TUC Digital

As Covid-19 stopped mass gatherings in person this year, many unions had to make a choice whether to cancel their big conference events or to quickly rework long-running formats for a digital medium.

This year’s been longer than usual and mostly awful, but it’s given us all some time to think. 

One of the things we’ve been reflecting on is the immediate future of work, whether the “new normal” just becomes “normal” for millions of workers, and how unions should adapt to this.

Since the lockdown, video conferencing has become second nature for our team meetings and one to one calls. And more of us are giving presentations online to union conferences, rallies and meetings, or being interviewed in our homes for media or training webinars.  

When you’re doing this kind of presentation, you control a lot more about the way you’re seen on screen than you would have done at a physical event that had been set up by somebody else. You are also viewed much closer up than usual, so the little things about your presentation can get more scrutiny.  

TUC Digital Lab case study with BFAWU

Coronavirus is changing how people work and how unions organise. Face to face contact in every sector is being reduced due to social distancing measures, more employees working from home, workplaces opening and closing due to government lockdowns and significant portions of workers on furlough.

This has been the first year that Congress couldn’t take place in its usual physical format. We have learned a lot as part of taking as much as we could of our flagship event into a new online format.

How we adapt union organising to fit a digital-first world is a critical question for unions. Even before the pandemic we were seeing increasing organising challenges from fragmented workplaces and casualised work. This year though, face to face access to workers has been really hard, and many unions have found it hard too to support activists to organise locally where they do have access.

The TUC hosted our first major online digital event, Organise 2020, on 9-11 July. It had originally been conceived as an offline organising summit for several hundred organisers and reps at Congress House in London. But when the lockdown came, it was pretty quickly obvious we’d need to develop a new approach, exclusively using online technology to organise, promote and host the event. 

Lots of us have had digital transformation thrust upon us by the coronavirus pandemic, having to switch up our time-honoured ways of working with little notice. Over the last few months, we have had to transition the TUC’s Executive Committee and General Council meetings online.

Using these meetings as a case study, we’ve learned a few things about how to support governance while going through (sudden, unexpected!) digital transformation.

Organise 2020 is the TUC’s free online festival of ideas in union organising, taking place from 9-11 July 2020. And TUC Digital will be joining in too.