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.
Here’s a bit of what I noticed, grouped around how unions have used the new rights, and how this has been made possible by some solid longer-term work on both digital innovation and capacity building in unions.
Campaigning to use new rights
Australian unions gained two rounds of employment rights under the first Albanese government, the original Fair Work Amendment and a follow up amendment tackling employment rights loopholes.
Unions have put a lot of effort into working together to understand how the reforms affect their industries and members. They have strategically identified test cases and campaigns they can bring, increasing the chance that subsequent cases can follow positive precedents.
Collectivising the realisation of new rights
The Same Job Same Pay provisions have been hugely significant in industries where casualisation had long depressed wages. Contract workers in mining are in line for life-changing raises if they achieve pay parity with permanent staff.
The new legislation works well with a collective response, as workers need to file a claim and this is obviously much easier with union backing. Mining union MEU have filed many high-profile claims and won substantial raises.
The union have prioritised their case load to workplaces with the highest levels of casual worker membership. This helps them to allocate resources more realistically, but it also provides an incentive for mass joining and activism to grow membership.
Social media has been important in spreading the word. MEU reach out to workers online and build up interest. And as the wins come in, they have been able to generate very effective earned media coverage, which can be shared on social media to reach more relevant workers.
There are similar cases being taken under new gender pay parity rules, especially in industries such as social care and childcare.
Where workers do not qualify for full employment status and rights, there is a new provision for minimum standards to be set by the Fair Work Commission.
Transport union TWU have used campaigns around these to increase collective bargaining in the gig economy. They have applied for minimum standards orders to cover different sections of the gig transport and delivery market. The orders cover contract minimum standards, but also measures that will help them to keep organising strength in the longer term such as protections for reps.
Reaching out to workers disproportionately affected by new rights
Many migrant workers are trapped in poor conditions because their immigration status is employer-dependent, and abusive employers can act with impunity.
Unions have expanded their outreach to migrant workers online and have established or supported a wide range of general grassroots Facebook groups for different migrant communities, localised to states and cities. These have become good sources of leads with migrant workers, helping the unions have clearer visibility in the space.
Union Visa Assist programmes support migrant members with immigration lawyers. And a new category of Work Justice Visa guarantees a stay for whistleblowers. To switch to a Work Justice Visa, the worker needs to go through an officially certified advisor, and unions have registered to support migrant workers in this way.
Involving digital tactics in campaigns
Digital is taking a more central and strategic role in campaign planning, rather than being a tactic brought in at the end. It’s been particularly important in reaching workers in a poorly organised industry at scale, such as in social care. Here UWU have embedded a dedicated digital organising team within their organising campaign, including data analysts and content creators, working closely to the needs of the field organising campaign.
The AgedCareWatch website is a tool that care workers can use to anonymously report conditions in care homes, and it has received more than 13,000 reports. UWU are able to reach out to talk about these issues with workers who are potential activists in campaigns in their workplaces.
Digital innovation
Unions have come together to develop more consistent digital tools across the movement, particularly with a view to improving retention rates.
Standardised tools
The Union Innovation Hub is an ACTU-owned but arm’s length digital agency, working directly for unions. They have run a hugely ambitious project to bring 60% of ACTU unions together around a common tech platform, involving group buying of a union-customised version of the iMIS CRM that they have developed (We’ve covered this before in the Digital Lab, and you can see more about it here). Five years on, the hub now has a team of 13, including project managers, developers, marketers and data scientists.
The majority of the movement now has a standard set of modern core tools to work with, and have achieved it more quickly, consistently and considerably more cheaply than they would have been able to do alone.
Bringing more of the union’s data into their central systems has enabled more intelligence to be acted upon. For example, a new softphone integration developed by the Hub allows for seamless display of member details during phone calls, making staff more productive and responsive in servicing members.
Holding more consistent member data and using it to target communications has also helped considerably with member engagement levels. If members are getting more relevant communications, with greater opportunities to engage, they have higher satisfaction and are more likely to be keeping their details up to date, forming a virtuous circle.
