Already, this year’s intake of TUC Academy Organisers have turned out to one en masse in Oxford, and doubtless the rest of us, dotted all over the country, have been involved in our local campaigns.

In Nottinghamshire, the local Trades Union Council have been instrumental in setting up Notts Save Our Services. The event grew out of a meeting, reported previously on the blog.

By now, the new intake of  TUC Academy organisers will be preparing for their union interviews, and I wish them the best of luck. This will be the most exciting year since the inception of the Academy, and organisers, with their skills and training, will be central to these local campaigns and their success.

When we learn about community organising this is where we need to put it into practice. We need to unite trade unionists, benefits claimants, disabled people, tenants’ associations, students and anyone else affected by the cuts into an effective campaigning body.

Trade unionists are instinctive organisers and excellent campaigners. But we’re not always so good at identifying our allies and involving them. That’s why Notts SOS have been reaching out to groups who would not normally see the trade unions as obvious allies. They won’t come to us, we have to go to them.

I delivered a short “Organising” session where I led a discussion about what a trade union does and the different roles that members can get involved in (and what those roles include). I was extremely pleased that we had great success – at the end of the session we had recruited:
1 x School Contact
2x Union Learning Rep
1x Student Rep
1 x Health & Safety Rep
1 x  Potential new branch secretary

So thats it…. proof that ORGANISING WORKS!

I can’t believe it is already the last evening of our final module at Ruskin College in Oxford.

As a celebration, nearly all of the Organising Academy Trainees, joined by Liz, enjoyed a nice evening of wining, dining and having a good time.

Everyone enjoyed a lovely meal at Cafe Rouge in Oxford with delicacies such as Bangers and Mash, Steak, Duck, Pasta (and more). Although the taste was brilliant, it was probably knowing that we had negotiated a great deal that really kept the smiles going.

The company was just perfect too – we have come though some much together over this year and have built some strong relationships between each other and this evening was just the right way to end our last evening in Oxford.

To end, I will leave you with a lasting photograph of our celebrations!

The Organising Academy Trainees with Liz Blackshaw on the last evening in Oxford

In my experience this September, the three teaching unions collaborate during this time to ensure all are represented at each training provider and whoever talks about why the new teachers need to be a member of a trade union emphasises the importance of joining all three of the unions whilst they are free.

Thinking as an Academy Organiser, I find this opens up fantastic opportunities – it basically sets a challenge for us to ensure we do enough work to encourage those students that when it comes to upgrading membership to paying for it they will choose us over other unions. I relish this challenge and am really looking forward to running training and networking events for these members.

Probably the best part of this recruitment period is having the opportunity to talk to (generally) young professionals about trade unionism… in my experience, the majority of new student teachers have never heard of a union and don’t have a clue what we do – those who do sometimes have a blurred vision of “unions, aren’t they just groups of people whinging and going on strike?” The opportunities to start the ‘Organising Talk’ are great and you can even start identifying potential activists and future leaders from the start.

Although it feels like I haven’t stopped this month and that my garage has never seen so many boxes (full of “goody bags” for students), I wouldn’t have changed the experience at all.

My driving interest right now concerns the conditions under which people can organise and mobilize in their own collective interest and how this can be promoted in a hostile environment. This year I have been completing an MA on Industrial Relations. I have been looking at John Kelly’s Theory of Mobilisation (1998).   Kelly attempts to explain the process by which a worker moves from being an isolated individual to becoming part of a collective. How and under what conditions does the isolated worker alter course and engage in sustained collective action.

At the heart of Kelly’s theory is a critical discussion of the following question: how are workers’ interests defined, and it is distinctive in Kelly that he relates this definition of interest to perceptions of injustice. There are other factors but perception of injustice is crucial.

Kelly argues that the process of moving from the individual’s sense of injustice to collective action is influenced by representatives and activists (leaders). The role of activists is central. Kelly proposes that activists help workers realise a sense of justified grievance, creating a grounded sense of real social identity, urging and legitimising collective action, against an identifiable agency (employer) in the face of hostile orchestrated criticism.

