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UK unions were urged to expand their organising strategies to include a global dimension by UNI’s Philip Jennings at a conference in London organised by trade union centre the TUC.

Congratulating the TUC on the tenth birthday of its Organising Academy, Philip told the unions “your story is not finished - we have to build in a global dimension. We have to join the dots and we have to get coherence in our organising strategies. Let’s keep growing together.”

He also called for a bigger focus on the services sector - “there are more workers in services than agriculture and three times as many service workers as in manufacturing”.



(photo: Rod Leon)

UNI's Philip Jennings (rt) with Stewart Acuff AFL-CIO and Paul Mason

“Unions are needed more than ever today, so we are building our membership to have more effective unions,” said the Academy’s Paul Nowak.

The launch of the Academy and a new approach to organising in the UK has halted a long decline in union membership and helped produce a first, small increase in membership.



(photo: Rod Leon)

Frances O'Grady, TUC Deputy General Secretary

“We have to be more structured in our organising, we have only just begun,” said TUC Deputy General Secretary Frances O’Grady, who steered the Academy in its early days.

The emphasis in the UK organising drive is now going to be on involving and training lay reps - “the people who to most workers are the face of the union”. “We have to push for better facilities for our lay reps and we have to be there for all sectors of the workforce,” she said.



The Academy has so far trained a thousand union officers and organisers who have been directly responsible for recruiting nearly 100,000 new union members, finding 5,000 activists and winning 300 recognition agreements.

The approach of New Unionism in the UK - resisted by some unions in earlier days - has seen union campaigns aimed at new workers and using new techniques. “Our (organising) culture has changed for ever,” said Tony Burke, Unite who chairs the Academy’s governing board. “We are here to stay, we are going to grow and we are going to win.”



UNI was praised for its work in helping cleaning and security workers in London’s two financial centres - building on a global agreement with ISS - and a strategy that targeted the rich clients of the contractors who employ these key (but often invisible) workers.

Corporate brands are immensely powerful but they fear adverse publicity, Steve Grinter of the Textile and Garment global union told a workshop during a discussion that explored the work of the global unions and emphasized the importance of building union networks in companies - nationally and globally.



AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff reminded the conference of the importance of the Employee Free Choice Act campaign in the United States to streamline union recognition procedures there, cut out the union-busters and build collective bargaining. Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama is backing the bill and increased representation in the Senate after next month’s election would break the Republicans’ blocking tactics. “We are going to make it as easy for an America worker to join a union as for their boss joining the Chamber of Commerce.”

He praised the CWA for its success in organising 47,000 union members in Cingular (now AT&T) and winning recognition for the first 1,000 union members in Verizon Wireless.

“We must globalise our organising and our strategies for justice - because employers have globalised their efforts against us.”



TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber called for organising efforts to reach out to the UK’s two million vulnerable - precarious - workers. Many are casual workers hired on street corners for the day or domestic workers who often have their passports taken off them by their employers.

They are generally outside trade unions, many difficult to reach, with language barriers to communication and employers who believe they can behave with impunity.

“We have to get out into the communities and into the workplaces and bring vulnerable workers into the trade union family, “ he told the conference to loud applause. “It can be done with a little imagination and a lot of determination.”