The future for unions: Reaching out into the community

By Hannah Blythyn

At last week’s TUC Congress, a number of unions, officials and delegates voiced the need for unions to build public and community consensus in opposition to the ConDem cuts and a proposed alternative. There was a feeling that in order to go forward unions not only need to build political support amongst our own members but to also reach out beyond this to local community groups, organisations and individuals.

The campaign against the cuts could provide unions with a window of opportunity to engage workplaces and communities with our labour movement values and create our own coalition of union members and Labour Party members alongside community activists.

To do this we need to widen our political emphasis from where it has traditionally focused on Westminster and Whitehall to the workplace and community hall. Yes, unions will need to continue their work with Labour MPs and to lobby the government on issues that matter to members, but there is much more we can do and ultimately achieve. We need to work to mobilise our members more at the grass roots in order to empower the activists of the future. We need to ensure union members have the training, resources and support to communicate with other members and reach out to the wider community.

So how do we meet this challenge? Firstly, we need to look at successful political campaigns and tried and (effectively) tested models of political organising – whether they be aspects of the Obama campaign; how we maximise our efforts through social media; constituency election campaigns that won against the odds; anti-fascist movements; or union industrial and political campaigns.

Under the auspices of ‘Unite4Labour’ my union Unite introduced, in the run up to this year’s general election, online phone banks that championed member to member contact in key seats across the country. In the months and weeks building up to the election, union members called up union members, not simply to find out their voting intentions but to also engage with them on the issues that mattered most to them on both a local and national level. The union worked with our members locally providing the resources and support to enable members to become activists in the campaign.

The task now is to take this forward, using both the principle and practice of the Unite4Labour campaign on a wider and more continuous basis in order to engage and involve members in industrial and political campaigns. This can then become a springboard to greater local activism and enhanced links with Constituency Labour Parties and community organisations.

At next week’s Labour Party Conference in Manchester we’re looking to take the discussion on where unions go from here one step further, with the fringe “From Westminster to the workplace: next steps for union political campaigning”. The fringe takes place in the Radisson from 5:45pm on Monday and you can get full details here. Join us to discuss how we best campaign politically both against the ConDem cuts but to also build political activism amongst union members. This is a challenge that we can and must meet.

Hannah Blythyn is a Political Officer at Unite.