristics – strategic capability, organising FTO and empowered activists – being in place without a committed and active leadership. Acknowledging this point implies that active leadership is the nucleus around which the other three necessary and interrelated elements orbit – even if active leadership is necessary but not sufficient in and of itself.
So, let’s continue to build internal union cultures that support and embed renewal and organising!
Gareth Murphy is head of industrial relations and campaigns at the financial services union of Ireland. He has worked for trade unions for 17 years and has just completed a PhD in industrial relations at Queens’ University Belfast.
