Last month, upon return from Encuentro, we held a panel conversation with Greater Manchester based organisers and our Spanish union comrades! Below is a transcript of the conversation.
Panellists:
- Dan – GMTU Staff Organiser (asking the questions!)
- Rosie – Chair of GMTU South and Central branch
- Conor – GMTU Committee Member Solidarity Officer
- Molly – Greater Manchester Organiser with Debt Justice Foundation
- Pablo – Organiser with Madrid Tenants Union
Dan: Okay, so, anyone can answer these questions. Question one: in what ways is organising in the UK different to other countries and political environments?
Rosie: I feel like we should have a buzzer (laughs).
I think a huge thing, which you touched on before, was no fault evictions. When we were explaining that to other people (at Encuentro), they were like, no faults? Like, yeah, literally, no fault! Which doesn’t help in some ways. It really makes it a lot harder!
Although there are some ways, still, a bit easier in England to organise, like the one we touched on, it’s one month (notice) for evictions in Spain. You can technically get evicted for any reason in England, but it has to be two months for it to be mandatory. Otherwise, the judge has to see if it’s reasonable. So that’s a bit of a difference.
So one thing we did come away with was, even if some of the things we will be working on are a bit smaller (than in other countries), it’s kind of good that we’re here in the first place, and that we are getting together and organised when the conditions are politically harsher.
Conor: Yeah, I really agree with the no fault evictions thing.
It’s a very different dynamic, because you are working with a lot of people in precarious situations, whereas in Spain and Catalonia, people, generally, will have more of a chance to stay (in their home), and have stayed in their neighbourhood for a long time and want to stay. Whereas often (in England) you’re trying to work with people who might have been in a neighbourhood for six months to a year and have moved a lot already and might be absolutely willing to move again. So you are often trying to fight that and encourage people to stay in their communities.
I think one big difference, as well, is we’ve talked about a little bit with Pablo, but the difference is the amount of social and private landlords, and I think GMTU has a lot of experience working in social landlord neighbourhoods.
It’s a lot of working class communities that have lived in an area for a long time, and they know who their enemy, if you like, is, and they know how to target the neighbours who also have the same landlord, who also don’t get the repairs done.
Whereas with private landlords, people don’t know who their landlords are. You have lots and lots of small private landlords with a few different properties, and I think you have to do a lot of work to find those large (private) landlords which you can organise (those tenants) all together. And I think that is something that we should really learn from, and research how we target larger landlords, where we can learn buildings or those blocks, but it’s harder to fight with lots of fractured people who are fractured by having 100 different landlords in one neighbourhood.
Dan: Molly, you work for the Debt Justice Foundation. In terms of your participants that come forward, is it more social housing or private rented?
Molly: Private rented, yeah, private rented. And it’s incredible the amount of the intersection that we see between housing and… I am doing a lot of work in social security as well.
When you were talking just then, actually, about international solidarity and international organising… the differences that we have in different countries… something tweaked in my mind, like, we have this thing in the UK and have it across the world as well. That sort of way we (are) currently trying to battle the new economic (conditions)… the fact that we should see social security and, by extension, housing provision, just like we see the NHS, and we just don’t. It’s interesting, how that changed during Covid.
When more middle class people were having to lose money, we saw that kind of window open up for more people to start looking more positively at Social Security. That window is now closed.
It really got me thinking about how in the UK, we are just not getting the narrative that, I mean, that’s a challenge for us as organisers. Like, how do we ensure that these things that we are talking about are seen as basic provision, both housing but also social security and people’s access to income?
Dan: From my experience at Encuentro, there weren’t just Spanish people that attended, people from Czech Republic, people from Poland, and people from the USA, and what was the feedback from Czech Republic around things like this? So they found it very hard to organise, because actually the police state will come and actually arrest them.
What kind of advice do you have for people who face those kinds of limitations when organising?
Pablo: Even in Spain, I mean, we get a lot of state repression and a lot of the local housing groups have been getting a lot of fines and even arrests up in the evictions. The police are getting… I don’t know how (it) is here, but they’re getting more and more violent with eviction. Even the local police now have geared riot police to their big people from their houses, right? So it’s always a bit hard.
We have a lot of resistance funds in Madrid for whenever people get fines. But you do get to a point where you realise, if the state starts arming themselves, we have very little… it’s very hard to resist against that, right? Like, you suddenly have 50 riot police. You can have 100 people stopping an eviction, but it’s very hard… what I was trying to say before, you can’t really focus on evictions anymore… We need to start sooner. We need to create conflict in other places. We need to be creative in other ways.
