Part-timers Unions?

Hello and welcome! I have some experience organising part-timers, however in very different circumstances to you. My experience is primarily with low paid private sector employers who run public services like cleaners and catering workers, and part-time public sector workers like play workers, etc.

In the UK discrimination against part-time workers is against the law (and has been for some years now), so part-time workers have to be treated the same as people who are full-time.

Although we do have zero hour contract and casual workers who have very few rights.

It definitely has challenges, because it's very hard just to get people to meet, as people all work at different times. Also means organisers may never see many of their colleagues, as they work different shifts.

So in some cases our successful organising efforts have primarily been due to people like me working in stable, full-time jobs, with union facility time going round workplaces and trying to recruit people.

One successful campaign I was involved with recently was around 300 outsourced contract workers who earned minimum wage, contracted by a local council. A large proportion were migrant workers, although everyone had at least a basic level of English.

We didn't really have any good worker contacts, so we organised a demonstration for the living wage, and leafleted each of the workplaces.

We got about nine people turn up to the demo, but one of them became a really key organiser who recruited her colleagues and cycled around to other locations recruiting lots of others. The other people on the demo recruited lots of their local colleagues as well. After building for about 18 months, having a couple more demonstrations and getting good coverage in our local paper we ended up with about 120 members, and so then started a ballot for strike action, and then the employers caved in.

However this would be quite an unusual way to run a campaign, doing something public before starting in secret. But we were lucky because although it was a ruthless private company, they were contracted by a Labour council and so we felt they would be unable to get away with victimising organisers, who were all low-paid mothers. Also most workers had been in their jobs for more than two years and so had legal protection from unfair dismissal.

I think a key thing for us was having a concrete goal we could mobilise the workers around. In this case it was the living wage (since achieving it, the growth has completely stopped).

I would be really interested to hear about any of your organising efforts, as I'm sure in your part of the world circumstances are very different (but then I'm sure there are many similarities as well)

I have done some work organising cleaners as well, who are entirely migrant workers, and who mostly have poor or no English, however unfortunately other than basic recruitment and individual representation this hasn't really had any "organising" successes as such, basically because we haven't managed to find a key worker organiser in the contractor themselves

I meant to add, we have some general info about here, although looking at it it could do with a bit of an update: http://libcom.org/organise/workplace

however I think some of the key features are the same. Namely that it's important to map the workplace, get an understanding of the number of staff, the shift patterns, location of different worksites etc. And also communicating is really important. If meeting in person is not possible due to lack of venues, or different shift patterns or whatever then using other things like text messages/whatsapp or e-mail/an e-mail list can be useful.