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While there is evidence that internationally union membership is on the rise, British union membership continues to fall[1]. TUC National Organiser Carl Roper’s recent article for the Unions21 journal ‘ForeFront’ noted that in modern Britain “over half of all employees have never been in a union”. Brendan Barber speaking to the Guardian on Friday acknowledged that unions had not done enough to reach out to new groups: "There has been a huge transformation in the job market. Trade unions have not always kept pace with that change". The debate on how union can reach out grows ever more important.
In recent Unions21 publications we have seen two broad approaches examined; a focus on modern PR and marketing strategies and a reinvention of the more traditional organising approach to new groups of workers. As Unions21 holds events at TUC conference on The Future for Union Image and Delivering for Young Workers this week, and at Labour Conference on Organising Our Communities later this month, it seems a fitting time to consider novel international examples of these methodologies in action.
In Australia the marketing agency Work Partners has run membership drives for unions. Work Partners train recruiters to tread the pavements outside of workplaces, find workers in lunch rooms, sell by telephone and even knock on doors. Sometimes they target, using the names of those they know have shown interest in joining, other times they ‘cold call’. Some of the results have been impressive. The Australian Education Union for instance announced in 2010 that their Victoria branch had received 7,000 new members over two years from Work Partners, equating to a 20% increase in membership. The company also has relationships with the Community and Public Sector Union, the Australian Nursing Federation and the Communications Electrical and Plumbing Union, although they have not been as ready to announce specific figures. The Industrial Relations consultant Grace Colliers has however suggested that Work Partners’ claims of 1,000 new members a week are unlikely to have been exaggerated.
Work Partners says it is training workers to present the benefits of membership in ways that work but its methods are based on chugging, charity direct debit sales and commission work. Employers in particular have raised concerns that the motivation of Work Partners’ recruiters is simply a signature on a membership form, and so they have little actual care for the worker themselves. These attacks however have been dismissed as a sign of the fear that successful organisation is instilling in bosses.
More relevant to our discussion is the critique of Paul Howes, National Secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, that a union isn’t something you sell: “It's not steak knives . . . It is an industrial organisation made up of working people collectively organising to get a better outcome collectively. It's a whole notion of what it is to be a union”. The debate is whether, by concentrating on marketing based on a narrow range of benefits, the Australian movement has risked ‘diluting’ the broader union ethos.
These issues have been considered by trade unionists in Britain. As Martin Smith, GMB National Organiser, wrote recently in a Unions21 document on Resilient UnionsBritish unions have often discovered too late the damage that a ‘sales targets’ approach can do to a union’s internal and external reputation, not to mention the unsustainable demand which selling membership based on individual services creates. Nonetheless some of the evidence of Work Partners’ success in terms of sheer numbers and income creation means that their tactics cannot be dismissed.
With a recent CommunityResearch study conducted for the TUC and Unions21 highlighting a lack of awareness of the work of unions and reasons for joining as key obstacles to young trade union membership it is clear that the labour movement must do more to market itself. After all, Stuart McGill of Work Partners quotes the statistic that 40% of Australian workers had simply never been asked to join a union – a figure we know is comparable to the UK. Thus a conversation is all it takes in some cases to bring newcomers on board.
As Carl Roper, along with Dannie Grufferty of the NUS in the Unions21 pamphlet ‘Delivering for Young Workers’, argues, trade unions must now ‘reach out’ to the ‘never members’, especially the young. Grufferty calls for student “outreach programmes” and Roper asks unions to consider the New Zealand ‘Together’ programme of graduated union membership – are these examples not comparable to the Work Partners approach; a remarketing of union membership communicated by trade union activists, rather than paid salespeople?
The Australian example is problematic. Selling union membership based on services offered to individual members can lead to the strategic failure of an unviable price race to the bottom between unions. But union membership remains a ‘good’ that we in the movement believe in and that we must promote in innovative ways given the threat of terminal membership decline. Contributors to the recent Unions21 publication on The Future for Union Imageagreed that unions need to radically change their approach to their public image; perhaps this should extend to a re-evaluation of pro-active sales and marketing techniques, such as street recruitment.
Chris Gray is completing a union related PhD and is working with Unions21 on its events at TUC Congress
[1] New Unionism state of the unions: “We have collected comparable data on union membership (post-2000) for 81 countries. Between them, these cover by far the majority of the world's workers. Of these countries:
• 52 experienced union growth over the period measured;
• 23 experienced union decline over the period measured;
• A further 6 either experienced stability (meaning less than 1% change), or do not have any unions.”
(figures taken at 24 January 2010)https://www.newunionism.net/State_of_the_Unions.htm