For example, (something) we try to encourage people to do whenever they come to our union, regardless of who you are, whether you have a problem or not – why don’t you map your own building? That’s a step that anyone can do. And because anyone can map their neighbourhood, or building and have a little map of (things such as): do you know your neighbours? Are they renters? Are they property owners? What are they worried about? Where do they work? You know, that’s kind of the community building that we have to be constantly doing. Where we can think, also, these are the needs of my community, and that’s how we can create things.
Dan: So we’re thinking, no matter which country or region, the strength is in numbers. A critical mass. If we get the numbers behind us, then we can achieve anything with them. That’s what creates safety.
Next question: what was the thing that impressed you the most about other organisations? Anything that GMTU could replicate? What systems do want you see replicated by extension Pablo?
Conor: I think a big experience for me was watching and learning about the advice assemblies that Pablo has already talked about. In GMTU, we have a system of people who come to us for you know… you make an online referral for yourself, essentially, and then we look at that, and we use our team of volunteers to then contact them. I think that is possibly a symptom of growing very fast and thinking, “support as many people as possible” when Greater Manchester is so big. I think it has made us very reactive and made it to the volunteers (to) spend a lot of their time speaking to individuals who may or may not be members. I think, instead, when we should be now a bit more structured to the Union now that we’ve grown a lot, we should be encouraging an assembly (model).
Whether that’s hopefully in local branches and areas or one large one, and then using that model to adapt it to the different areas. We need to start using that, because we’re going to empower more people at once. We’re going to be able to help more people at once, and we’re going to be able to organise in those assemblies more… it gives our volunteers, our member solidarity officers, far more time when they’ve given all that advice in one whole session, to then go and do the Organising.
The proactive (work), creating the conflict that we’ve talked about, (does) work when they’re not always interacting with one or two or three specific member disputes at one time. All those members who have disputes can come to the same meeting and discuss it with each other and experienced people, and then those like myself or other people as officers, can spend that other time in their week, going out and mapping and planning out, “how do we grow and create more organised neighbourhoods and build in our areas?”
Dan: I think that we felt that the advice assembly models as big assemblies feel dynamic, inclusive. We’re not so interested in old school, boring agenda led (methods) like our models of meetings. These can turn people off, and also, a lot of times these meetings are done in complex language or lots of acronyms and things like that. So the assemblies kind of break that down. Rosie, what do you feel was most inspiring?
Rosie: Just seeing some of the huge rent strikes that have been going on. Particularly the Toronto tenants union – just huge blocks. There was one that had been going on for 11 months, that’s crazy! They could do it because of the sheer amount of people they got together, and just loads of little techniques they were talking about that sort of galvanised everyone together, like making door posters.
So, when you go door knocking, even if someone’s not up for joining a rent strike at that time, just a little poster to support this union, having it on the door (of the) building, raising awareness, or even little door hangers. One union, I can’t remember who it was, but they were saying, to sort of lure everyone out of the block and get them to this meeting, they got an ice cream truck. It’s my favourite. Just get an ice cream truck, play the music and (everyone) comes out. Everyone got free ice cream, and then they had to join the branch meeting. And I thought that was pretty good.
But it just made me think a bit more about how because we’ve tried, me and Connor actually, tried organising the block in the city centre. Just didn’t go very well because of the things we were talking about before. People, particularly the centre, they’re used to moving every year. They’re don’t really have that same class consciousness or that idea that they can organise themselves. We found it really tough.
Conor: Yeah, I reflected a lot on that experience that I had with Rosie in the Northern Quarter. And I think on reflection… is that we did get a meeting with about 10 people from that block, and what ended up happening was the (flat) owners in that building became the leaders, really, because they had a stake in keeping that building running the way they wanted it to… and I think in improving that, I think we’d need more volunteers and more time to be like, No, we’ll door knock the whole building, because there was disrepair throughout the whole building.
And unfortunately, as I said, possibly the fact that me and Rosie both had a lot of things going on, and we didn’t necessarily have the time to do the whole building. And my thought process is actually we should have – and maybe could – go back there, right? But (this time) we should actually be thinking, this could be an opportunity for the Union, and we should spend our time doing the whole building and trying to make as many allies as we can. Whereas we didn’t, we targeted our door knock, whereas I think we could have done a lot more. And that is a big reflecting experience for me.
