At the recent May Day march and rally in London, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber made a strong call for “a Trade Union Freedom Bill to allow unions to properly protect their members”. I wonder how many in the audience had ever heard of the proposed Bill, and went looking online to see what I could find out.

The first place to look would naturally be the TUC website, but when searching for “trade union freedom bill”, one gets a list of 38 results — and it’s not a promising beginning. Among the first five are “Final Trade Union statement on the agenda for the World Trade Organisation,” “Trade unionists in the classroom” and “Solidarity with Iraqi and Kurdish women trade unionists”.
Google offers the opposite problem — 25,800 results when searching for the full name of the bill. But at least its first results seem more focussed: the Institute for Employment Rights, NATFHE, and the Parliament website.
For many students and others, the first place to look for information like this would actually be the Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with 1.2 million articles in English alone. But as in so many other matters related to trade unions, there is actually very little there. (This would be easily rectified by union members creating content about the Bill here.)
Having finally located some text on the TUC site, the provisions of the proposed Bill become clear: protecting workers from unfair dismissal (including during strikes), making union recognition easier when a majority have voted in support, and allowing unions to more effectively counter strike-breaking.
The TUC site promises more campaign materials and further briefings, but what is probably needed is a dedicated website with a memorable name like tradeunionfreedom.org.uk (which is available).
Such a website could concentrate in a single place not only information about the Bill and the problems it seeks to solve, but even interactive tools to allow union members to email or fax their MPs.
In the USA, unions are also fighting to get legislation passed to make it easier for workers to join unions. They’ve made a lot of progress so far (43 out of 100 Senators, and 216 members of the House of Representatives have backed the proposal). Even if their proposed “Employee Free Choice Act” is unlikely to become law until Democrats regain control of Congress, these are impressive results. And unlike British unions, they’ve tightly integrated this campaign into their websites, with tons of background material and even a frequently-updated campaign blog. And of course, they allow members to instantly tell their representatives in Congress to support the proposal. Their “Voice@Work” website is a model for what we could be doing, and is located here:

http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/