By Daniel Huegli, Director, Switzerland and France, Unions 21 | 5 min
We asked seven organisations who build technology for unions what makes it difficult for unions to adopt technology. Every one of them said the same thing.
“The biggest misunderstanding is that buying technology is the same as changing how the union works. It is not.”
Craig Johnson of Change Agent said the same thing from the adoption end: "Providing technology does not mean that people adopt it." And adoption is not an event. "I also think this applies to other software, but software adoption is a continual thing, it's not a one time investment in a bootcamp or change management consultant."
And Digital/Organizing (Switzerland) adds:
Technology does not replace strategy, it is always a tool for achieving strategic goals.
Sam Jeffers of Join Together named the confusion that produces years of disappointing digital spend: “Unions have often confused having the ability to put things on the internet, with the ability to make things 'of the internet'." One or two people in comms managing a flow of output: an internal requirement met, a member need untouched.
Nobody in this set thinks the problem is the tool
That matters, because the tool is where the conversation usually starts and it is the cheapest part of the business. Peyman Owladi of Poteris gave the sharpest version of why.
The real cost people underestimate isn't the software, it's the time and cultural space that testing things genuinely requires.
Ned Howey of The Organizing Center (Tectonica) takes it further up the organisation, to leadership willing to carry the risk of changing: "A partner who will do that is a partner with whom technology can actually land and last. A partner who will not has already decided the outcome, and no tool will change it."
So if the tool is not the variable, what is?
Someone who understands what you are buying
Antti's point here is uncomfortable and precise. Unions buying digital services "often know their operational needs, but they may not fully understand what they are ordering. That makes them vulnerable to being sold the wrong thing, or something that cannot be integrated properly into their wider work." His ask is not for more staff who are keen on technology. It is for people who understand technology strategically - systems, integrations, data flows, and long-term maintainability - so a union can brief a supplier well and challenge one when it needs to.
Peyman's version is to build in-house capacity sooner rather than later. He points at customisation as the biggest unused opportunity, because off-the-shelf CRMs rarely fit a union and unions differ enormously from each other.
Sam is the most optimistic here:
Thankfully, this is starting to change, as more tech-native people reach higher rungs of the union ladder, and as the benefits of making things better, seen elsewhere, become too painfully obvious.
Permission to try things that might not work
It isn’t just about skills though: to grow comfortable with technology people need permission to try it for themselves, and to make mistakes. This helps them get ready for the change it represents. This is particularly relevant for the big technology of today, AI. As Jonathan Tanner of Rootcause says: "What gets in the way is partly scepticism about AI, and holding AI to a very high standard. But more often it's people feeling they're not quite ready to make the change, even though they know the change needs to be made. There's something here about bravery, and about a fear of what change actually looks like, that stops people getting going." What he wants is modest and specific:
a permissive environment where people can simply learn and play with AI.
Antti asks for the same thing and names the consequence honestly: Give people room to test things "and accept that some experiments will fail".
Protected time, which is the part that gets cut
Peyman's answer on readiness is the one we keep returning to, because it moves the goalposts in a useful way. "New possibilities are emerging month by month and some tools that looked useful six months ago have been overtaken by events. So being genuinely ready isn't about picking the right ones now, it's about being an organisation that can find out quickly." What that takes, in his words, is permission, budget, time, and the testing mechanisms already in place before you need them. Craig arrives at the same two variables from a different direction: education, “plus the time and space to experiment".
Protected time is where this usually dies. It is the easiest thing to promise in a strategy document and the first thing surrendered to a bargaining round, a recruitment push or a restructure.
So the sequence runs capability, then permission, then time, then adoption. Buying the tool sits nowhere in it.
What we cannot tell you from this
These are seven organisations who build technology for unions. They see the inside of a lot of union projects, which is why we asked them. They also have an obvious interest in unions becoming better buyers rather than fewer buyers, and none of them is a union officer. We have not put the same question to the movement yet, so we cannot tell you how many unions already have that sequence in place.
The Unions AI community and the published case studies exist so one union's experiment becomes everyone's knowledge. Peyman's point was that what unions most need is not which tool worked, but how the trial was run, who was involved, and what it took. If that is the useful part, tell us and we will do more of it.
