That’s a pretty ambiguous title, and I think this blog post is going to be pretty ambiguous too, but what I am trying to do is draw together some ideas that I have been thinking about over the last couple of months.
Some of these ideas I have blogged about before while others have arisen from conversations with colleagues and friends more recently. I’ve been considering the importance of participation in membership organisations, with an obvious and limited focus on teaching unions. It’s something that Howard Stevenson has discussed regularly – he’s also podcasted about it too.
The argument that Stevenson makes – and I think it’s a good one – is that increasing union membership is not enough. It’s important, but the key to both increasing the power and agency of the union and, ironically, increasing union membership – is increasing the participation of members.
This might seem strange – and it is to me, coming from the strictly top-down hierarchies present in schools – and it is part of what makes unions a little bit of an odd fit in the current industrial relations climate in Australian and around the world – but it is calling for the return to the strictly democratic roots that are part of unionism and collectivity.
That can be a bit confronting; some conversations I’ve had with people working in the union movement and political parties have suggested that the structures and organisation of these bodies is designed to limit exactly that participation; that is, membership participation is deliberately designed out. I can understand that: democracy is messy and awkward – and even more so when you have 30 000 or 100 000 people all pulling in different directions. It can lead to factionalism and schisms. I get that.
But what’s the alternative? The death of membership-based organisations like unions? It’s more complicated in the Australian setting thanks to our limited and draconian industrial relations laws which require 50% + 1 for protected industrial action. For example, when trying to organise a small primary school to take action: if there are 10 members, you need 6 to vote in favour in order for the industrial action to be lawful. In these instances, every non-vote is actually akin to a vote against industrial action. So it would be better to have 4 engaged members that would all vote than 10 members where half might not engaged and hence not vote.
So, the question for unions is no longer just ‘How do we arrest declining membership?’ It now has to be ‘How do we increase membership participation across the union?’ I think one of the key factors to consider here is the role of Organisers.