Resources for organising

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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