The missing half million

Understanding the lives, attitudes and needs of young workers is essential to designing an offer that appeals to them. This research and pilot offers important insights for union recruitment and organising strategies.

Overall recommendation – there is value in unions taking a different approach

A key discovery was that simply informing young workers about the existing trade union offer is insufficient. That means trade unions must look at and reshape the offer of trade unionism itself to meet young workers’ needs and expectations, if they want to recruit young workers. Merely re-presenting the same offer through modern communications methods is not enough to recruit young workers at scale.

It is not appropriate to present an offer to young workers based on structures that have not changed substantially in decades – that will not induce them to join. Nor will offering services that are not relevant to this group, such as home insurance or will-writing. 

Unions should consider: 

• how they support workers, the offer and joining journey in unrecognised workplaces – which is where most young workers work
• whether they can make an individualised offer upfront, as a way of bringing younger workers into the movement – and then take young workers on a journey towards collectivism
• whether new members could get instant access to support on joining. There needs to be a consistent approach across the movement to providing support and representation to young workers at the point where they realise they need us. Some unions already offer instant support to staff in companies that are organising priorities. Young workers could be seen as a priority organising target in the same way. Of course, unions can’t be sustainable if members then leave immediately after benefiting from advice and support. But there are innovative mechanisms that could protect unions from this – e.g. members who receive advice within their first three months could repay the cost if they leave within a year.
• forms of portable membership. Young members change jobs much more frequently and we lose a lot of people when they move to workplaces with a different recognition agreement.

WorkSmart and other new products 

• Develop the learning and skills aspect of Worksmart. The TUC will seek external funding to take this forward and to grow Worksmart’s user base.
• Unions should explore the routes we didn’t take in this project, to develop other products to reach young workers. These could include looking at additional ways to support young workers with job progression, providing immediate solutions to make everyday life easier, bringing groups together with positive shared goals or through shared identities.
• It could be beneficial to introduce young workers to trade unionism before introducing a specific union. For those who are already close to joining, the choice can feel confusing. For those who are furthest from unions, there is a longer conceptual journey. It would be more efficient to support this group towards unions together as a movement rather than duplicating effort. Unions could then take responsibility for those working in target industries and employers. WorkSmart is one way to achieve a pre-union journey, but there could be other ways for unions to come together to allocate their recruitment effort more effectively. 
• Think about the role of reps. Reps need to see recruiting and developing young members as part of their job. With such pressures on their time, it’s understandable if this falls down the list but face-to-face contact is important alongside digital recruitment. And it’s critical to find the next generation of workplace leaders while they can still benefit from the experience of older reps. Unions and the TUC should prioritise how they support reps practically and structurally to ensure they have the time to carry out this vital job, e.g. developing resources to support reps in understanding young workers, their aspirations and ambitions, as well as the barriers to union organising.

Union working practices

Unions need to think about how they change their working practices to have a chance of developing successful projects and products to recruit more young workers. Unions should: 

• Think more specifically about your target group and let them guide you. ‘Young workers’ is too broad to be a useful target audience, which is why we developed a narrower audience – young core workers. Developing an offer will be more successful if the starting point is the needs of the group a union is trying to reach. And if we test concepts with real users and are honest about the results, going with what is shown to be working, then new offers stand a much greater chance of adoption. 
• Listen to the kind of young workers you want to reach before expecting them to listen to you. The young workers who are already part of our existing structures are not typical, so we need mechanisms to hear from non-members.
• Think about how your union tackles the barriers to collective bargaining set out in this paper. 
• Younger audiences have higher base line expectations of digital. We need to change to meet these expectations – in the experience of joining, in communications from unions and in organising and campaigning approaches.
  • We should use the most appropriate digital or offline methods in each case. 
  • Where digital is to be used, it should be from a ‘digital first’ approach – designed with digital in mind from the beginning rather than as an afterthought.
• Innovate: unions have to create a space and capacity outside business as usual to experiment, trial and test – and not to worry if it fails. This will be a challenge to union organisational culture and will need a degree of decentralisation, giving decision-making authority to those running the experiment. Alternatively, unions could create a ‘walled garden’, where a team can build its own culture. This can be a good starting point before the organisation is ready for more radical change.
• Share information with the rest of the movement: we all have an interest in building union membership across all sectors. Unions should be open about what’s working for them and what isn’t. And the TUC should play a leadership role in building skills, knowledge and sharing information – such as through the TUC Digital Lab. 

Getting to grips with the challenge we face – and what it will take to overcome it – is daunting. Not everything we try will work, but the cost of not trying new things is too great: unions will fall further and further out of step with workers, ultimately terminally losing relevance. And the potential gain is equally great – a revitalised and growing, modern movement.

Communications

Unions too often fall into the trap of believing that if only they communicated better with young workers, young workers would start joining in numbers again. Our research suggests that this is false – that greater action than merely refreshing how we communicate with young workers is needed. But this project did offer some insights into how to better communicate young workers, which may be useful as unions take the actions above. 

• Use the visual style that appeals to this group when targeting them, rather than what we think appeals. This typically means clean, modern design.
• Go to young workers, don’t expect them to come to you. That means talking about the issues that matter to young workers, in language that resonates with them, in the spaces where they already are or on platforms designed for them. 
• Employers treat young workers as if they aren’t serious about work, as if they’re unreliable and not worth investing in. We mustn’t make the same mistake. When talking to younger workers we can recognise that they’re serious about work by talking about workplace issues, rather than feeling we have to draw them in with something less substantive.

Further reading

• Living for the weekend? Understanding Britain’s young core workers
•  “I feel like I can’t change anything” Britain’s young core workers speak out about work
• Innovation from all angles – how charities can use innovation to improve