Organising strategy

The branch’s 2019 organising strategy was agreed at our Annual General Meeting on 26 february.

It outlines Bootle Taxes Branch’s key organising objectives for the coming year, as we strive to keep building our strength with both in-house and outsourced workers.

It is vital that the final agreed plan is put in to action throughout the branch. Support for reps will be available to help put the strategy into practice.

Read the strategy below or download as a PDF here.

FOREWORD

Bootle Taxes Branch is one of the best organised branches in PCS. That’s been true for a long time, but it’s not a static thing nor something we can be complacent about.

The environment we’re organising in as we enter 2019 is very different than 2009, let alone the decades prior to that. We face more restrictions than ever on our activities, we have a younger and more diverse workforce with a much higher turnover than ten years ago, and even how we do our jobs has changed dramatically in that time. The change we’ve seen has necessitated a change in how we do things.

Not everything we need to do to organise better is new. Some of it is; the union movement has a long way to go to be fully representative of its membership, something we can see at a glance when we have two thirds female membership but an majority of male reps. But we also have to embrace strategies and tactics which are as old as the movement, but which we lost as we got too comfortable in a far less hostile environment.

Organising isn’t just about recruitment, nor about mobilising members when we call a strike or a protest. It is about building up the confidence and capacity of workers to take collective action in order to stand up for themselves and each other, and using that to shift the balance of power in the workplace.

To do that, we can’t carry on as we have before. There’s a lot of work to be done, much of which is ongoing. This strategy builds upon the existing work and previous strategies in order to hopefully equip us to make Bootle Taxes far stronger than it is now.

Phil Dickens
Branch Organiser

NATIONAL STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES

The national union has agreed a series of national strategic objectives that it wants to achieve by 2020.

The national objectives are:

Building our organising strength

1. We will have 10,000 union Advocates by 2020.
2. There will be one or more PCS representative or Advocate in every workplace, representing the diversity of our members and encouraging members from underrepresented sections of the membership to take an active role in the union.
3. Separate branch BEC positions will be filled by individual members.
   95% of members, and 100% of reps and Advocates will have up-to-date personal contact information stored on the PCS database.
4. Distribution networks (the way that we get union materials and messages directly to members) in workplaces will be reliable and efficient and in place for all branches and groups
5. We will have training and support packages in place for reps and for members wishing to become active in the union.

Growing our membership base

1. Grow the union by 10% to 200,000 members by 2020. This will be done by:
   1. recruiting new members to the union at a rate of one new member per month for every 100 existing members by the end of 2018; one new member per month for every 80 existing members by the end of 2019; one new member per month for every existing 70 members by the end of 2020.
   2. Every branch and every workplace to have density levels above 50% by 2020.
2. Build a Fighting Fund of £2 million by 2020 by ensuring the majority of members are making small contributions to the Fighting Fund by 2020
3. Members from underrepresented sections of the membership (young, black, disabled members, LGBT and women) will be represented at branch, group, regional and national level proportionate to the make-up of the union’s membership.

Winning on the issues that matter to our members

1. Break the government’s public sector pay cap
2. Demand pay rises of 5% or better for all members
3. National agreements on job security for all members
4. National bargaining for the civil service
5. Properly funded and resourced public services
6. Identifying, campaigning and winning on local issues
7. Fair and equal treatment in the workplace.

BUILDING > GROWING > WINNING

These objectives are unpinned by a consensus that we can only win on industrial issues if we build our union and grow our membership. This can be neatly summarised as; building, growing and winning.

Building > Growing > Winning stems from our organising principles and is a cycle of union organisation, connecting basic union building with: member participation, recruitment, hard bargaining and winning.

Building > Growing > Winning is not a step by step process, where one element follows on from another.

However, winning consistently on the big issues that matter to our members demands that we constantly recruit new activists and members to our union.

Building > Growing > Winning is a process that is repeated and refined, at every level of the union.

We systematically test the strength of our membership at various points and in various workplaces, testing the support that members have for their union on a particular issue.

Tests of the strength of our membership might start small, and could include: signing petitions, getting members and non-members to meetings, asking all members to wear a badge or sticker on a particular day and at a particular time, organising pay day protests, asking all members to take part in a particular activity.

OVERVIEW OF BRANCH OBJECTIVES

The Bootle Taxes Branch Organising Strategy for 2019 is based upon the national strategic objectives and upon how far we got against the objectives we set ourselves in 2018. We are a strongly organised branch, and we achieved most of what we committed ourselves to in the past year, however there are still some gaps to be filled and other elements that we can always improve upon.

The objectives listed below stand in addition to the national objectives and are specific to our branch.

Building our organising strength

1. We will have at least one rep for every business stream, including the currently un-represented areas – Customer Strategy & Tax Design, Debt Management, Estates and Operational Excellence.
2. Every rep will maintain an up-to-date map of their local work area.
3. We will build up our equality structures in order to actively encourage members from underrepresented sections of the membership to take an active role in the branch.
4. More reps will be encouraged to take up more senior roles in the branch.
5. We will plug the gaps in our distribution networks so that all union communications go to all members who they are relevant to.
6. We will identify skills gaps in the branch and ensure that reps are put on the training that they need.

Growing our membership base

1. Each workplace in the branch will build its density to over 80%.
2. We will establish a membership presence amongst all the sections of outsourced workers in the branch.
3. We will ensure members who are from underrepresented sections of the membership and/or have protected characteristics (young, black, disabled members, LGBT and women) have a voice in the branch.

Winning on the issues that matter to our members

1. Ensuring we can deliver a high turnout in any ballot that the union runs.
2. Taking on the punitive, draconian attendance management system.
3. Defending and improving terms and conditions for all members.
4. Building a collective response to individual issues.
5. Demanding the Living Wage and improved conditions for outsourced members.
6. Identifying, campaigning and winning on issues at a team, workplace and branch level.

