ORGANISED ENOUGH?

RMTnews :: december 2005 24 Since the mid-1990s, "union organising" has become the mantra of progressive and innovative unions in Britain. Union organising comprises a renewed focus on building workplace and inter-workplace trade unionism, based on recruitment, relating to workers' specific grievances in the workplace and mobilising their collective strength there. The aim is not just to create a union presence but strong and cohesive trade unionism. "Union organising" pronounces that the members "are the union," that they "own the union" and should be "empowered" by it. By contrast, the "servicing approach" sees union members as consumers who have bought a service and the union represents them on their behalf. The key signs of union organising in Britain are the TUC organising academy, which was launched in 1998, the increased spending on "organising" and the recent setting up of individual national union organising academies at the T&G and USDAW. As a result, hundreds of new union organisers have been appointed, several thousand new workplace reps identified and trained and tens of thousands of new members recruited. Compared to the many previous initiatives like single- union deals, unions acting as consumer discount agencies and partnership agreements, "union organising" is the most credible attempt by unions to arrest and reverse their decline and stagnation in the last two decades. But, still, decline and stagnation are present. And both look set to continue. While some unions have grown, others have further contracted. Overall membership decline has bottomed out, not reversed, at 29 per cent union density and collective bargaining coverage currently stands at 35 per cent and is still falling. The period of the 1970s is not a bad benchmark to use and to aspire to. Then, there was over 50 per cent union density and 70 per cent bargaining coverage for workers. So, after nearly 10 years of the growing deployment of "union organising," two related questions need to be asked. "Is or was it enough?" And "is it enough any more?" BENEFITS Would union membership and organisation be worse off if "union organising" had never happened? Yes is undoubtedly the answer, although how much worse it not so clear.More importantly, can we say that "union organising" has been necessary without being sufficient to renewing trade unions? If it was necessary without being sufficient, this might mean that it is really a case of "union organising" needing to be practiced more widely and for longer - more unions wholeheartedly signing up to it, spending more of their resources on it and doing so for years to come. Being necessary but not sufficient might also mean that some other magic ingredient needs to be added to the pot, like significant employment and labour law reform so that union organising is carried out on more fertile ground. Both more union organising and law reform would be truly significant developments if achieved. Yet neither can substitute themselves for the renewal of trade unionism as one of the great but now depleted social movements of modern times. The central deficiency in union organising is that it attempts to rebuild a social movement from the top downwards by paid full-time union officers, when all social movements, trade unionism included, have essentially been built from the bottom upwards ORGANISED Gregor Gall argues that trade unions could benefit from greater grass-roots involvement