Introduction to Core Materials

This preparatory section begins with materials that will help you to collectively analyse your situation, set goals, and prepare your team to work together effectively and inclusively.

Each union and each situation is unique and changing. You will need to review the materials below and decide which of these core materials are applicable to your situation.

Once you are familiar with these core materials you will be able to apply them to Organisational Transformation, Campaigning and Organising ,Collective Bargaining , or Advocacy work.

If you need an overall work plan for the union or if it is not yet clear where the union needs to begin its work, the section below on strategic action planning will help the union collectively focus and decide how to proceed.

Pay particular attention to ensuring that your analysis and planning processes consider the voices and needs of all workers, including women workers and workers from traditionally underrepresented groups.

If you are not familiar enough yet with the base of workers, their problems and needs, you may want to begin with the Participatory Action Research process.

Analysis

Analysing your situation collectively will help ground the union’s work and develop the capabilities necessary to build union power. This process should reflect the diversity of the workforce and ensure that all voices—particularly those of women, gender-diverse individuals, and other underrepresented groups—are included and valued.

The analysis work should be planned and carried out collectively, with attention to fostering an inclusive environment where all members feel empowered to contribute.

Analysis should not be done for the sake of analysis only, but as a critical step in bringing about action. Choose which of the materials listed below will fit your situation.

Which of these tools might you utilise to help collectively analyse your work before you begin?

Analysing the union’s power resources gives you a series of guiding questions that will help you understand and discuss your current and potential associational, structural, institutional and societal power resources that workers can draw from. The discussion will create a shared and collective understanding of the power resources for your specific situation.

Participatory Action Research(PAR) will help you create worker research teams that will perform one-to-one, personal surveys of workers and analyse the results. Also known as horizontal mapping, PAR is a way to link collectively driven research about workers and working conditions to campaigning and organising. The union gains information and connections to the workers’ living and working conditions and the workers gain a sense of collective interest and an increased ability and desire to take action. PAR is also particularly helpful when working with underrepresented groups such as women, youth, religious minorities, and informal workers.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your union – things that you have some control over and can change. Opportunities and threats are external — things that are going on outside your union. A SWOT analysis organises your top strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats into a prioritised list.

Setting Goals

This section contains tools that will help you collectively set goals. This will help develop a collective consensus around clear, realistic and measurable goals that are framed in a manner to build workers power.

Which of these tools might you utilise to set collective goals for your work? You will likely need to use all of them, particularly the materials on Problems to Goals

Problems to Goals. A recommended way to collectively set goals is to first define and prioritise the key worker and union problems, and formulate the goals based on those problems. Then adjust the goals to make sure they are specific, measurable and realistic. We need goals in order to help us focus, to know when we have succeeded. Goals can help us to ground our union work in the daily problems that workers and the unions face. We need both smaller, potentially realisable goals, and larger goals with a long-term vision.

Benchmarks are specific measurements of the levels of worker involvement that we need to achieve. For example, benchmarks might be used in an organising campaign to determine the required percentage of workers willing to commit to publicly confronting their boss, before we take action. If you are working to improve the union by increasing the level of involvement of women in the union, you might start by setting a benchmark of a specific number of women with which you will have one-on-one conversations before you begin your work. Benchmarks are particularly important if you are organising workers who will face apathy, violence or intense pressure.

Mandates are collectively agreed upon instructions and parameters from workers for union leaders to follow. Any changes to the collective mandate must be taken back through the collective decision-making process. You will review your goals and benchmarks and determine whether any of them should be mandates.

Working Collectively

Working as a collective will help spread the work around, develop leaders and increase the commitment and ownership of the action plans for all participants. The more you plan and act collectively, the more you will be building worker power.

Which of these tools might help you work collectively?

Arbolitos are small communication networks with one worker communicating to no more than 5-7 others. Arbolitos mean little trees in Spanish, which helps us remember that these networks need a lot of gardening and patience.

CommitteesWithin the framework of overall union decision-making structures, organising or working committees make daily or weekly decisions about strategy and work plans. They are made up of the people who do the most work on your campaign or issue. These materials will help you work out who to include and how to make collective decisions.

Calendars and Commitments help you create a working calendar and make collective commitments as to who is doing what tasks by when.

Evaluationsare critical to helping you monitor, adjust and change your work. Often things work out better or worse than expected and adjustments need to be made.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning helps us collectively analyse our union, define how we would want the union to be and what changes are needed. It can be part of an overall plan for the entire union, or it can focus in on specific area where attention is needed.

You will need to decide which of the materials will be most useful to you. For example, if you know that the union is committed to organising a group of informal workers, you might want to review the sections on Campaigning and Organising and Crossing the Divides. If the informal workers are female racialised migrant workers, you may also want to work with the materials on Women and Gender Equality and Racism and Decolonisation.

If the union is unsure whether it wants to begin organising informal workers, a strategic action plan may be the place to start, but you will also want to include the materials on “Crossing the Divide – Informal Workers”.

Some unions use an annual or biannual strategic planning process to create a space and culture in the union that allows for collective review of the union’s work on a regular basis.

Would the union benefit from a strategic planning process?

How can you integrate underrepresented groups and women in your strategic planning process?

If yes, would the strategic planning process cover an overall plan for the union or a specific area of the union?