TUC Digital Lab

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.

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.

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. 

Lots of us have had digital transformation thrust upon us by the coronavirus pandemic, having to switch up our time-honoured ways of working with little notice. Over the last few months, we have had to transition the TUC’s Executive Committee and General Council meetings online.

Using these meetings as a case study, we’ve learned a few things about how to support governance while going through (sudden, unexpected!) digital transformation.

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.

We’ve just released the latest version of our digital healthcheck tool, with the latest major release (version 3) seeing a significant revision. It has been more than two years since the last version and so these latest changes have been needed to reflect the fast-moving world of technology.

Before the coronavirus crisis, video conferencing was something only a few people used regularly for work. With many more working from home now, it’s suddenly become their main connection with colleagues and their outside world.

At the NEU, we have been developing our use of digital channels in our response to the coronavirus crisis.

This has been a difficult time for our members, with schools mostly closed, new ways of working for teaching staff and great uncertainty for the future. It has also brought profound changes for the union and our ability to support members and activists.

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.