Peter Lillie

It might be time for FICSA to start looking at scope for re-branding itself, without however discarding long-held principles. It must broaden its appeal among the organizations and agencies in the common system by providing its members with the tools they need to do their job of representing staff.

Despite everything that has happened to staff over recent years, their unions and associations are still part of a living, breathing movement across the member organizations. They bear the aspirations of the staff in those organizations; they can do more than simply provide emergency services when things go wrong.

In unions in Australia and the United States of America, for example, there has been a perceptible shift in union activities from addressing the problems of the membership as a whole to organizing individual member associations to resolve their own issues at source. Whereas unions, and FICSA is no exception, are for the most part external and reactive, the new approach is distinctly individualistic and legalistic. It revolves around motivating people to come together to settle issues in their own immediate working environment. In brief, the individual member associations must become internal, empowering and proactive. Staff unions and associations must be seen as a movement that makes collective action and group empowerment popular again. FICSA must continue to think globally providing the political thrust and cohesion, but its member associations must be encouraged to act locally. Staff must recognise that they are stronger standing together than standing alone. Staff associations and unions must take their message to their members instead of allowing others, usually their critics, to speak for them. Paternalism as a management mode is out!

In order to achieve this, staff associations and unions should communicate more regularly with each other on their activities - and report on their successes. Furthermore, staff representatives should be equipped with organizing skills and techniques that, when deployed effectively, will rebuild membership and strengthen trust in the staff unions and associations. It is no longer permissible to expect the parent federation to do everything that is needed, especially an impoverished federation such as FICSA.

Under these circumstances, FICSA might wish to recast itself more as a body providing access to those skills and strengthening the impact of its membership than a body re-iterating standard positions with mantralike regularity. FICSA cannot attempt to undertake this shift in emphasis alone nor should it attempt to re-invent the wheel. It should continue to draw on the services of institutions in the world of unions, such as Public Services International (PSI), that already provide such training and advice - and model itself accordingly. For their part, staff associations and unions might be well advised to approach national trade union federations in their host countries which invariably provide such training for their representatives. In a rapidly globalising world, solidarity is at a premium and allies are desperately sought. Even the United Nations is promoting a global compact between major corporations and international labour in a common cause of economic advance and social justice: words that ring hollow to a federation whose members continue to be deprived of the most basic rights. However, rather than accept that injustice, staff associations and unions must press for improvements at the local level and once achieved use them as leverage at the global level.