Recruiting new members

Why is recruitment so important?

We don’t just want to maintain our existing membership – we want to grow and we need to grow. The more members we have, the stronger we are. A workplace with 90% membership is in a much stronger position to resist an unwelcome management proposal than one with 60% membership.

Organising to maintain and strengthen our voice means engaging members and recruiting your colleagues who are not in the union – all reps have the ability to do this.

The branches that are most effective at recruiting have two obvious characteristics:

• they see recruitment as a task for everybody – not just certain reps, or even all reps, but all members
• they have a high profile in the workplace: their activities, local communications and the respect in which they are held by management as well as staff mean they are central to working life in that area.