Marketing automation
The Union Innovation Hub has pioneered automated marketing journeys with unions, developing pathways that will automatically send a sequence of interactions to members when triggers are met, and aim to improve members’ experience of the union, or identify where things might be going wrong.
For example, there are email welcome journeys that activate when a new rep is inducted, offering a pre-specified programme of training material. CRM-linked member feedback surveys can trigger relational marketing requests to supportive members, or retention journeys to those who are dissatisfied. Key union content for an industry can be developed into longer-term recruitment funnels – landing pages with downloadable resources that non-members have to register to view, following up with related information promoting membership.
The Hub employs dedicated marketing staff to assist in this, supporting unions to understand which automated journeys could be helpful in their members’ context, and directly helping to write these and build them within the unions’ systems.
Marketing automation has been especially valuable in retention, when members’ payments fail. Systems can check and prompt members with automatic follow up journeys by SMS or email, or by placing the member into a queue for a phone call from the membership team. Getting to lapsed members more quickly is key in keeping them in membership.
And many unions have taken up remarketing on their join forms. If a prospective member doesn’t finish the form, they can be prompted by email to return and complete this. Nursing union QNMW union has achieved a 48% recovery rate in remarketing to people who drop out of joining online.
Some unions have taken this tactic and developed it further themselves, and across multiple channels. For example, civil service union CPSU have developed QR code check-ins for local campaign events that they run, which send data straight to the CRM, automatically identify non-members and add them to call queues for organisers to follow up with.
Business Intelligence
Unions have increased their in-house expertise with business intelligence tools, particularly Power BI, which has reports incorporated into ACTU’s iMIS CRM. Dashboards are shared with staff who need it in a cost-effective way, at whichever level of the union they are.
Interactive reports help organisers and others drill down into data along their own lines of enquiry. Unions find regression tree charts particularly helpful in this – allowing different teams to cut membership gains and losses by any demographics, industries or locations, as would be relevant to their own work. Heat maps for location and size of workplaces are proving useful for allocating organisers’ geographical patches for more effective use of travel time.
Some unions are now using Power BI on member data in conjunction with publicly available statistics, to plot member density in detail for organising strategies.
The Hub are currently investigating union interest in a benchmarking tool, which would use anonymised cross-union statistics to help unions identify where they measure up on a wide range of factors around membership and retention.
Join infrastructure
The ACTU have developed a central online joining process that allocates prospective members directly into unions. Previously, they had a tool like the TUC’s unionfinder, which pointed towards unions, but could not tell how many people that it sent on actually joined.
They researched with users and found that prospective members often had a bad experience. Unions might not get back to their enquiry in a timely way, or at all, especially if they were a member who might be difficult to service. Or they might write back to say they weren’t the right union, but without an indication of which would be. But the biggest drop-off was probably in the majority of users getting distracted or discouraged between using the ACTU form and then completing the union’s own join form after referral – something we’ve identified with the TUC unionfinder as well.
The new form recommends a union and takes payment immediately, entitling the worker to membership. Then the ACTU gets to work setting up the prospective member’s account with the union, or finding an alternative union if the original union is not a good fit for the member. The first two months’ fees are set at a standard price and go to the ACTU to cover the system’s costs, and marketing campaigns for union membership that ACTU run to drive more traffic to the form.
This system is optional for unions, with not all unions getting involved in the direct join approach. But it has meant a large number of members having a better onboarding experience and not falling through the gaps before they join.
Capacity building for union organising
Recent years have seen plenty of behind the scenes work by unions and the ACTU, putting in place infrastructure and new ways of working that make new growth campaigns more possible.
Outbound calls
ACTU maintain a 6-person outbound call department who, as well as servicing their own needs around the online join process and campaigns, are able to add instant capacity to union campaigns. They work across phone, SMS and email, with costs are recharged to unions on an hourly basis.
