From 26 to 28 March UNISON Scotland held a training weekend for Young Members, incorporating the AGM for Young Members in Scotland. Due to the time taken to travel down to Glasgow, and an STUC* Youth Committee meeting on the Saturday morning the first session I was able to go to was just before lunch on Saturday. John Hackett, who works for UNISON Scotland spoke about the upcoming march and rally against the cuts, and we looked at roles which Young Members could play in publicising this event, such as ringing activists.
Following this we considered the topic of recruitment, and instead of looking directly at this we used role play based around different situations, but which had a similar theme. These included persuading people to give blood, buy double glazing and donate to charity. In each situation we looked at why it is important to pick up on reasons people might have against what we were trying to get them to do, and then how use this skill when persuading people to join the union.
Finally we split into groups and were tasked with preparing a talk to potential members who had just started in a workplace. We used our own experiences within the union, as well as drawing on workshops to think of arguments which we thought would be effective, and then presented them to the rest of the groups.
On the Sunday we had the Scottish Young Members AGM, where after a report had been given on the previous years work we selected people to act as delegates to various committees and conferences. Generally there was little competition for these (indeed, some positions remained unfilled), aside from the observer at National Delegate Conference, for which a number of people wanted to go. As a result concern was expressed around the lack of enthusiasm amongst activists, and we agreed to look at ways of encouraging more people to take part.
*Scottish Trades Union Congress - I am one of UNISON Scotland’s delegates to their Youth Committee.