John Wood, Author at TUC Digital

Unions and digital disruptors

TUC Digital Lab report

In recent years, new digital start-ups have changed the faces of whole industries. New entrants have risen to dominance in their sectors and previously major players have collapsed. The pace of change has only intensified with the digital-first response to Covid-19.

Unions aren’t commercial businesses but as organisations we don’t exist in a vacuum. We too can find our position eroded by disruptive innovation if we fail to understand how it works or adapt to it.

Online joining in unions – current and best practice

New Digital Lab report

In 2021, people expect good quality digital interactions with all companies and organisations. Unions are no exceptions – prospective members will expect to be able to easily and immediately join online.

Producing union digital conferences

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.

Recruiting hard-to-engage workers on digital during Covid-19

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.

A brave new world of work

Union Dues podcast interviews Christina Colclough on how the response to the pandemic has accelerated the rate of digital change at work, and what unions need to do to protect their members.

Benchmarking our digital organising

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.

10 digital organising sessions at #Organise2020

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.

Working remotely for trade unions

The coronavirus crisis and our response have caused huge changes for all of our society, but it also brings new ways of working. Unions are having to keep on doing the same things they’ve always done but in a really different context. And they’re having to add some new things on top.

This is going to be the new normal for months. And it could change some of the ways we end up working after that too.

So we’re really keen at the Digital Lab to understand the situation and the challenges facing unions, work out where there’s good practice, and discover where there are new areas we might come together to plot a way forward.

Measuring People Power in 2020+

How could we better measure the value and impact of grassroots power building, organising and volunteer initiatives? MobLab’s latest report surveys voluntary organisations to find out the opportunities and challenges in getting smarter on our metrics.

How do you get your users to actually use your union digital project?

Digital change projects are only partly about making sure a new bit of technology works. Even the best specified new tech tools won’t be any use if people don’t agree to change their current behaviour and engage properly with a new system or process.

When you’re trying to get someone to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, you’ve got two options. You can motivate them to get over the barriers to taking the actions needed. Or you can make the barriers much easier to get over.