Kelly’s work provides important ideas and food for thought at this time!  Trade union activists can help to take the lead and play a crucial role in galvanising and mobilising workers by explaining the flagrant injustice of the cuts. They can do so as part of an organised trade union response. We say ‘cuts’. But behind that anodyne term there is simply a massive transfer of wealth from the citizenry to the super-wealthy, who remain free of rational taxation. But the current game of neo-liberal wealth transfer is at a critical stage:  it now includes a co-ordinated invasive attempt to erode social protections in Europe .

Speaking to delegates who attended this years TUC Conference, the central themes of fairness and inequality were top of the agenda. Motion 27 on establishing a High Pay Commission, driven by the CWU and crucially the development of an affiliate coalition to fight the cuts were the conduits to tackle these injustices.  Kelly’s (1998) ‘mobilisation theory’ assists us as we look to galvanise the ‘perceived’ injustice of workers in the UK today into an organised affiliate mobilised response. As the factors for a societal response are present at this moment in time: open political decision making structure, instability of political alignments (Coalition Gvt), availability of political allies and divisions amongst the ruling elite.

 Dave Condliffe, Year 12 Organising Academy Trainee sponsored by CWU.

An attack like this requires a united response. Trades Councils across the country are awakening to these new attacks, and their role in resisting them. Last night more than 150 people packed a hall in Nottingham to hear Labour MPs, trade unionists and community campaigners call for united resistance.

On Sunday 19 September 4,000 trade unionists lobbied the Lib Dems in Liverpool. The Liverpool Trades Council organised a march through the city. If you have a Trades Council In your area, get involved and bring some of that Organising Academy magic to these slumbering giants.

The programme is about domestic workers brought into this country from abroad to work as slaves for the rich and powerful.  Some of their employers are foreign diplomats who are above the law, but they are by no means all foreign and the range and variation of the employers concerned is striking.

The programme presents example after example of men and women (some trafficked in as children) who have been physically abused, made to sleep on floors and in cupboards and forced to work 20 hours a day for very little or no pay by the mega-wealthy families who employ them across West London.  

This is totally bizarre.   Why would rich people with plenty of money treat human beings with such brutality?  Surely they would be better served as employers by treating their employees well and paying them a decent wage.

That, I guess, is our common reaction – it just doesn’t make any sense to most people in Britain.  It’s weird! Bizarre! Pathological!  But I think there is a deeper truth here which needs expressing.

Most people in Britain only find this behaviour unusual and remarkable because of what we as a nation have learnt to take for granted.  In fact this type of brutal treatment of workers by rich employers is actually the historical norm.  Think of feudal England and early industrial Britain.  It’s a norm altered in our own society by active resistance over generations.  What made the difference in our own case is trade unionism.

But this is not a connection which most people now make.  Trade unions changed our society to achieve a whole range of things to make life roughly bearable (negotiated wages and conditions, the NHS, our state education system, the list is a long one).  The problem is that most people nowadays don’t get this and do not relate these hard won gains to the pressure brought to bear historically by trade unionism.  People do not commonly understand what real pressure means in a social context. 

Now we risk these things being taken away.  We dreamers! Brendan Barber has warned that Britain will become a ‘darker, brutish and more frightening place’ as the government’s so-called austerity measures take effect.  I think this is an understatement.

Whilst not discussed, what this Dispatches programme conveys is the image of a world without trade unions or before trade unions.  It provides a picture of the general tendency of employers without trade unionism. This is what happens where there is no effective permanent organised structure to underwrite a rule of law that protects working people.  This is the world without trade unionism and that’s what you see in this programme.

The programme is available to watch online at 4OD for the next 7 days http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/4od#3117241

I should make clear that attempts are being made to help migrant slave workers in the UK.  Justice 4 Domestic Workers (established 2009) is an organisation of Migrant Workers who work in private houses in the UK. It is supported by Unite the Union and Kalayaan (a charity which provides advice, advocacy and support services in the UK for migrant domestic workers).

PS No sooner had I drafted this blog than Dispatches announced a programme on Trade Unionism to be aired on Monday 27^th September at 7.30.  Let’s see what they say.

