TUC Digital Lab

Discover, define, develop: A model for designing for change in unions

Last year, we launched a new module in the TUC’s leadership development programme, Leading Change. It expands our long running course to also look at how digital can support (and challenge) senior union officers in managing change in their areas of work.

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.

Delivering for “different” in 2021

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.

Improving your video call presence – a how to guide

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.

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.

Congress 2020: Our first online Congress

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.

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.

4 things we learned from running Organise 2020

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.