They have particularly focused on contacting organising prospects, where the union does not have capacity to follow up on leads generated by large events or campaigns in a timely fashion. For example, one union had gathered 1,000 new membership prospects from an online petition and the team were calling them to talk about joining the union.
They also run win-back campaigns with lapsed members, calling to check when payments have ceased and trying to get them to restart membership with the union. On a recent campaign with 474 lapsed members, they were able to contact 422 of them, re-signing 47, and with a further 64 rejoining by another method after the call.
Data insights
The ACTU Insights Unit is a team of three data scientists, from professional market research backgrounds. They provide shared support for ACTU and union projects around data science and market research.
The team contributed to a major profiling project, which looked at public attitudes to unions and built up a series of personas to help unions understand how their messaging might come across to different groups. It could help develop more effective campaign messages in industries where particular persona attitudes are likely to be more prevalent.
A major project in 2024 was the ACTU’s Retention Playbook, developed with the Union Innovation Hub. This partnered with 6 unions to survey and interview people who were leaving the union and ascertain their reasons for leaving. A practical guide was developed for unions to use at all levels, highlighting practical changes to reduce accidental leakage.
Futures network
The ACTU’s Futures Network is a series of informal networks between union officers and leaders engaged in areas of change, such as digital or the future of work. Similar to the TUC Digital Lab, but wider in scope, it seeks to bring unions together to develop good practice and explore new trends that will affect the movement.
Organiser diversification
The organiser model is a bit different in Australia, with unions having a higher ratio of paid staff organisers to the membership than the UK, and a lower ratio of lay reps (delegates). As organisers are maybe less likely than delegates to be drawn from the workplaces they are representing, there has been a lot of effort to help diversify the movement’s organiser base.
UnionsNSW’s Union Summer places 30 young activists with limited union experience every year into short term live campaigns with unions, with a specific focus on recruiting more women and activists from minority communities. It works as a kind of extended interview process for unions with potential new staff, and a good number of participants land a job with a union afterwards.
This has been particularly helpful in supporting campaigns amongst casualised or gig workers, where marginalised minorities are disproportionally represented, and less representative organisers are less likely to build trust as quickly.
The ACTU’s long-running Organising Works programme is still operating. It works in more depth with a 9-month course more directly focused on recruiting to organiser positions.
Building training for reps in the new rights
ACTU’s training arm ATUI have increased their programmes of training for organisers and reps, especially their online training, practical resource documents and networking.
There has been a big demand to keep up with for briefings on the Fair Work Amendment reforms. The Fair Work Amendments extended paid time for training to many more delegates. Plus new rights like the Federal Right of Entry to workplaces require a delegate to update their training every few years, which creates a particular need for expanded training.
ATUI have offered digital badges to help delegates prove their credentials, using the Credly platform. That’s been taken up by around 20% of course attendees.
Lessons for the UK?
Whilst the Australian union movement is one of our closest parallels in the UK, there are still a lot of differences between our different legislative environments and the makeup of our movements. But there could be a lot of interesting pointers in the Australian experience when it comes to planning for and using the rights coming down the track in the government’s Make Work Pay programme to grow unions and win for workers.
On the tech side, I was particularly struck by the impact they have managed to gain through marketing automation and increased use of business analytics. These have done a lot to reduce avoidable retention problems, giving unions a more stable base to grow from, and to ensure union organising can be more strategic, making better use of resource at a time of opportunity.
I’d be really interested to hear your reflections on this, and where UK unions and the TUC could be putting in digital preparation now to make the most of new regulations as they arrive. Please do get in touch with any ideas or things you’d like to see happening through the TUC Digital Lab.
For this blog I interviewed colleagues from ACTU, Union Innovation Hub, UnionsNSW, VTHC and UWU, as well as discussions in workshops with a range of NSW and Victorian unions, and at the Union Innovation Hub’s annual CRM conference. Thanks to everyone for being generous with their time.
Header photo of attendees at the Union Innovation Hub’s annual tech conference by Kayla Chong, Union Innovation Hub