Organising members and bargaining for them are the core activities of the union. Any labour union that is worth its salt cannot afford to neglect these activities.
But during the organisational renewal process, participants said that: the three-year bargaining strategy adopted in 1993 is outdated. centralised bargaining has weakened participation of our members in the collective bargaining process and has weakened structures.
When structures are weak and shop stewards do not attend union meetings, our traditional way of communicating to members through their shop stewards, fails. There is a lack of clear planning and systematic co-ordination, especially in Head Office. the union lacks the capacity to do research there is no strategy to recruit new members while the union has policies on organising and empowering women, health and safety, HIV/AIDS often there is no strategy or programme on how to implement these policies campaigns are poorly supported by members the Union needs to review how the National Bargaining Conference works.
What Project 2 will do:
assess our current collective bargaining strategy including how our structures work (or don't work) and make suggestions for the future. A preliminary report will be given to the Numsa Central Committee in November.
Further research will be done next year and a final report given to the Numsa Central Committee in June 2003. develop proposals that Numsa's November Central Committee will discuss. These will include proposals: for campaigns for 2003 and 2004 that will integrate the different work areas of the Union and suggest new ways to encourage members' support in these campaigns.
(This will include campaigns like recruiting new members, HIV/AIDS, health and safety, empowering women, shop steward elections), on how Numsa can improve the way it researches issues on how Numsa can communicate better with its members. develop programmes to build the capacity of sector co-ordinators (those full-time officials who co-ordinate the different projects/sectors in the union) and their bargaining teams as soon as possible.
Source
Numsa News