Tracey Bent, Year 12 Organising Academy Trainee, sponsored by the CWU

I recently came across a website called “Against the Grain – A Programme about Politics, Society and Ideas” at http://www.againstthegrain.org/  This is an online radio programme. It’s produced for Pacifica.  Pacifica is a network of Centre – Left radio stations in the United States. Their most famous production is the amazing “Democracy Now!”  More about this in later blogs. 

Anyway here’s what caught my attention.  On Against the Grain, I listened to an interview with Steve Early.  He’s a Union Organiser and journalist who worked for 27 years as an international representative and organiser for the Communication Workers of America. 

His writings are collected in a book called “Embedded with Organised Labor”.  He’s also got a book out this autumn called “Civil Wars in US Labor” which describes the bitter conflict currently raging in California between the main healthcare workers union in America – SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and a new and very dynamic breakaway union NUHW (National Union of Health Workers). 

This is discussed in the programme.  Many people are totally mystified why a conflict such as this between unions should be happening at this time of crisis.  Steve Early characterises the conflict between these two unions in terms of differences in underlying strategy and policy related to organising and bargaining.  He talks about 2 different and competing visions of unionism – one more bottom up, the other more top down, one more driven by elected rank and file leaders, the other more influenced by the role of full time staff and appointed officials.  He talks about worker involvement, worker participation and the accountability of union leaders to union members at a time of unprecedented attack. But it is the issue of active organizing versus mere recruitment for dues which is the central issue.

The programme isn’t just about the conflict between SEIU and NUHW. Although that is something we should all know about. The programme also discusses:

• How trade unionism has faired at other times of economic crisis – Early talks about the Great Depression of the 1930s.
• What trade unionists can do to protect public sector workers who are under attack at this time.
• Promising directions in organising around non-unionised workers in the private sector.
• The overlap between environmental concerns and occupational health and safety concerns for workers (referring to workers affected by the recent BP oil disaster)
• Why the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is so important to Americans and why hopes for it have been dashed.
• How trade unions can help workers that are non-unionised and how non-unionised workers should organise themselves at a time of real austerity for workers in general.  Early talks about ‘Workers Centres’ funded by trade unions.

You can listen to the Steve Early interview by going to http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/321/id/251521/wed-6-23-10-labor-pains

Or go to http://www.againstthegrain.org/  and search for Steve Early – the program is called Labor Pains, broadcast 23^rd June 2010.

There is an earlier interview with Steve Early and one with Cal Winslow which are also still up on the site. I shall be listening to them this week, I hope.

You can listen to Against the Grain on-site or download to keep.

Tracey Bent, Year 12 TUC Academy Trainee, sponsored by CWU

Despite its faults the BSF programme was replacing crumbling school buildings across the country. A parent from Nottingham spoke at the rally of the concrete cancer, sewage leaks and inadequate class rooms that desperately need renovation.

What’s needed is a strategy of community organising. Schools are ideal for this as they have a defined catchment area, pre-existing networks (PTAs) and concern everyone.

If you know of a community campaign for a new school get in touch and we’ll spread the message using this blog.

It’s a government of the rich, but a poor example of an administration.

But for a classic example of life imitating politics you can’t beat this. It’s Michael Gove showing his amazing ability to make even the simplest things look hard.

 This doesn’t reflect particularly badly on me.  According to everyone I’ve asked, this is normal for project work.

A lot of the early period has been taken up with mapping and then with planning and then finally with getting permission to put the plans into action. At regional level in the TUC  permission takes time. You ask your own manager, then a regional  secretary of an affiliated union and then a union branch.  You either do all this before getting near any workers or you build up contacts with workers in parallel and take the risk that this work will be wasted time if permission is refused.

All this stuff is important and especially so for me! I arrived here with no contacts and no reputation to draw on which poses obvious problems for an organiser.  Organising is essentially the art of getting other people to do things. Clearly you can’t get people to do things if you don’t know any  people or if the people you do know have no reason to listen to you!

For me, the mapping period has been an opportunity  to carve out my little foot hold in the movement as much as anything else.

