unitefto

In response to my previous post “A Day in Tony’s Dungeon”, an anonymous responder left the following post, which highlights the issue that deserves urgent serious thought:

Some key questions:
1. How many members recruited by Organising Unit in last 3 years? A
2. How many of these are still retained in membership after 12 months? B
3. How many organisers employed to produce this result? C
4. Annual employment cost of an Organiser (including backpay)? D
5. Annual UNITE membership subscription E
And now some sums:
BxE = Subscription income over 12 months
CxD = Cost of recruitment
If CxD >> BxE = PROBLEM
Figure A is not really relevant, although it is constantly quoted. A temporary and seasonal workforce has high recruitment costs – just processing the application forms, for example, high churn and high maintenance costs – lots of individual issues initially. It may be the case that before these can be converted into collective issues, the workforce has moved on.
A constructive proposal:
• Allocate a team of Organisers to each cluster of Regional Officers, and allow 60% of their time to be used in the Regional setting, with 40% devoted to national campaigns.
• Forget the daily phone calls from the RCOs to each Regional Officer – what a waste of time, and use the time freed up to support the teams created
• Monthly team meetings, 2 hours max, with reports from Officers and Organisers on industrial relations and organising issues
• Find something useful for the RCOs to do, as the post is unnecessary in a team working , mutually supportive environment, as working for the union is not like working in car factory or a pie factory, or a warehouse.

This is an interesting and refreshing scientific approach to answering the question ‘how do we build sustainable workplace organisation?’ This, after all, is the only real question which matters. We can recruit as many as we like but the key to growth has to be an effective workplace organisation so that members can win and, crucially, hold onto the gains they make. To me, that is the only way we will grow. Simply recruiting and moving on only creates transient membership.

When I started as a full-time officer an old hand said to me ‘it’s the shop stewards, it’s always the shop stewards that are the key’. I’ve always found that to be an invaluable piece of advice that works in many ways. This colleague wasn’t an organising zealot, but though his long experience had put his finger on the key principles of organising – sustainable organisation and members’ self-activity.

The objective of what I will call Real Organising should be:

• training our reps to undertand their role and buld their confidence;
• facilitating and encouraging our reps to recuit their fellow workers;
• identifying our members’ concerns and facilitating our reps’ organisation around those issues, thereby creating a ‘virtuous circle’ of activity and growth

This is a different emphasis to the recruitment-only approaches that currently stand in for organising. Supporting reps and members in workplaces has been wrongly labelled ‘the servicing model’ by some, but these activities are crucial if we are to grow and are integral to successful Real Organising.

Organisers should be recruiting and supporting reps in the workplace (whether they are single-union agreements, large or small sites), then, only when the ‘virtuous circle’ of activity and growth has been achieved, move on to the next project. Organisers should be working with officers and inegrated into the local teams, not in a silo cut off from the rest of the union’s work, and working towards these aims.

It’s not getting them to sign on the dotted line that’s important, it’s getting them active.

Tony Woodley held a ‘motivational’ meeting at Congress House on 14 April 2011, ostensibly on organising. The response from his audience, sadly mostly muttered under the breath, is unprintable.

Around 200 people, every officer, staff member and organiser from the London & Eastern Region of Unite had been told to attend comrade Woodley’s address on his perspective on what organising means, some being compelled to attend during annual leave. I call him ‘comrade’ because that is what he called us, his unwilling audience, repeatedly. Although this may have been to impress the London Regional Committee ‘representative’ in attendance. This was (nearly) a first for me. In January, ‘comrade’ Jim Kelly, that fine organiser of proletarian black cab drivers, had been present and even been given a slot on the agenda to address officers on developments in the union, including his view that the Amicus initiative to invigorate local activism, Area Activist Committees, ‘don’t work’, although he failed to explain why or what other initiative he has in mind.

But this was a bit different. The T&G’s nominated man, Len McCluskey, had his feet well under the top table and, four months into his reign, was getting into the swing of restoring everything his former union had agreed to put to one side for the merger with Amicus. One of the things everyone, T&G and Amicus employees alike, had hoped would be put aside was one Mr T Woodley, formerly Joint General Secretary of this parish. Unfortunately, Len had made the decision that Tony was indispensible and had put him in charge of organising. At times Woodley had to remind himself vocally that he was no longer GS, but that didn’t stop his condescending pontification.

Woodley let us into his vison. A new emphasis on large workplaces and getting everyone into the union. Sounds familiar? That’s because it is simply a regurgitation of his T&G 100% Campaign. Tony found it hard not to contradict himself. At one point his plan was an ‘organising strategy, not a campaign’, but at other times he let slip and referred to the ’100% campaign’.

When Woodley stood for GS of the T&G he stated that ‘we cannot grow and sustain the union by simply placing greater demands upon full-time officers’ (his campaign website is still online – check for yourself). We got a very different message from him last week. According to Woodley we are a hair’s breadth from the annihilation of the trade union movement in the UK (despite the evidence that many other unions have turned the corner on growth through realistic organising strategies) and the only way to stop decline is for every employee to work harder because we clearly had not been working hard enough. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to work hard. What I don’t expect is to be insulted.

Yet insulted we were. Firstly, Woodley said that if you don’t monitor officers’ work ‘more than once every two months’ all your get is ‘seven weeks of slacking and a week of bullshit’. I had to check my diary when I heard this, but the seven weeks of slacking weren’t in it. As for bullshit, there was plenty more from comrade Tony.

Apparently, ‘being dead did not prevent membership of Amicus’ and he could ‘bet his life that any Amicus officer didn’t know what his real membership was’. I know my Amicus colleagues spend a lot of time getting membership records right, and this was a gross insult to our professionalism. Despite Woodley’s apparent lauding of his former union, there’s no doubt the T&G’s membership system was unreliable, as anyone who has tried to find members on will attest.

Amicus, according to Woodley ‘was broke, and you had to merge with us’. Amicus actually had a sound financial footing and was actually in net growth at the time of the merger.

Sadly, the biggest insult of all is that Woodley is still in a position of high influence in Unite. Despite Len McCluskey’s promises that under his stewardship Unite would not become T&G Mark II, it is increasingly looking that way, with all the former T&G processes and structures being re-imposed without any critical analysis.

Unite was an opportunity to build a union fit for the 21st century. It now looks like that opportunity is being cast aside, through lack of imagination and creativity, in favour of a retreat into the T&G bunker.