How do we democratise and invigorate our unions?

Below is the text of a speech delivered at a Troublemakers at Work public event, taking lessons from organising charity workers, to argue for more intentional rank-and-file organising.

Recently, workers won a ballot for union recognition at West Yorkshire charity GIPSIL with an overwhelming majority. Following a previous piece on the particulars of that campaign, I elaborate here on the wider lessons we drew from it and the implications of recognition campaigns in our current context. In part, this is because the techniques we utilised were not especially novel – whether mapping, organising conversations, or collective actions. I think instead our key problem remains that we are not widely disseminating and applying those techniques in a thoroughgoing way, and that the democratic cultures of unions, and with it the collective participation and confidence of the rank-and-file, have atrophied.

We know that trade union membership has declined to around half of its peak in Britain relative to the 1980s, with membership particularly low in the private sector. Days lost to strikes have dwindled and many industrial action ballots falter at turnout thresholds. There have been inspiring surges of union activity, such as the strike wave of 2022-23, largely in the public sector sparked by the cost-of-living crisis, but the overall picture is one of the erosion and retreat of worker power. Of course, this has been precipitated by much broader sets of social and economic changes, from deindustrialisation, to anti-trade union laws, to the fragmentation of the public sector where union membership still has its stronghold, but I pose here that it is also a problem of our own organisation.

GIPSIL is a microcosm of these wider processes: many of our services are directly commissioned and funded by the council, effectively outsourcing public sector work like welfare rights, housing support, and school counselling under poorer, more precarious terms and conditions. Many of our workers have direct experience working in the public sector; some have been TUPEd across from other commissioned services. It is the breaking up and fire sale tendering of public sector contracts to organisations like GIPSIL that is driving privatisation and undermining bases for trade unionism. What happens in the ‘voluntary’ sector is a race to the bottom which is also snapping at the heels of local authority workers. It is no surprise that the strike wave also therefore involved similar activity in the third sector from Shelter, to Citizens Advice Hull, to Hestia housing association workers.

Alongside the expansion of the private sector, campaigns at workplaces like GIPSIL are instructive insofar as the terrain we have to fight on to rebuild union power is increasingly one of unrecognised workplaces. Recognition campaigns then become contradictory experiments in building unions from the grassroots – given that the bureaucratic process and end goal of recognition tends towards ‘official’ representation and compromise behind closed doors, rather than worker self-activity. We have to reverse perspective from that of the bosses and state and ground ourselves in our own agency: the steepness of the threshold for statutory recognition is not only a result of anti-trade union law, but also a chance to reclaim as default a majoritarian, collective organising approach.

Reactivating a moribund union entrenched in a partnership arrangement with bosses presents its own challenges, but they really are two sides of the same coin: that we are not well organised enough. This is not to disregard all the systemic barriers – but they can become alibis, obscuring the fact that with sufficient power we can overcome them. We have to believe that, and crucially believe in our fellow workers enough to follow through. Otherwise, we resign ourselves to defeat, and the stakes are too great for any such fatalism if we are to redress the grotesque levels of inequality all around us. We must be deliberate with our method as much as our optimism.

It might seem like an overly simple answer to the complex question of today’s session, but the democratisation and reinvigoration of our unions I think hinges on us as workers talking to each other, building relationships, and re-asserting our own power. That means not siloing off organising as a professionalised operation, it means shifting the prevailing dynamic in unions from servicing towards organising, and it means not blaming our problems on apathy or on the collusion of officials. We have to go out there and speak to our colleagues knowing that we can only rely on ourselves to collectively solve our own problems in the workplace, because those problems stem from our being dispossessed of control at work.

Here we should not acquiesce to a company’s ‘right to manage’, ceding the workers’ right to ownership over the organisations that we make run. We advanced such demands for accountability and a real stake in decision-making throughout our recognition campaign at GIPSIL, and workers were very receptive to it. If we don’t proactively communicate empowerment, and then fail to embody that in our actions and campaigns – we will remain on the backfoot, lacking leverage and losing ground. Too often members can feel like foot soldiers, with the strategic thinking conducted on their behalf by officers, if we neglect to foster a grassroots democratic practice. This limits not only the engagement and participation our disputes need to win in the short term, but also constrains the political development and initiative that coheres struggles around a broader program of transformation.

The recognition campaign at GIPSIL is just one case study in how we can embed a rank-and-file orientation into the foundation of union branches – we ran our own meetings, decided our own demands and strategy, and challenged officers where they dragged their feet because we had developed our collective knowledge and power. Other workers trusted us because we were also workers going through similar issues, so could speak to their concerns with the specific empathy and respect that common experience crystallises. The union wasn’t an external party – it was us showing up for each other, listening to what mattered to people, and being honest about challenges and working through them together. It was placing us in charge of the campaign, voting together on key decisions at each stage, and developing an expectation that reps should be accountable to workers not bosses.

The composition of our workforce exemplifies many of the longstanding obstacles facing trade union organisers today: understaffing plugged by the increasing contracting out to agency and casual staff, high attrition rates due to poor pay and conditions, and a large degree of remote and shift workers dispersed across multiple workplaces. Recognition campaigns are tactically useful, if nothing else, insofar as during balloting periods you can negotiate access to workplaces that you would not have otherwise. Before this, due to turnover, we had struggled to get the majority we needed over the line.

But the years of prior organising, building up a base of members, activists and contacts in each team, chipped away at those barriers and enabled us to then reach the last sets of workers during the ballot. Through consistent, patient and determined effort – leaving no worker behind, personally speaking to everyone through pre-existing social networks in each team, and utilising every means of communication available to us at every hour, from phone calls to leaflets, we won our ballot of all frontline staff with a nearly 80 per cent turnout and 90 per cent in favour. Every worker should feel empowered with the tools and confidence to organise – guided by the principle that our unions, and our workplaces, should belong to us.