By Daniel Huegli, Director, Switzerland and France, Unions 21 | 5 min
If you had asked me a year ago what my union achieved in a month, I could have talked for an hour about higher pay, more say at work, better collective agreements and stronger social plans.
During the first module of the Unions 21 Future Leaders Programme in Leuven, I was asked a harder question: how much of it left us stronger as an organisation?
By the measures we used, we were doing well.
Becky Wright, Executive Director of Unions 21, introduced us to two ideas. The first was the Union House, a model Unions 21 developed that works across unions in different countries and sectors.
In the Union House, membership is the foundation, activism and engagement are the walls, and collective wins are the ceiling. Together they make power and influence, and each part has numbers you can track.
I started to think about unions in Switzerland. The foundation is reinforced concrete. Membership is the cement; movement culture, history and institutions are the steel bars running through it. Cement without the bars cracks the first time it takes real strain. And you cannot build up the walls on a foundation without cement.
The decline in membership has slowed, so the foundation looks sound. The campaigns are proof of members’ engagement and the rep positions are all filled, so the walls look sound. Our newsletters celebrate the union’s wins, so the ceiling looks sound. Asked before Leuven whether this would be considered a strong union, I would have said yes and meant it.
Good work can leave a union exactly where it was.
The second idea was strategic choice, drawn from David Weil’s work, which asks a sharper question: which of this work leaves the union better able to act next time?
Take the collective agreements. We negotiate an improved agreement, the members are grateful, and the workplace has no more organisation than it had before. The campaign that got members to sign a petition is the same story if staff planned and ran it: members took part without learning how to run one. The work was good. The capacity stayed where it was.
Our figures couldn’t show this, because they count activity. None of them asks whether more people can organise this year than last.
Then there is the gap between potential and actual leverage. Potential leverage is what your figures say you could do. Actual leverage is what you can make happen when it counts, with the reps, organisers and organised members you actually have. Good work can raise the first without touching the second. It made me wonder how often governments and employers can ignore us not because our case is weak but because they can see we lack the capacity to act on it.
Then culture. The programme set out six union cultures: service, organising or participation, confrontational, administrative, advocacy and professional. A union with strong service and administrative cultures does service brilliantly and sticks to established procedures, which is exactly why it rarely notices it isn’t building capacity. And when a leadership announces a move towards an organising culture, the dominant cultures do not shift overnight.
Strategy is what turns good work into capacity.
A well-founded strategy starts with: if we do this, that will follow, for this reason. It needs a clear view of the playing field, which means using data, and AI where it helps, to understand what the employer depends on and what is shifting in the sector before anyone reaches the bargaining table. And because strategy is what lets a union deal with events nobody can predict, it needs an honest assessment of risk. That means planning for what could go wrong, not only for what we hope will go right.
The sequence we kept returning to was leverage, capacity, leverage. Assess the leverage you could have. Build the capacity to use it, meaning reps, organisers, data, and members who have acted together before. Then reassess, because what you can do has changed, and so has the environment.
“There is no durable leverage without capacity.”
You can win once on potential. Holding that win, or getting the next one, needs the walls standing. Go round that cycle enough times and the Union House stops being a picture of what you could do and becomes a powerhouse.
None of it works if strategy and culture pull against each other. The programme’s answer to resistance was a culture that can learn, adapt and act on what it has learned. I’d put it more bluntly: it is the difference between a union that changes its strategic direction when the facts change and one that changes which facts it pays attention to.
What I can't answer yet.
The programme gave us a simple reflective practice to take home: what, so what, and what now? What: I spent the programme with 17 participants from unions in different countries, working with a model that made sense in the room. So what: work that builds capacity usually costs more at the start, which is exactly why it is easy to postpone. What now: before I ask anyone to change anything, I want to take one area of our work and ask honestly what it leaves behind.
If your union has moved from doing things for members to helping them do it themselves, what did you stop doing, and how did members take it?
