Online voting in UK trade union statutory ballots is being introduced this year, as part of the government’s broader reforms to modernise workplace rights, under the Make Work Pay agenda. This is something the TUC and unions have consistently campaigned for, over more than two decades. And union experience with indicative ballots means we have a … Continue reading Preparing the union for online statutory balloting

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We’ve just released the latest major version of the TUC’s digital healthcheck tool, version 4.01. It’s been more than five years since our last version, so we wanted to revisit it and make some changes to reflect the fast-moving world of technology. What’s different, and what’s the same? We’ve looked across the whole tool to … Continue reading TUC digital healthcheck v4 – A new version of our union benchmarking tool

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The internet is getting worse by the day. Platforms like Google, Facebook or Amazon are getting unusable – crammed with intrusive ads, user surveillance and AI slop content. Tech workers who used to add value for users are laid off to improve share prices. It’s all part of the big tech playbook to build monopolies, … Continue reading Tech unions vs enshittification

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Brian Young is the founder and director of Action Network – a progressive tech co-op that’s become a backbone for digital campaigning and organising across the US labour and progressive movements. It operates the Action Network campaign CRM internationally, and is currently about to offer its organising toolset Action Builder to Europe for the first … Continue reading Building union power in the digital age: Lessons from Action Network’s Brian Young

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Brian Young is the founder and director of Action Network – a progressive tech co-op that’s become a backbone for digital campaigning and organising across the US labour and progressive movements. It operates the Action Network campaign CRM internationally, and is currently about to offer its organising toolset Action Builder to Europe for the first … Continue reading Building union power in the digital age: Lessons from Action Network’s Brian Young

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Phishing is the most common form of cyber attack, and in the last couple of years it’s been the starting point for some of the most damaging attacks on unions. Around the world and in the UK, unions have lost millions to scams, had their members’ personal data stolen, and been locked out of their … Continue reading Video: Why and how unions should use phishing simulation

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Cyber-crime is growing year on year in the UK. At the same time trade unions’ reliance on digital technology to operate effectively raises the stakes ever higher. If our computer networks are compromised by criminals, the results could be disastrous for our ability to operate, our finances, and the trust of our members. Even with … Continue reading Email phishing simulation to keep unions safe

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Back in 2015, Microsoft launched Windows 10. It quickly became the go-to operating system for businesses and individuals alike, thanks to an improved user interface, stability and compatibility with a wide range of hardware.  But as technology moves on, so too does support. With Windows 11 having now been available for four years, Microsoft has … Continue reading Does your union still have Windows 10 PCs? Here’s what to do before Microsoft support ends 

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A year on from our first TUC Digital Lab workshop exploring how unions might make use of Artificial Intelligence, we got together again to take a deeper dive into the topic. We were joined by Hannah O’Rourke of progressive digital network Campaign Lab to look at what unions had learned in the last year about … Continue reading How are unions using AI? What should our next steps be?

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We all aspire to ground our decisions in real data where possible, giving our unions’ activities the greatest chance of success. But in reality, there are often barriers to achieving this. Unions have lots of data, but it may be trapped in systems that few people can access. Sometimes data is paper based, in files … Continue reading Data visualisation for trade unions

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Online voting in union statutory elections has been a long time coming. The TUC launched our first campaign for eballoting in 2002, and unions started using it for non-statutory elections 25 years ago this year. Today, other organisations already make widespread use of the technology – from appointing boards for mutuals and NGOs, to electing … Continue reading Online balloting moves closer for unions

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Over the past three years, Australian unions have grown by an impressive 12.3%. Growth has been across most industries and in most unions. Particular areas have been in childcare and early years, amongst casualised industrial workers, and in the gig economy. New members have skewed younger and female. These achievements come on the back of … Continue reading New rights, new tech and union growth in Australia.

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When Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) announced changes to representation arrangements for its recognised unions, it agreed to improve the information it shared with new staff in grades A – C about their recognised unions as part of their onboarding journey. The bank agreed to giving background information on the unions, with videos and direct web … Continue reading Developing a targeted union landing page for employer inductions – Accord case study

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A new practical guide from the TUC Digital Lab. Effective digital engagement is crucial for unions to recruit new members, support and retain members, or to get members to take steps towards activism. And well-designed, high-performing landing pages are an important tool for achieving these goals. In each case, you need to convince a user … Continue reading Building more effective landing pages for unions

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A case study from Join Together on how they helped NEU to redesign their online joining process, and increase completed applications by 60%.

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The value of retaining union members is obvious. Unions should always be recruiting new members, but losing them unnecessarily means you need to work even harder to grow. This TUC Digital Lab webinar launched our new guide “A six-step plan to retaining more members”. Sam Jeffers of Join Together and Guste Matuleviciute of RCM joined unions … Continue reading Video: Retaining members webinar

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Here’s a fact of union life – all members leave, one way or another. They often do it for a reason you can do nothing about. They might stop working in an industry, decide to study, emigrate, retire and so on. But others leave for avoidable reasons. They don’t think membership is worth the money, … Continue reading A six-step plan to retaining more members

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Unions have huge amounts of data to draw on in our membership records. But how do you get that data into the hands of the people in a union who need it, and how do you support them to understand how to act on it? Unlocking the membership data building up in our CRM systems … Continue reading Video: Visualising union membership data

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Generative AI tools are being introduced into workplaces across all sectors and, whether officially or informally, will be being used inside many trade unions too. Tools such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot offer potential for increases in productivity in many common tasks. But at the same time, the hype around generative AI has obscured a … Continue reading A context guide to generative AI for unions

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