Tonight we had the first informal meeting of the TUC’s ‘Leading Organising’ network, bringing together heads of organising from unions including Unison, GMB, PCS, NUT and the CSP.
Our aim is to pull together this group every couple of months or so to share ideas and experience. The meetings are open to everyone with a lead responsibility for organising and recruitment in their union, so if you want to get involved please let us know.
May Day (Thursday 1 May) sees the launch of Union Island, an innovative new trade union project to build a home for unions and activists in the virtual world Second Life™.
Union Island will host the first ever virtual May Day, a day of training, networking and celebration to bring activists from the global union movement together in a way never before possible.
Events planned for the day include:
Union Island plans to use Second Life to create a community for trade unionists, which will let activists from around the world meet and work together on shared issues in the global economy. The project also aims to use the virtual world to present union campaigns to a new audience and enable a new generation of online activists to have more input into union activities.
TUC Deputy General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: ‘Trade unions are all about people coming together to make things better, and online networks offer a powerful and cost-effective way for us to forge new links. As more businesses embrace virtual worlds such as Second Life to foster international networking and collaboration, it will be natural to find unions there too.’
UNI Global Union General Secretary Philip Jennings said: ‘UNI Global Union’s member unions around the world are constantly innovating, to show their relevance to today’s members and tomorrow’s potential members.’
Last week I spoke about the organising challenge in the UK to the Biennial conference of Mandate, the union for bar and retail workers in Ireland. Its the second event I’ve spoken at in Ireland during the last few weeks. The first was an event hosted by the NCI looking at prospects for union growth in Ireland. You can read papers and download presentations from the conference here.
Mandate have recently adopted an ambitious organising programme, and have spent time in the UK talking to the TUC and unions such as USDAW about their organising work. USDAW has grown by some 60,000 new members since 2000, in part due to the 110 activists who have gone through the USDAW Academy. USDAW’s Academy was inspired in part by the work of the TUC Organising Academy – which by happy coincidence is now recruiting its 11th intake of new Academy Organisers. You can find more about the recruitment process for the Organising Academy here.
Many of the challenges facing unions in Ireland are similar those we face in the UK – turning round declining union density; finding ways to get more members active in the life of the union; and reaching out more effectively to newly arrived migrant workers – so its good to get the opportunity to share ideas and experience with colleagues. The only downside is that I’ve spent a few hours than I would have liked hanging round Dublin airport because I refuse to fly RyanAir (I’m not providing a link), which have flights to Liverpool pretty much sown up!
One of the projects that I will be working on over the next 12 months will be setting up the TUC Activist Academy.
The Activist Academy is being set up to increase the number of lay union reps accessing organising training, support the efforts of unions to engage lay activists in organising and recruitment activity and build on the work of the Organising Academy.
The organising training materials aimed at lay reps – ORGANISE – have recently been updated and re-launched as ORGANISE 2, however the number of lay reps attending specific organising related training is particularly low especially when placed along side the numbers attending training related to either Health and Safety or Industrial Relations/Collective Bargaining.
The Activist Academy will pull together unions nationally and regionally as well as Region TUCs and TUC Education Units to offer training combined with specific work and/or community based organising projects.
The Activist Academy will be trialled initially in three TUC Regions – Yorkshire and Humber, Midlands and Southern and Eastern with national roll-out scheduled for early 2009. If you want to know more about the Activist Academy drop me a line at here.
Via this blog, you can find out more about the day to day work of the TUC’s Organising & Recruitment Team.
The team is headed up by Paul Nowak the TUC’s National Organiser and includes Liz Blackshaw, Director of the TUC Organising Academy, Tom Mellish, Organising Policy Officer and Carl Roper, National Training and Consultancy Officer (Organising).
Paul Nowak
Carl Roper
Liz
