Thanks for sharing your experience. Interesting that you use company infrastructure for meetings. I guess it’s assumed that somebody will feed info back to the company regardless of platform anyway.

Do you know how the initial bargaining unit was formed and recognised?

What do you think would be a good way to get people to join?

I think getting people on to a neutral platform is definitely the goal. In my experience though many remote workers just do their jobs and keep to themselves so enticing them to these spaces is difficult. The ones I’ve had best luck building solidarity with are those that have attended at least one in-person event and built rapport.

What tactics do you think would work to win the others over in this environment?

I think one option is to seize on a galvanizing moment like a round of redundancies, contract change or merger and use this to get people in to a private group where they can express their opinions with less fear of reprisals.

Of course you would still have to initially communicate via some company owned channel. For this I’ve found people are more willing to talk one on one via voice/webcam than text. Make sure any transcription feature is disabled.

Obviously a big problem here is that you are already on the backfoot since you are relying on the the company’s actions to create the right conditions. You can try instead be proactive with these chats but the momentum is much weaker.