How to unionise like a model, a doctor or a construction worker
How to unionise like a model, a doctor or a construction worker
Platforms and collective power
Hi! Lucy Harley-McKeown here, bringing you the latest from the New Power Review.
It starts with what sounds like a bad joke: A social media influencer, a medical doctor and a building machine operator walk into a newsletter. These three might seem like unlikely bedfellows, but they have more in common than you would think.
This issue zones in on three individuals working to make the labour market a fairer place, using collective campaigns and platforms to plug the gaps where traditional unions might have a blind spot -- or might not even exist yet.
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Medicine, activism and digital power
It’s 2015. Junior doctors in the UK are preparing to go on strike, the country is in the midst of Brexit fever ahead of the referendum, and Jeremy Hunt is the beleaguered health secretary.
The first four months of the year see doctors from all specialties in England protesting contractual changes brought in by the government. Before these strikes there had only been one other in the NHS in the last 40 years, in 2012. To use a now overused word, it is ‘unprecedented’.
Doctors felt the new contracts being imposed on juniors -- those below the level of consultant -- were unfair. A compromise deal, said to be the government’s final offer, was backed by the then chair of the junior doctors’ committee, Dr Johann Malawana, in May 2016. But he resigned in July after British Medical Association (BMA) members voted against the agreement by 58% to 42%. Malawana’s replacement, Dr Ellen McCourt, then said junior doctors have no choice but to strike, because Hunt had refused to engage in meaningful negotiations.
In this moment, away from traditional union organising, a movement of doctors was galvanised -- a Facebook group was set up, which quickly garnered tens of thousands of members. What has tended to be a rather conservative profession found a platform to air grievances, connect with others having similar issues, and make changes.
Dr Julia Patterson, co-founder of the nonprofit EveryDoctor, sees the momentum of that group as a turning point in how the profession viewed collective organising.
“It showed very quickly how doctors could link up with one another and share news, share articles about what's going on. And various projects were spearheaded off the back of that Facebook group including one that myself and another doctor started,” says Patterson.
This opened the door for EveryDoctor, which was launched officially in 2019 -- an alternative place that allowed medics to put pressure on the government regarding crucial issues facing the profession.
“It's sort of frowned upon often in the senior echelons of the NHS to speak up about things like that, and can be difficult for people,” says Patterson.
Some of EveryDoctor’s campaigns have gone on for several years and have involved high profile legal cases. The nonprofit has also worked with whistleblowers to get stories into the press about working conditions that wouldn’t otherwise have been told.
EveryDoctor showed how grassroots campaigning and doing things a bit differently to conventional union structures could make important changes that might not be otherwise possible.
Particularly during Covid, membership snowballed as medics were put on the front line of fighting the pandemic, without PPE, searched for a way to advocate for themselves and create safe working conditions. From around 500 members, numbers swelled to about 1,700; the network as a whole is much larger than this due to social media followings on twitter and facebook.
“What we've actually been finding over Covid, certainly, is that organisations such as ours are small, very responsive and able to mobilise people very quickly, are able to kind of feed into the kind of broader ecosystem of activism, and the BMA certainly is responding to that.”
The group has found a kind of symbiosis with the BMA. As EveryDoctor reacts quickly, getting voices into the media and creating campaigns, the BMA backs this up with surveys and public statements. This is an example that shows the joining of old and new unions could be a stronger catalyst for change.
F*** You, Pay Me: New industries need new unions
Some movements to combat poor or unfair working conditions start with a clear moment, such as the junior doctor strikes -- while others are catalysed by a pent up collection of injustices over time.
If you travel 5,500 miles from London to LA you’ll find freelance model Lindsey Lee, whose career began when she won a competition on the ubiquitous photo-sharing platform Instagram. This resulted in her face being plastered over billboards and fronting campaigns for Marc Jacobs. For the pleasure she was only paid $1,000. Lee then went to work in finance, where she has since built a following creating satirical content about sexism in the workplace through a blog and the handle @MsYoungProfessional. Followers and engagement snowballed and this led to brands contacting her for endorsements.
“Again, nobody wanted to pay me,” said Lee. “I lived and breathed this problem in several different areas of my life.”
Over years in the industry, Lee’s frustration grew with the lack of bargaining power content creators have. There was no open and transparent place for influencers to see what others are paid – there still is no working union for them that is able to encapsulate the complexities and power dynamics of a new kind of online economy.
Social media influencer marketing campaigns cost brands nearly $10m in 2020, according to a recent study -- so there’s some serious money to be had.
During the pandemic, Lee lost her job in finance, which pushed her to realise and co-found the platform F*** You Pay Me, or FYPM.
FYPM, launched last Autumn, bills itself as a kind of GlassDoor for social media influencers. Users submit what they have been paid among other details on different branded campaigns to a database. The goal is to give creators a way to understand whether they are being paid fairly, and a reference point before they enter into a new contract.
