The unions of Ukraine face many problems.
One of the main challenges is a decrease in membership. It’s clear that such a situation not only leads to a deterioration of the unions’ organizational and financial capacity; it also brings up the question of the unions being able to represent workers of any industry during national collective agreement negotiations. But the worst aspect of the decrease in membership is the reduction of opportunities to influence processes at the sectorial level and solve problems at the national level. The main part of my professional life is my work in the Ukrainian building workers’ union. Recruitment of members is designated as a priority in our union’s program for 2006-2010.
A bit more than one year ago, a new project recruiting construction and building-materials industry workers started. The project is developing and progressing now, and in June 2008 the union’s central committee took a special decision adopting a policy which supports the current efforts and outlines further directions for the work of organizing. We think we’re in the very beginning, but I want to share with you our vision of the problem, our plans and small successes. Organizing in our opinion is not only recruiting members, although it’s considered as the first final result.
We see organising as an approach, as a tool to involve people in the protection of their rights. Thus, we then wait for the second final result – people working together to solve their specific problems. Ukrainian workers in the construction sector encounter many problems in labour relations. Among them are salary delays and overtime work, health and safety issues and many others. Workers approaching employers individually concerning the above-mentioned problems or about living up to requirements will more likely lead to worker dismissal instead of the problem being resolved or the requirement being met.
Such essential problems (target problems) are an area for our organizers. We use target problems to draw the attention of workers to the opportunity of the collective way to satisfy requirements, that is, by acting together as a union.
Frankly speaking, showing an “egoistic” worker how his or her “target problem” can be met by the union is a much shorter route to convincing him or her about the importance of union membership (the I-NEED-A-UNION pattern) than convincing him or her about solidarity and the increased benefits that come from participation in a union (the-UNION-NEEDS-ME pattern).
Organizing is a unique work activity. In our union, we don’t have a special department that deals with organizing questions. And this means that our organizing work is less efficient. We believe that such a specific job needs to be done by professionals. But we have found a solution for the first part of the process: we involve youth, who then become a main part of the “organizing machine”. Why? Youth are the part of the union who are the most active and who are the most open to new ideas about union development. We are – I say we because I have already worked with youth issues for many years – the first in the organization who mostly act and not just talk when something is decided as a priority.
And here I’ll describe how we see and practice organizing. In our organizing activities we use campaigning. All of us know that campaigns are concerted efforts to solve concrete problems and gain planned results within the constraints of limited time as well as limited human and material resources. All the rules of campaigning are followed in our organizing activities. Due to limited space, I’d like to mention just the basics of our opinion concerning organizing methodology – communication with workers. Whether the union is strong, rich and powerful or not, an organizing campaign will not succeed without communication with workers. We work by the principle of “organize at the workplace” in Ukraine. That means we recruit people in the context of their places of work. Their target problems are there.
One of our main tasks during organizing campaigns is to talk to every man or woman at the enterprise. Methods may differ: conversation at the work site before or after shifts, or phone calls and even home visits. We believe it is necessary to compile a detailed workers’ “map” at the workplace. For a successful organizing campaign, it’s vital to know who minds the target problems and how. We have to know the workers’ attitudes to the union and to their comrades at work and, finally, to their job. Before the next active phase of an organizing campaign, we must be very certain in deciding who will act during our activities, and how they will act.
The final stage of an organizing campaign is action, which is intended to target problem resolution and (as a result) to recruit new members. I will not talk a lot about organizing tactics. Actions are the best way to make known the union’s possibilities and capicity to solve specific problems that workers face. I’ll just describe one recent action that we used as a basis for an organizing campaign and member recruitment. One of the biggest factories of the former USSR sanitary facilities is in the western part of Ukraine. Since privatization, in this facility a “yellow” union came about, and of course it was created with the support and will of the director. By January 2008, the yellow union united half of the factory workers.
At the end of 2007, the owner refused to pay the premium salary that was adopted by collective agreement. That exasperated workers very much. And our union has chosen this problem as a target problem. The campaign was planned for five months. We used different tactics: court cases, PR-campaigns, rallies in front of employer and local government offices and a pre-strike procedure. As a result, our union signed an agreement concerning payments for every worker – members and non-members. After the campaign, for five months we organized about 500 workers who had before participated in the yellow union.
In the framework of this and several other organizing campaigns that we managed in 2007-2008, we realized there was a great vacuum of knowledge, skills and qualified organizers. I repeat once again that organizing is a systematic work. It demands no less effort than that required, for example, by collective bargaining. People who not only believe in union values but also have special experience are necessary for successful organizing. Such experience comes from training and work in the field. That’s why further efforts for the organizing chain are needed. I think that it’s not an exaggeration to say that we need the ITUC’s support in this process. Special qualified training and work-in-the-field oriented projects – that’s what our organization needs. There are already effective examples of different GUFs organizing work at the local level.
In our region we receive a big inspiration from IUF practices. This GUF builds a powerful organizing chain in post-Soviet space. And they achieve victory over such international giants as Coca-Cola and Nestle, which are very negative to unions at their plants in the former USSR. We know about the huge work that our North American colleagues do even in conditions of sharp antiunion legislation. And we see what they gain from the development of organizations as a result of organizing policy. Many American unionists are highly qualified experts in this.
Summing up, I would like to say that all of us who are representatives of many unions around the world understand the importance of organizing to achieve change and to strengthen our movement. We move forward with decisive steps and see clearly the final goal of our route!
That will help us! That will make us stronger!
