Resources for organising | Workers' Liberty

Join the AWL!

15 Apr 2006

Welcome! If you want to put consistent time and energy into fighting for solidarity and workers' liberty, and are willing to put effort into studying and discussing socialist ideas, then it is easy to join. Contact us with your name, address, email address, and phone numbers, and we will arrange for an AWL organiser to meet you to discuss the details. What does it involve? How to join Our constitution Our code of conduct, complaints procedure and safeguarding policies. What does it involve? We ask new members to discuss a membership agreement with an AWL organiser, fill it in, and sign it. The...

AWL branch organisers' pack

07 Jul 2013

Local meetings Organising comrades to do activities Public and open meetings Organising sales Recruitment Education National events, drives, etc. Troubleshooting The branch is the basic unit of AWL organisation. It is normally based on a geographical area. A few branches are organised around workplaces. A branch elects a local organiser, a treasurer and a sales organiser. In a small branch, one member may take on more than one of those jobs. A branch above a certain size - say five or six members - should also elect a branch committee consisting of these three officers and, perhaps, other...

Workplace activist skills training from Workers' Liberty

02 Mar 2013

Trade union activists in AWL have developed a short series of workshops to help develop workplace activist skills. The workshops are: - Beyond "organising" : has "the organising agenda" replaced "partnership" as the orthodoxy of the trade union bureaucracy? What are the positive aspects of "the organising agenda", and what are its limits? Can socialists argue for and build a radical model of organising? Click here to download workshop notes as a PDF. - Real life problems : how can we build collective cultures in our workplace? How can we turn what seem like individual gripes and moans into...

Activities schedule form for AWL branches

31 May 2011

AWL branch organisers can use this form for branch meetings to sign up AWL members for the week's activities. Download the form and print it out. In the first column, write details of the week's activities - paper sales, meetings, demonstrations, educationals, etc. - in order of date and time. Write your own name in the second column opposite the activities you yourself will do. Pass the form round the meeting. Ask people to write their names in the second column opposite the activities they will do. Lead a discussion later in the meeting if some essential activities do not have enough people...

AWL branch sales record form

31 May 2011

Download this form to print off and pass round AWL branch meetings in order to get a detailed record of AWL paper sales.

Training sessions

18 Jan 2011

AIMS: will vary from exercise to exercise. But generally the broad aims are to: a) reinforce abilities and develop them; b) help overcome chronic weaknesses, e.g. fear of speaking; c) teach new political ideas through exercises. Essentially training is about building up people's confidence and equipping them to deal with everyday situations. Contact work one Contact work two Public speaking Educationals Debates Arguing More public speaking Mentoring Paper sales CONTACT WORK ONE Aim: to get comrades to "see" contact work from the contact's point of view; to increase their confidence about...

Posters for use on AWL stalls and at AWL meetings

19 Oct 2010

These can be reproduced cheaply at plan copy shops, A0 for as little as £1.10 and A1 for 90p. Click to download pdfs: "Get Ready for Class War" "Labour is entitled to all it creates" "The longer the picket line, the shorter the strike" "Our class is entitled to all it creates"

Winning the battle of ideas: methods of contact work in Lutte Ouvriere

07 Apr 2010 |

Martin Thomas

These notes were written for an Internal Bulletin in 1977. Many passages make me wince on re-reading: they are "very 1970s", sometimes downright ponderous and pompous, I should also record that LO people who read the account of their contact work methods given at the end winced at the time. They thought it made far too much of the formalities and buried the essentials under that. A lot of the references to the Labour Party Young Socialists and the Labour Party are out of date today - referring to a political world very different from today's. There are still, I think, some useful points to be...

How to post audio files to this website

24 Feb 2010 |

Martin Thomas

The audio files are hosted and played from the Podomatic website , with a button or a link on our website pointing to them. To put up audio files in this way: 1. Record what you want put up, with a digital recorder. 2. If you're recording a meeting or a discussion with several speakers, record each speaker as a separate file. (I.e. press the Stop button after each speaker, and the Record button when the next speaker starts). 3. Transfer the audio files to a computer. 4. Process them with Audacity. It seems that mostly four bits of processing are needed: a) Chop off any rough bits at start and...

Posting articles from back issues of the magazine to the website

30 Sep 2009

Electronic files for some articles from some back issues will be accessible at http://www.workersliberty.org/files/wlweb/ .... E.g. the article on the Blitz in WL 18 is at http://www.workersliberty.org/files/wlweb/18/blitz.qxp There is a subfolder entitled wl19to24, so you will find articles from those issues at addresses like http://www.workersliberty.org/files/wlweb/wl19to24/WL21/ .... The attached pdfs show the directory structure. The file names sometimes contain spaces, since they were Mac files, and Mac allows that. Other software sometimes doesn't, so you may be best to rename the files...