Making Your Voice Heard –

Some Strategies and Secrets

Women’s Voices – Is the Trade Union Movement Listening?

August 2012

Bride Rosney

• Teacher, Researcher in Education, Vice-Principal, Principal, Union Activist

• Special Adviser – Ireland and UN

• Private sector

• Director of Communications, RTÉ

Making Your Voice Heard

• Your voice – Women’s voices or members voices?

• Members Issues Women’s Issues Children Reproductive rights

Health FGM

Bullying Gender selection

Domestic violence Trafficking

Maternity Child Marriage

Global Situation

Women:

• perform 66% of the world’s work

• produce 50% of the food

• earn 10% of the income

• own 1% percent of the property

www.unifem.org

Women in Teacher Unions

Education International (EI) – biennial conference and Quadrennial Report on the Status of Women in Unions, Education and Society

• 2010 Report - women between 50% and 80% membership, global average 59% in 2010 (63% in 2001)

• Conference attendees: 47% (50%)• On Executive Boards: 39% (25%)• In leadership posts: 36% (20%)

Women in Teacher Unions Leadership

Women are strongly underrepresented in the front line:• Presidents: 24%• General Secretaries: 34%• Vice-presidents: 48%• Deputy General Secretaries: 42%

All under 50% and far lower than their proportion in the membership and this despite mechanisms for gender equality in vast majority of education unions.

Big gap between stated commitments / policy goals and their implementation

Accountability

UNIFEM report “Progress of the World’s Women 2008/09”

• Focuses on the issue of accountability and asks “Who Answers to Women?”

• Accountability systems that work for women contain two essential elements: – include women as participants in those systems – make the advancement of gender equality and

women’s rights one of the standards against which the performance of officials is assessed.

Making Your Voice Heard

• Simple – COMMUNICATE

• Communicate – SIMPLY

• Communication is always a two-way process

Usually we want to make our voices heard to exert influence

Power and Ability to Influence

• Power – is not leadership, can interact with it – comes from (a) position, (b) expertise and/or

(c) personal– should be seen/used as a resource

• Ability to influence is a personal skill and essential part of the leadership process

• Power and ability to influence may be mutually supportive.

Three Key Pointsto making your voice heard i.e. to communicating

• Message

• Target (Audience)

• Medium

Words that Work: It’s not what you say, It’s what people hear

Frank Luntz

• Usually positive language encourages positive action / mindset

• Community Charge – opposition called it the Poll Tax

• Martin Luther King

Message - KISS

• Cliché is true - keep it short and simple; avoid jargon

• Orwell said ‘never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you think of an everyday English equivalent.’

• Never as true as it is now; Twitter 140 characters - effectively sound bites

• Huge challenge of message not being corrupted

Message – WORD CLOUD

• The size of each word represents the frequency it was used in a speech, debate etc.

• Wordle – anyone can use it.• Over a fortnight in Spring 2011 Unions21 did a

word cloud based on all the press releases issued by five of the largest UK unions –

Unite, Unison, RMT (Rail Maritime and Transport), PCS (Public and Commercial Services) and NUT (National Union of Teachers)

The following cloud shows the number of times words used in articles featuring unions in the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Sun and Mirror over the same period

Message – CONTROL OF USE

Word Cloud equally applies to articles, notices, spoken word etc

• BUT usage does not equate to pick up

• What pre-conditioning exists?

• Lack of expertise – e.g. in media loss of specialised correspondents

AUDIENCE

Must identify so as to specifically target• Needs to know• Wants to know• Should know• You want to know• You want to disseminate

Where available use audience research

AUDIENCE cont./

• Relevance – to them or to you? Unless interested or made interested won’t pay attention

• Timeliness – as much in advance as appropriate (not as possible!)

• May have a primary audience which is a potential barrier to the main target

• Target the targeting

MEDIUM

• Combine message and target audience to seek appropriate medium

• Most appropriate medium will communicate message:– with the greatest accuracy – to the right audience – optimizing resources, financial and personnel

If the only tool you have is a hammer you treat everything as if it was a nail

Medium – HIGH LEVEL CONTROL

• Paper-based: article, memo, letter, notice

• Meetings: personal one-to-one or one-to many: face-to-face presentation, seminar(phone presentation)

• Digitally: plain text email, text + graphics email, voice mails, webpage, webcast/webvideo, broadcast, television broadcast, cd-rom/dvd

Medium – LOW LEVEL CONTROL

• Press release

EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

• Communicate or die – demands a move to social media

• Do a social media audit to identify the most highly networked colleagues / members

• Involve them in communications

• Well crafted online activity can be used to build support (and membership)

Report of the Commission on the Irish Trade Union Movement

• A Call to Action July 2011• Immediate objective was to build processes to bring

unions together to define and begin the process of change

• Recommendation 9.8: Building on the work of the Communications Group, Congress should finalise a strategic communications policy to address the scale of activity required to connect with union members, unorganised workers and civil society generally

• One year later?

Report of the Commission on the Irish Trade Union Movement cont./

Recommendation 9.10:

Additional future work will include:

• Integration of women and youth;

• Work with the Legal Affairs, Health and Safety and Communications Strategy Committees;

• Further analysis of the Irish labour market to identify future job trends;

• Support for a new legal framework concerning the right to organise and collective bargaining

The Union Challenge - ensure participation

ILO (2008) analysed women’s participation in national social dialogue institutions using data from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The study shows that: • women account for only 15% of total members in social dialogue

institutions. • Highest representation of women was in government delegations at 19%• lowest was in employers’ groups at 10%• representation in workers’ groups was only 13%

Trade unions, founded on the principles of equality, justice and solidarity, should be the most progressive in terms of gender equality.

ACCOUNTABILITY?

Useful Organisations

• Prometheus Labor Communications (US) Communicate or Die http://prometheuslabor.com/

• Unions21 (UK) www.unions21.org.uk/

• Thank you