With continued financial support, the approach has been so successful in Edinburgh that the team have created three physical hubs in Edinburgh, Craigmillar and Falkirk.
This could be big. Unions have the numbers to make a huge impact on poverty and exploitation. Unite has trained 50 members to offer benefit support including on housing. Imagine the impact if that was replicated across the six million union members.
But cooperation isn’t easy. Frustratingly, it’s pretty unusual in the UK for unions to step outside their traditional roles and embrace community-based collaboration.
Conditions in the local textile factories in Leicester – wage theft, the ‘blue eyed boy’ system penalising workers who raise issues, lack of formal contracts – can be abusive. In one case an employee was marched to a cash point to withdraw and hand over the cash that represented the difference between the minimum wage they were paid on the books, and the lower illegal wage the employer was willing to pay them.
It was a community organisation not a union that got the stolen wages back. Traditional union organising works for stable groups of workers in defined workplaces, increasingly in the public sector.
Gig workers, whose housing and other problems can absorb the time and money that might be spent on union membership, are much more challenging to organise. Yet they have the least power and the most need of support.
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The Scottish example shows it can be done if unions and community organisations pool their strengths. And in the face of the growing power of the far right, and the hostile environment for migrants, the need for working together is becoming urgent.
Stephen Stark from the Ron Todd Foundation, sums up the challenges, saying: “Organisers face a growing threat from the far right and intensifying racism in workplaces and communities. While both unions and community groups want to challenge these forces, their efforts are often disconnected: unions organise within workplaces, community groups organise around neighbourhoods and social issues. This separation weakens collective power, leaves vulnerable workers and communities exposed, and makes it harder to sustain campaigns.”
We think this is so important that we’re making it the theme of the fourth New Organising Conference from August 28 to 30 in Liverpool: Roots and Branches – Unions and Communities in Common Struggle. Find out more here.
Carolyn Hayman OBE is a board member of the New Organising Collaborative which runs the New Organising Conference.
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