Dan: Amazing. It starts with a free ice cream and leads on to free housing (laughter). Quick question to Molly, in terms of the debt justice and the way that you organise, how do you get people into the room? How do you get people to come join? Because I actually think that talking about debts is harder to talk about than housing. So you’ve got a slightly harder job, in my opinion.
Molly: I think it often comes down to relationships, like if we think of any social movement, if you think of everybody in this room, I can guarantee this while hearing because you knew somebody like Dan. When I first met Dan, the way that I got involved with tenancies, he added me to a WhatsApp group for the Food Justice Network, and said, “Welcome our new driver, Molly.” And I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t have a relationship with Dan, so that’s the first thing.
The second, identifying and building your leaders, like for me as organising, is not about me being parachuted into an area like we should all do this. It’s about – okay, who are my leaders? How can I build a relationship? How can I build their confidence and their skills and their understanding so they feel able to do it themselves? If I need to go off and do whatever, I know that’ll continue in that area.
Middleton Cooperative is a really good example of that, where we start by having established connections to a community and we understand how we can build their strategic capacity as an organisation. So when we’re not going in cold, we don’t have as many of the issues around, like, having to provide that really immediate support for people, because organisations do that themselves.
Dan: At Encuentro, the thing that really stood out for me was the rent strike. Two words that were repeated over the Encuentro. As tenants, as the tenants movement it’s our moment of industrial action.
If I can get 400 people to rent strike, that’s 200,000 pounds a month. Really seriously hinderance to the (housing) organisation.
Pablo: I think, like Rosie was saying, the example of Toronto was very inspiring in the way they managed to really organise the 11 month long rent strike. I think for me… I have this very specific example… for me, it was really interesting that this neighbourhood newsletter that they (Toronto Tenants Union) produced for the neighbours… the first pages were about their rights. Like, know your rights, know what you can do. Then they had a few pages about, like, “oh, there’s this swimming pool (you can) go to,” and then in the back page… they had a crossword. I thought it was a great idea, like, one of those small techniques. So the idea is, if you finish this crossword and you send us a picture of the finished crossword you get (a free T-shirt) and the crossword was all about tenants rights and tenant arguments. They were like, that’s how we recruit natural organic leaders. This crossword and send us a picture of this crossword.
Because they may not be the most politicised person, but they are really committed, to like, they fill out the crossword, they send you a picture. They want that free T-shirt. So thinking about… finding those leaders…I thought that was fantastic.. I was like, wow… we never would think about this way of recruiting leaders, but it was great.
Dan: So the real takeaway in this respect is, creativity? Is Art? Food is a huge thing that we use, and actually a lot of organisations use food too. In particular the Kingston organisation is all about social spaces. They were all about food. They were all about everyone contributing, everyone contributes their money to stay autonomous. And I thought that was really interesting in our kind of respect, did you have another point to make?
Molly: Creativity, yeah! So one of my colleagues with the housing campaign in South Yorkshire, in Rotherham… these buildings are called The Derelicts. And The Derelicts have been there for just over 10 years. They are… as you can imagine, no windows, no doors. They’re really dirty. There’s litter everywhere, and they’re really dangerous for some of the young children around the estate.
Over 10 years, individual residents in (nearby) council estates were putting forward individual pleas to the council to sort (it) out – and to the person who was not (managing) the property (issues).
Then about a year and a half ago, my colleague Heather went in, found that there was this individual, this one woman called Teresa who was like, who was beautiful. She’s a beautiful person. And she said, “Molly, I’ve lived in this estate for 25 years, and I used to have my curtains open when this all started happening, and when… it started getting bad, I closed my curtains.” She said, “when the organisers started, I started to feel more connected to my community.”
One of the things that they did recently is they blocked off the street where The Derelicts were and with all the residents cars, and they produced a film with a filmmaker. They projected it onto the side of the derelict buildings.
The landlords found out about the screening, and the landlords put up a banner that said, “works to start on this late 2024” so it was massive. They must have spent an absolute (fortune) on this banner. What was really clear on that day was… such a perfect picture of… the relationships they’d built, the creativity that they’d used to produce the film, (projected) onto The Derelicts. Also… the sheer… audacity of blocking off the whole block. Then the leader of Rotherham council came as they were pushed to remove The Derelicts or to force the owner to remove them themselves. So I think it’s just… such a beautiful coming together of moments where creativity was powerful.
Dan: Thank you to all the panel!
