Brendan Barber charts a decade of successful membership recruitment for the TUC and says the task now is to build on all the hard work
THE launch of the TUC Organising Academy in 1998 marked a significant shift in resources and attitudes in Britain’s trade union movement. Launched on the back of two decades of year-on-year membership decline, the Organising Academy was a clear statement of intent that the unions and the TUC were no longer content to manage decline. Instead, organising the next generation of members and activists was to be the movement’s highest priority.
Heralding this change in approach at the 1996 TUC Congress, then TUC general secretary John Monks said: “What must we do? First, as Joe Hill said: ‘Organise’. The potential is there – there are five million workers in Britain who are not in unions, but who would like a union to act on their behalf: five million ‘union wannabes’. We need to develop new services to meet new needs. We need to set aside old rivalries between unions and within unions. Above all, we need to double the resources we commit to recruitment. Then double them again and again and get this issue higher on our priorities.”
The Organising Academy was developed as the flagship of this new approach. It was tasked with recruiting and training a new layer of union organisers focused on building workplace organisation, recruiting new members and activists and taking a representative, campaigning union voice into Britain’s workplaces.
Since its launch, the Organising Academy and its sponsoring unions have brought some 270 new organisers into the movement. More than half of these organisers have been women, and half of them under the age of 30. While most have had some trade union experience, a significant proportion of these new organisers have come to us from outside the union movement – from campaigning groups and the student movement. We wanted people with the skills to engage potential members and get them excited about the difference unions can make in the workplace. And we got them.
More than 30 TUC unions – representing about 80 per cent of the TUC’s affiliated membership – have sponsored Academy organisers. Those organisers have worked across a range of diverse campaigns: from securing union recognition in telecoms companies to helping revive local branches in the public sector; developing campaigns to support migrant and vulnerable workers to helping to beat “union busters”; organising around learning projects to acting with the National Union of Students to organise working students.
As well as taking on new organisers, the Academy has been working hard over the past four years to equip our existing officers, organisers and staff with the skills they need to help unions meet the organising challenge, with nearly 1,000 union officers and staff going through Academy programmes.
But what impact has all this activity had? As we mark the 10th birthday of the Organising Academy, are unions in any better shape than they were in 1998? The answer to this is an unequivocal “yes”. But it’s equally clear that unions have no room for complacency if we are to move from “steadying the ship” to real membership growth.
Since 1998, union membership in this country has been broadly stable. The decline in union density during this period has been shallower than that experienced in the preceding two decades and is predominately a function of a growing workforce rather than union decline. Two of the past 10 years have seen very small increases in union density, while a decline of 2.5 per cent over the past decade sharply contrasts with the near 30 per cent decline between 1978-1998. This year, the TUC-affiliated membership rose by 65,000 – the biggest increase in a decade.
Underlying these aggregate figures, some individual unions have experienced significant growth over the past 10 years. In fact, out of the 46 TUC unions that we can compare membership figures for between 1998-2006, 27 have grown and 23 of these have grown by more than 10 per cent.
Of course, external factors have helped unions perform much better over the past 10 years than they did in the preceding two decades. Despite the ongoing tensions between unions and the Labour Government, the past 10 years have presented a more positive environment for organising than that engendered by the Conservative Government of 1979-1997. New recognition legislation has provided a statutory basis for union recognition in Britain. Other legislative changes with the potential to support union organising efforts include the right to accompany individuals, new information and consultation rights, along with the regulation of gangmasters. Reduced unemployment and increased public sector employment have also helped unions to grow.
But new laws and increased employment do not organise new union members. Yes, the change in the external environment has been important. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the relative success enjoyed by British unions over the past decade can be attributed to the work done by the unions themselves: prioritising organising and membership growth. The Organising Academy represents just one positive union initiative in this area. Every day, up and down the country, in hundreds of workplaces, unions are signing up new members and winning new agreements with employers. Unions are reckoned to have signed more than 3,000 new agreements with employers since 1995 – a remarkable figure, especially when you consider that unions spent most of the 1980s and early ’90s on the back foot.
For the TUC and the Organising Academy, meeting the organising challenge – helping Britain’s workers get a union voice on the job – remains our central focus. Unions have made good progress over the past 10 years, but there is more for us to do. The hard work we have put in over the past decade has laid the foundations for membership growth in the decade to come. Now let’s get out there and organise.
Brendan Barber is general secretary of the TUC
