As the new year begins, trade unions are continuing to do their utmost to support workers in the face of wide-ranging challenges arising from the pandemic.
Workers are also facing huge pressures to make ends meet and to improve their job prospects, including boosting their skills.
New research findings from a unionlearn survey of reps highlights how unions are making a real difference on this front by supporting workplace learning and training in very challenging times. Some of the key findings from the survey include evidence of:
- huge pressures on union learning reps (ULRs) and other reps in the face of Covid-related priorities and other factors (e.g. closure of the Union Learning Fund)
- resilience and innovation by reps to sustain union learning activities during the pandemic, including through the expansion of online/digital learning and other ground-breaking approaches
- increasing diversity in the population of union reps supporting learning with significant increases in the proportion of women and BME reps.
The unionlearn survey
Unionlearn has regularly surveyed ULRs about their activities and support for workplace learning. In recent years these surveys have been broadened out to other reps in order to encompass all union initiatives promoting learning and training.
The 2021 survey included new questions related to the impact of the pandemic and it also repeated the majority of the questions in the latest two surveys conducted in 2017 and 2014. It is worth noting that the 2021 survey sample size (1,278 respondents) was significantly larger than either the 2017 survey (962 respondents) or the 2014 survey (880 respondents).
Impact of the pandemic and other barriers
The responses from ULRs and union reps highlighted the overwhelming impact of Covid-19 on their day-to-day support for union learning. Over three fifths said that they had been at home for significant periods of time during the pandemic because they were working from home (55%) or they were on furlough (7%). Half of these reps said these circumstances adversely impacted on their union learning activities.
Many reps were also working round the clock to prioritise health and safety and related challenges triggered by the pandemic, including the increasing number of workers reporting issues relating to their mental health and workplace stress. There were also examples given of reduced demand from workers for any kind of learning due to an understandable focus on concerns about their health and safety, employment security and other Covid-related matters.
While no specific questions were asked about this, many reps pointed out that union-led learning and training had been destabilised by the closure of the Union Learning Fund.
Sustaining union learning in challenging times
What is remarkable is the degree to which union learning activities and their impact were sustained on a number of fronts during the pandemic, in particular through a rapid expansion of online/digital learning and other innovative approaches. Half of those reps working from home or on furlough said that they had been either equally effective (41%) or more effective (9%) in delivering support for union-led learning and training than before the pandemic. There was also evidence that the union learning offer was being taken up by many people working from home or on furlough and that virtual learning was key to this.
There were many references to a rapid take-up of online video and communication software, such as Teams and Zoom, to deliver learning and training and to facilitate networking for reps (e.g. ULR forums). Expanded use of these and other software packages by employers during the pandemic also created a demand for training that unions were doing much to support. In addition, there were extensive references to the benefits from unions and their reps expanding access to webinars and a wide variety of other e-learning resources.
Nearly 9 out of 10 reps (87%) said that their activities continued to raise awareness of learning among the workforce and 73% said they were directly supporting colleagues who had little or no experience of training. Seventy-one per cent of reps said that, as a result, they were increasing interest in union membership among non-members during the pandemic.
Nearly 9 out of 10 (89%) said that work colleagues were supportive of their ULR/union rep role. Over four fifths of reps said they were happy with the level of support provided by their individual union (82%) and by unionlearn (83%).
Changes in the population of reps supporting learning
Over half (51%) of the respondents to the survey were women. This is the first time that women have outnumbered men in the unionlearn survey series and it is a significant increase on the previous peak of 46% reported in the 2017 survey. This suggests that learning and skills is an increasingly powerful means of attracting more women to become actively involved in union activities in the workplace
The proportion of reps from BME groups has also increased, up from 9.8% of survey respondents in 2017 to 13.4% in 2021. This is a welcome trend and means that union reps supporting learning and training are now more representative of BME groups in the labour market.
More information
The findings from the survey are available in a summary report and a more detailed research findings report available on the unionlearn website. We anticipate that the survey findings will inform the debate at the forthcoming unionlearn annual conference, New Opportunities for Union Learning.