Union-board liaision

Requests
1

Hey all,

I’m looking for any guidance, insights, or formal policies, etc, on setting up effective board/union liaison. This is for an org of which I’m on the board. Ideally this would be about the actual practices you’ve found work to ensure the board is hearing from the union, and would include having either a board member as the designated liaison or a union member as such.

Thanks for any help!

1 Like
2

Good question @emilyk!

It’s hard to say anything for sure, without more detailed context about the org, the board and the history, but a few more general things come to mind, from previous experiences, tho not sure if they are immediate answers to your question…

  1. Is it possible to talk openly about the (inherent?) tensions between the roles (board members who must prioritise organisational needs and union members who must prioritise staff rights and wellbeing), before these tensions are coming up in practice? To help set expectations about the ways the relationship can be mutually beneficial, but also how to think about it when it is not (including nuanced discussions of the power held on both sides when those tensions come up)?
  2. Are there ways the board can actively hand over aspects of traditional board oversight and power, to workers, to help share understanding and responsibility for the difficult balances involved in keeping an organisation going? This may be initially symbolic, but may also be about practical devolution of power, though it is inevitably tricky.
  3. With the above in mind, how much can you foster relationships of trust and mutual respect between the individual contact points on both sides? Given the power of boards, I feel like the onus should be with the board to demonstrate that it believes the union’s positions are critical parts of practicing organisational values, and that there is a shared belief around doing so.

Essentially, all of this is about getting towards a place where more alignment is possible between what a board and a union both want, but without glossing over that one side of that dynamic holds some really practical forms of power over the other (namely, the power to hire and fire). The degrees to which the antagonism and power differential play out will obviously vary a lot based on the size of the org and the perceived role of the board, as well as what history has come before in staff/board relationships, so wouldn’t want to give the sense there was any kind of simple template here. These are just a few thoughts from some of the challenges I’ve experienced in a few small-to-medium organisations over the years.

Would be very keen to hear what others have to say and what you end up developing, @emilyk!

3

Thanks Liam. I appreciate you taking the time to respond. It feels a little like your response is schooling me in the power dynamics between workers and managers and is masking an opinion with questions. In a bad faith interpretation, I can’t help but wonder if that would be the case if I had posted under a less gendered username - I use the word ‘wonder’ on purpose, because I can’t know. In a good faith interpretation, I assume you’re concerned that I might be unaware of these aspects, which I can see could be read into my post, though in actuality I am not, and I wrote it with a vagueness for deliberate, governance-related reasons.

If anyone from the community has practical thoughts - like, literally what did the liaison do in terms of meetings, how did they define, state and navigate boundaries, and so on, that would be great to hear. However, I have had some really useful practical advice from someone outwith this platform who is doing this sort of role from an employee perspective so as I move forward with this, and if I think there is anything appropriate and useful to share, I will do so.

4

Hi @emilyk,

Firstly - I’m sorry for the tone of this and how it’s landed. I think there were a couple things going on from my side:

  1. often responding to forum posts in a way that might provide some broader grounding for the range of places that different people reading it may be coming from (even if not all of it is specific to the original post request), and
  2. a lot of experiences of the power dynamics of boards being minimised and glossed over in most orgs I’ve been a part of or worked with, so being reluctant to not surface that in a public thread on the topic, if it’s not been mentioned directly already (this is likely the ‘opinion’ being masked in questions part?).

That said, I wish I’d checked in with you first about your context and experience, before writing anything else. Or at least made clearer, if I had added any of the rest of the text, that this is more general groundings in case anyone else is reading this, so to feel free to ignore if it’s not relevant/obvious to your context.

As to the gendered aspect of your comment - I don’t know the answer, but hope that I would have made the same mistakes across gender assumptions, based on those experiences I’ve mentioned!

I hope others are able to provide some of the things you’re looking for and am also keen to see them, if so.