Activate: The power of trade union education

Through the PCS Academy, the union offers a range of bite-sized and in-depth training for members, union advocates and reps.

If they haven’t already attended some of these courses themselves, activists can encourage members in their branches to find out more about PCS, discover how it works, and learn how they can organise and represent members at work.

PCS offers courses on everything. Negotiating, organising, health and safety, equality issues, and handling members’ cases are all integrated into rep training. There are even ‘Welcome to PCS’ webinars for the curious and new joiners.

Justine, a branch treasurer in the FCDO, recently attended the course ‘Workplace reps: essential building blocks’. She said that the “casework element of the course was excellent” and called the course leader “brilliant”: “I learned so much and it supercharged my enthusiasm.”

For Justine, the course was most impactful in improving her understanding of workplace policies and the employment law which underpin them. The course has allowed her and her branch to “challenge HR/management when their interpretation of either their own policy or the law is incorrect,” most notably on voluntary exit scheme and redundancies impacting on her members.

Complex cases and issues

In the past, she had primarily been tasked with supporting colleagues who had received poor performance measures by managers.

“It seemed to me in many cases that the managers were poor communicators and, in all my cases, I have been able to successfully stop poor performance measures completely or have them ended with no detriment to our member’s career.”

As a result of these successes, she has now been assigned more complex cases, including sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Elsewhere, Showkat, from the Competition and Markets Authority, attended the ‘Handling complex issues’ course, which they said has made them feel “very confident” about helping their colleagues.

“I enjoyed the course due to the effort of the tutor to deliver sessions using a compelling, empathetic and fun approach and I was also fortunate that my fellow students were passionate and engaged,” they explained. “This created a positive and energetic environment for everyone to open up and express themselves. The group work was special as it brought up lots of ideas.”

Challenging the employer

Georgia, a recently retired member of ARMs who worked for HMRC, similarly praised the “brilliant team-working on this course,” which has helped her to “develop transferrable skills such as speaking and listening, empathy, note-taking, and researching policies”.

Crucially, she learned how to “identify poorly constructed policies and use them to challenge the employer, and about helping members to develop confidence when speaking with their managers”.

‘Racism and intolerance: changing attitudes in the workplace’ is another popular course choice for reps and members alike. For Isabella, who works for DWP Black Country, it helped her “identify different types of racism and now I have a better understanding of how these can affect us in the workplace”.

But PCS training is about more than learning policy, procedures, or best-practice directly from the tutor.

It is also, in Isabella’s words, “an opportunity to meet colleagues from different departments with different backgrounds who will share their knowledge and experience, bringing us together.”

For more information on trade union education courses, contact [email protected] or view our course list.