Trade Union Use of Digital Communications Technology: Interview data, 2023-2024

This research was designed to investigate the ways in which trade unions use digital communications technology to communicate with and amongst their members, and at how digitally-enabled communications fit in with wider campaigning and organising practices, including industrial action such as strikes. The use of digital communications technologies in established and mainstream trade union settings has been (and, to date, continues to be) significantly under-researched. The data in this collection comprises transcripts of a series of interviews from a case study of the National Education Union (NEU). There are two groups of interview transcripts. One comes from individual interviews with five full-time officers (FTOs) and staff at NEU head office (HQ), who work in and/or have responsibility for national digital communications and associated data-analysis and data-management functions. The second group comes from group interviews (GIs) carried out with seven groups of local union reps and branch officers from different parts of England. We focussed on England because the management of schools is now different in each of the four devolved nations of the UK, and England has the most fragmented system, which provides the greatest challenges to the NEU's traditional organising model. Sites for GIs were selected for geographical spread (three in London, one in the North of England and one in the South), plus we selected for different school governance models; specifically, we wanted to interview reps from Multi-Academy Trusts, a relatively new type of school that presents novel challenges for teaching unions. The selection of sites for rep interviews was also significantly influenced by access considerations, being wholly dependent on arrangements made by NEU FTOs and branch officers, as well as the willingness of reps to give up their time during a period of intense union activity – notably, a national pay campaign, including strikes, which followed a period of significant stress and workplace conflict over school closures and related issues during the COVID-19 pandemic – in addition to the usual heavy workloads associated with classroom teaching. As a result, the GIs carried out were varied in terms of the number and composition of reps present (varying between two and 13 participants), and were always pressed for time (which significantly restricted the gathering of demographic data). The data is therefore somewhat patchy and unrepresentative, but nevertheless generated rich insights and achieved a reasonable degree of saturation on important issues. Key findings include overlapping but sometimes different approaches between NEU HQ and local reps, as well as sophisticated understandings by reps of the use of different digital communications technologies for different purposes, the relationship between technological and in-person communications, and the place of each in wider union campaigning and activism.