TUC Digital Lab

Online balloting moves closer for unions

Online voting in union statutory elections has been a long time coming. The TUC launched our first campaign for eballoting in 2002, and unions started using it for non-statutory elections 25 years ago this year. Today, other organisations already make widespread use of the technology – from appointing boards for mutuals and NGOs, to electing Labour or Conservative party leaders.

But unions have so far been held back from using it by legislation. The Trade Union Act 1984 and 1992’s Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act mandated postal voting for strike votes, general secretary elections, union merger ballots and political fund ballots.

New rights, new tech and union growth in Australia.

Over the past three years, Australian unions have grown by an impressive 12.3%. Growth has been across most industries and in most unions. Particular areas have been in childcare and early years, amongst casualised industrial workers, and in the gig economy. New members have skewed younger and female.

These achievements come on the back of significant new employment rights legislation introduced by their Labor government, which has just been re-elected.

I was lucky enough to visit as a guest of the ACTU last month and joined them for their big annual union tech conference, as well as meeting unions in Sydney and Melbourne. I was particularly keen to find out about the technology and tactics that unions have adopted to achieve those results.

Augmenting union education with AI – PCS Case study

Union building never gets anywhere without lots and lots of one-on-one conversations in the workplace. Whether it’s persuading workers to join, persuading members to take roles in collective actions, resolving conflicts, or negotiating between members and employers, a lot of these conversations can be difficult.

That places high expectations on the union reps who need to have them. And whilst this comes naturally to a lot of reps, many of them also need support from their unions.

Developing a targeted union landing page for employer inductions – Accord case study

When Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) announced changes to representation arrangements for its recognised unions, it agreed to improve the information it shared with new staff in grades A – C about their recognised unions as part of their onboarding journey. The bank agreed to giving background information on the unions, with videos and direct web links, repeated at three points in the induction; pre-employment, day one, and one month into the job.

Accord wanted to make the most of this opportunity to engage and recruit new members, so rather than use their home page or their standard join page as a link, they developed a custom landing page for their website. The new page was tailored to the context of these new potential members.

Building more effective landing pages for unions

A new practical guide from the TUC Digital Lab.

Effective digital engagement is crucial for unions to recruit new members, support and retain members, or to get members to take steps towards activism. And well-designed, high-performing landing pages are an important tool for achieving these goals.

Video: Retaining members webinar

The value of retaining union members is obvious. Unions should always be recruiting new members, but losing them unnecessarily means you need to work even harder to grow.

This TUC Digital Lab webinar launched our new guide “A six-step plan to retaining more members”. Sam Jeffers of Join Together and Guste Matuleviciute of RCM joined unions to introduce some of the ideas in the guide.

A six-step plan to retaining more members

Here’s a fact of union life – all members leave, one way or another.

They often do it for a reason you can do nothing about. They might stop working in an industry, decide to study, emigrate, retire and so on.

Video: Visualising union membership data

Unions have huge amounts of data to draw on in our membership records. But how do you get that data into the hands of the people in a union who need it, and how do you support them to understand how to act on it?

Unlocking the membership data building up in our CRM systems will tell us a lot about the ongoing operation of our unions, and the experiences of our members. And combining this with easy visual representations can help colleagues around the organisation to identify opportunities for growth, retention, organising and impact.

A context guide to generative AI for unions

Generative AI tools are being introduced into workplaces across all sectors and, whether officially or informally, will be being used inside many trade unions too.

Tools such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot offer potential for increases in productivity in many common tasks. But at the same time, the hype around generative AI has obscured a range of potential limitations, societal harms and organisational risks.

Video: Visualising data for union bargaining and organising

We all know that the best decisions are those that are grounded in relevant and accurate data. But how do you get that data into the hands of the people in a union who need it, and how do you support them to understand what it could tell them?

One important development could be the growth of dedicated business analytics tools in the union, such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.