TUC Digital Lab

Digital unionism means showing leadership and managing change

By the time digital change becomes visible to our members, most of the difficult work has already happened inside the union.

In our experience, tech change projects are mostly about change and less about tech. Problems with the technology itself are rarely the decisive factor in whether projects succeed or fail. That’s more often explained by how change is led, paced and governed – and by whether leadership treats digitisation as an organisational challenge rather than just a technical one.

Digital unionism means a deeper relationship with data

Digital systems generate lots and lots of data. But digital change doesn’t just give trade unions more data. It changes how unions relate to information, insight and organisational memory.

Digital unionism means moving beyond seeing data as a by‑product of systems, and towards treating it as a shared organisational resource that supports judgement, learning and better decisions.

Digital unionism means skills and organisational culture

When digital change stalls it’s tempting to feel we’ve just reached the limits of what the union’s tech systems can do. But progress is just as often limited by whether we have the skills, roles and culture in place to use our systems well.

The same systems have enabled very different outcomes in different unions. The difference lies in how digital capability is understood, supported and embedded across the organisation.

Digital unionism means systems and investment

In the last post, we talked about how digitisation isn’t just about tech – it’s about adapting to meet members’ modern needs and expectations.

But of course it is also about tech, and about unions developing a new relationship with it.

Tech systems shape what unions are able to do every day. And just as importantly, what they are unable to do.

Digital unionism means meeting members’ expectations

When trade unions talk about digital change, it’s easy to start with systems: a new CRM, an app, a website redesign. But when members experience the union, they don’t encounter this technical infrastructure. They encounter journeys.

What is digital trades unionism? A short blog series

In the 6 years we’ve been operating the TUC Digital Lab programme, the pilot projects, events and shared learning we’ve been running with our affiliated unions has generated a huge amount of content.

There are reports, how-to-guides, case studies, workshop write-ups and blogs. It runs to over 330,000 words in all. As it’s spread over so many documents and such a long period of time, there’s probably nobody who’s actually read it all.

Preparing the union for online statutory balloting

Online voting in UK trade union statutory ballots is being introduced this year, as part of the government’s broader reforms to modernise workplace rights, under the Make Work Pay agenda.

This is something the TUC and unions have consistently campaigned for, over more than two decades. And union experience with indicative ballots means we have a lot of good practice to draw on as we extend the tactics to strike votes and leadership votes.

But there are also a number of areas where the move to new ballots means a difference in importance, scale and audience, and there will be complications with the changes, due to the limitations of the new legislation.

TUC digital healthcheck v4 – A new version of our union benchmarking tool

We’ve just released the latest major version of the TUC’s digital healthcheck tool, version 4.01. It’s been more than five years since our last version, so we wanted to revisit it and make some changes to reflect the fast-moving world of technology.

Tech unions vs enshittification

The internet is getting worse by the day. Platforms like Google, Facebook or Amazon are getting unusable – crammed with intrusive ads, user surveillance and AI slop content. Tech workers who used to add value for users are laid off to improve share prices. It’s all part of the big tech playbook to build monopolies, degrade user experience, exploit staff, and lock us into broken systems. Tech critic Cory Doctorow calls the process ‘enshittification’.

Back in November, we held a webinar with Cory and tech sector union activists from Prospect, UTAW and Unite, to explore how the concept of enshittification affects tech workers and users alike – and how unions have a big role in the fight back against Big Tech’s worst instincts.

Building union power in the digital age: Lessons from Action Network’s Brian Young

Brian Young is the founder and director of Action Network – a progressive tech co-op that’s become a backbone for digital campaigning and organising across the US labour and progressive movements. It operates the Action Network campaign CRM internationally, and is currently about to offer its organising toolset Action Builder to Europe for the first time.

Brian’s experience spans decades of union and political campaigns and organising, so when we found he was passing through the UK, we were keen to get him in front of a room of union campaigners and organisers. Here’s a bit of what he told us.