Author: John Wood

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.

Continue reading Online balloting moves closer for unions

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.

Continue reading New rights, new tech and union growth in Australia.

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.

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

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.

Continue reading Building more effective landing pages for unions

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.

Continue reading A six-step plan to retaining more members