However useful and nessacary this period is however, it is still the case that it doesn’t quite seem like forward motion. You can’t see anything tangible being achieved. You prepare for a plan that is as yet untested. And if you’re like me: you worry that the plan may not work.

It is therefore with great relief and satisfaction that i can now report the following:

Today I began to organise: I phoned people up, contacts i have made, and I asked them to do something, together, for their union. And they agreed.

There it is: Progress is being made. Onwards and Upwards!

At a well attended meeting of local teachers, Thanet NUT Association voted unanimously to donate £2000 to the anti-racism project.

NUT Organiser Andrew Robbins commented after the meeting, “Today’s historic vote by Thanet NUT sends a clear message that local teachers want Thanet to remain an inclusive and multicultural place for children, teachers and parents of all backgrounds”.

In the run up to the main festival, Love Music Hate Racism and the NUT will be working with local schools, to run workshops and competitions which promote an anti-racism message. Thanet pupils will be given the opportunity to enter a contest to design a Thanet LMHR logo. There will also be an anti-racism poetry competition and local pupils from a number of schools will each design and make the festival banner – to be displayed at the event.

Furthermore, there is currently talk of holding a local Thanet’s Got LMHR Talent contest!

There will be food, drink, prizes, music and dance on the day! Local school choirs and performing arts departments are invited to come and perform.

To find out more call Andrew Robbins (NUT) on: 07872564938 or Bunny La Roche (LMHR) on: 07947424505 or email: a.robbins@nut.org.uk. You can also join the Thanet Love Music Hate Racism Facebook group.

Anyone can get involved in this exciting community project and schools are particularly welcome. Get in touch to join us at our next planning meeting and help us throw the party of the year in Margate this September!

For this visit hundreds of letters, scores of posters and dozens of phone calls helped smooth the way so that every visit produced a result. Using email, snail mail, text and telephony every school visit involved some kind of meeting with members.

Progressive Lincolnshire

lincolnshire has links with the east coast of the United States. The first published poet in the states, Anne Bradstreet, lived in Lincolnshire before emigrating with other pilgrims to the US. She has often been described as a feminist. Below are a few lines from a poem about Queen Elizabeth I.

Now say, have women worth, or have they none
Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?
Nay, masculines, you have taxed us long;
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason,
Know ’tis a slander now, but once was treason.

So it aint all bad.

Mapping is just what it sounds like: a process of understanding the important features of a workplace or situation: how many people work in this office, or warehouse or industry, how many are union members, who is doing what, with whom and how? What the hell is going on and how could it be improved on?

Since I’ve been given a remit that could easily encompass the entire working class and the area of London, a city of seven and a half million people, the main difficulty presented by this task is where to start and when to end!

Because I had the luxury of writing my own work plan, I left myself a very generous two to three months for this part, got on the phone to anyone and everyone who seemed interesting and started to set up meetings. This is surprisingly easy: any number busy people have found time to talk a newcomer through their terrain and for this I am eternally grateful.

When I think of the readership of this blog I imagine someone like me: perhaps considering applying to the organiser academy, perhaps about to start a placement. I want to be encouraging but I want to be realistic too. So I’ll tell you the truth: There have been moments when I’ve found myself staring at a blank computer screen wondering how to fill my diary or coming back from a meeting  wondering if I’m doing the “right” thing.

You get through it: you look at the contacts you have and the resources in front of you, you get on the phone and you make appointments and talk to people and take notes. Pretty soon filling time isn’t a problem anymore although finding it might be!

You need flat shoes for running about the city, an A to Z and the nerve to talk to a lot of strangers. Apparently in Brazil they call this having a “wooden face.” I would never have known that if it wasn’t for the mapping.

What I’ve found is that generally people are happy to chat and are very helpful. Only very occasionally is someone sarcastic, patronising or clutchy over their knowledge. After a while it’s clicked with me that these are the people who perhaps are not so sure of what they’re doing.

Where people are helpful, I try to cultivate a similarly friendly and open attitude and if possible to do some small favour to show willing: even if this is just passing on a contact or putting them in the direction of some information.

Gradually, gradually, the hopeful little lines on my Gantt chart have begun to look like definite possibilities.

Real things that might get done by real people.