“There's never been a baseline, or a place where you can safely discuss this besides your own inner circle. And then even so that conversation feels invasive sometimes,” says Lee.
When asked if she was worried that she would be marked as a troublemaker for the platform, Lee says: “I've made peace with it, and I think at the end of the day, this group of labourers is much bigger and their power is crazy. Take meme stocks, for example, they have the power to disrupt the stock market.”
“So I guess I was a little nervous at first, but now that it's like, taking off, I'm hoping in a couple of years, brands will just be like, ‘Oh, this is the way it is.’ And then it'll incentivise them to behave better.”
At the moment the website is in closed Beta, meaning it’s only been distributed to a small sample of testers, but it has approved 1,500 people and rejected almost 1,200. To get in, users must contribute information and verify their identity. It has already garnered almost 2,000 reviews of brands by influencers, from global companies, to local authorities in the UK.
The platform was launched around the time of the US election, so data on what influencers were paid by political parties is also available, as is one review from Kirklee’s Council in the UK, which paid an influencer to promote the coronavirus vaccine.
“Influencing is not seen as a real job. But it really is. And I think a lot of that has to do with sexism and what we value as a society,” says Lee.
Lee wants to keep the platform free for influencers, due to the fact that similar businesses working in the space have tried to charge in the past, or take a cut of what creators earn, but she says those products end up not working well. The goal in the future is to extend the remit of FYPM to all gig economy workers.
“I really want this thing to help people, you know. I have three degrees, and I’m really f*cking smart, and I have never been financially independent. This to me is like, key to unleashing that for so many people all over the world,” says Lee.
Construction recruitment gets a regulator
From adapting fair working practices in the digital economy, to jobs that have existed for centuries, construction workers have also rallied to improve their standing in the work market through Facebook groups.
One group -- which is used primarily as a recruitment tool to help link-up employers and employees -- has, in essence, set its own minimum wage, holds employers accountable and, at the same time, has amassed tens of thousands of members.
The construction industry in the UK is propped up by contractors. Meanwhile, companies operating in the space often go bust and wind down, without good protections for the livelihoods of those employed by them. Some companies become known for doing this while others have historically been able to fly under the radar.
“The working man at the bottom often doesn't get paid -- but suppliers do. And it's almost like, companies do it on purpose,” says Kevin Walshe, a moderator of several different facebook groups for construction workers -- one of which has more than 160,000 members.
“People do chip in often say ‘that's a bad person to work for because they've done this, that and the other,’” says Walshe. “If someone is common at late paying people, people jump on the posts.”
Walshe and other moderators either don't allow posts that quote below a certain fee or, if something below average does get approved, people will criticise the recruiter in the comments. Many construction workers are not in official unions so it remains an important space to understand what the going rate is, potentially dodgy employers and your rights.
“If you try to underpay you just got annihilated in the comments, you have to delete the post,” says Walshe.
Most of the time posts in the group adhere to Facebook community guidelines, but the platform has tried to shut it down for abuse before. Walshe says 99% of the time they keep this under control, but the Wild West of a group with more than 100,000 members can be unruly.
Walshe, who has been approached by recruiters and marketing companies in the past to collaborate in running the group, doesn’t get anything out of it financially. Construction workers routinely pay recruiters in the region of £20 a month to be on their books anyway.
“None of the companies seem to benefit the group, you know, it's, it's okay to say it'd be safe to work with a recruitment company, but it would be their jobs only that were posted. All the other companies would have to go through them. I'm not not going do that. It's not what it was for, and it won't work,” says Walshe.
Walshe says the group is open to any person or company that wants to make their life easier, with posts garnering instant responses and being seen by thousands of people. He also runs a group for machinery operators, one for gas and electricity contractors, as well as one for HS2 workers, among others.
As for formalising it -- creating his own website for construction workers, or an official place to get advice -- Walshe has considered it, but believes it would be too difficult to build a consensus on what that would look like among other moderators.
“If I posted a picture of a perfectly blue sky with a cloud in the middle of it, somebody would say ‘that's not a perfect blue sky.’ And we start arguing over it, and I don't have the time. Or the energy.
“If it came across, right? If something else was done, then I'd say the word, go for it. But at the moment I don't have the capacity, the energy or the ability to.”
These are just three examples of ways in which people have used the internet to harness power and adapt to an agile and changing market.
Like all organising models, these structures have their pitfalls. The official structures of a union make it easier to take industrial action when it’s needed and provide legal protections. They also have the power of money, through monthly dues as well as institutional ties to the government.
There’s also the issue of the potential for a one-track leadership. Many official unions do things by consensus, avoiding a charismatic leader with social media cache speaking for all members without having gone to a vote.
One thing’s for sure, though, whether or not these groups of workers make it official, there is power in platforms.
Coming up in the next issue: Can an old union learn new tricks?