PUTTING THE STRATEGY INTO ACTION

It’s all well and good having objectives that we want to reach, but the important question is: how?

The Fundamentals

Ultimately, all of the organising that we do as a branch will come back to the basic, tried and tested fundamentals of organising.

This means mapping out the workplace; knowing where the workers are and who they are, who is and isn’t a member and what social dynamics operate in the workplace in order to identify the best approach. It means one-on-one organising conversations; where we identify the issues important to the worker and get them to take an action in support of the union that they might not have otherwise. It means identifying leaders; those with influence over their fellow workers on their team or in their social grouping, which could be put to use in support of the union. Most importantly, it means taking collective action; where workers don’t look to the union to help them, but realise they are the union and tackle the issue directly.

These ideas are the bread and butter of trade union organising. Through them, we can not only build the size of the membership but also members’ confidence to stand up for themselves together. From there we shift the balance of power in the workplace, which means we improve the odds of winning.

Active / engaged membership

Objectives

• We will have at least one rep for every business stream, including the currently un-represented areas – Customer Strategy & Tax Design, Debt Management, Estates and Operational Excellence.
• More reps will be encouraged to take up more senior roles in the branch.

Strategy

Finding and encouraging potential reps where we currently lack them comes under the heading of identifying leaders. The key point is that putting out an email at election time may not be enough, and we will have to have direct conversations which include an ‘ask’ – getting somebody to commit to getting involved face-to-face. This will be an ongoing process as some gaps will be more difficult to fill than others and some will emerge with turnover of reps. In either case, we have to be actively seeking new reps rather than simply waiting for them to appear.

As for encouraging reps to stand for more senior positions, this will require reps already in those positions to replace themselves. Not necessarily stepping aside for the sake of it, but ensuring that they share their experience and knowledge with others, and also seeking to train their replacements when they recognise the need to either because they are moving on or because it becomes appropriate to pass the baton. We will be in the strongest position when because of the sharing of knowledge no rep is irreplaceable.

Equality

Objectives

• We will build up our equality structures in order to actively encourage members from underrepresented sections of the membership to take an active role in the branch.
• We will ensure members who are from underrepresented sections of the membership and/or have protected characteristics (young, black, disabled members, LGBT and women) have a voice in the branch.

Strategy

We could hope that the process of identifying new leaders and replacing ourselves makes the branch more representative on its own. However, we know this is unlikely.

Actively identifying shortfalls in representation doesn’t mean tokenism or picking somebody just because of their identity. It means actively working to identify issues related to equality that we can organise around, which in turn can draw new layers of activists in. It also means looking critically at the branch structures to ensure there’s a place for new people to come in and that there are no barriers to the rep base diversifying.

Communication

Objectives

• We will plug the gaps in our distribution networks so that all union communications go to all members who they are relevant to.

Strategy

Our internal email lists are mostly up-to-date and are looked at regularly. 80% of members are signed up to receive emails externally. We also manage to cover most members coming into and out of work when having to leaflet outside. One of the main gaps is when we desk drop materials.

We need to identify which areas don’t receive desk drops, and why, so we can fix that. We also need conversations with those who’ve not yet registered external contact details so we can reach them outside of work systems. There is also work to be done to build a wider group than we currently have of those willing to hand out materials in their own time so that we get the widest possible coverage when leafleting.

Building workplace power

Objectives

• Every rep will maintain an up-to-date map of their local work area.
• Each workplace in the branch will build its density to over 80%.
• Ensuring we can deliver a high turnout in any ballot that the union runs.
• Taking on the punitive, draconian attendance management system.
• Defending and improving terms and conditions for all members.
• Building a collective response to individual issues.
• Identifying, campaigning and winning on issues at a team, workplace and branch level.

Strategy

Building workplace power comes back to the fundamentals of organising. We need to push to a point where every section of the branch is mapped and that map is regularly updated, not only allowing us to identify who moves into and out of each area and to recruit, but to identify issues we can organise and take action around.

This work will in turn strengthen our hand in larger campaigns, but it starts with us being able to take collective action at a very low level. Workers on a team banding together to take on bullying, rather than relying on an individualised grievance process that is biased in favour of the employer, is the first step towards being able to challenge dismissals with industrial action as the RMT do.

Our strategy has to start from getting all reps confident enough to organise with the workers around them. To pick winnable battles and win them in ways that empower members rather than relying upon the reps to act for them. And from those victories to escalate their activity and draw more members in to future, possibly larger battles.

Education

Objectives

• We will identify skills gaps in the branch and ensure that reps are put on the training that they need.

Strategy

We are in a strong position in that reps are generally able to get their basic, stage one training. However, it is more difficult due to facility time pressures to get reps more advanced training, particularly at diploma level. This means the number of reps with this training is limited, and will reduce over time as reps retire or move on.

To address this, we need to analyse what the gaps are, and from there work to fill them. This will involve some shifting of priorities, but it will hopefully make the branch as a whole better equipped to deal with more complex issues even in the absence of the existing experienced reps.

Outsourced Workers

Objectives

• We will establish a membership presence amongst all the sections of outsourced workers in the branch.
• Demanding the Living Wage and improved conditions for outsourced members.

Strategy

We already have 100% membership amongst the cleaning staff employed by ISS. There is work to be done to bring other outsourced workers on board.

Part of this will be leading by example, with the ISS members kicking off a campaign for better pay and conditions. The other part will be about organising conversations with the other groups of workers.

Broadly, this will mean asking them to fight for the living wage and better conditions. From there, the decision to join the union and be balloted can be taken collectively and they can stand alongside the ISS workers. An expanding campaign will in turn boost confidence and make it easier to draw in more workers in this way.