Labour Unions Editing and Proofreading Services

A union's authority rests on members believing that what they are told is true, including when the news is bad. That belief is built over years and can be lost in a single communication — most often a recommendation to accept an agreement, written to secure a yes, which members later read against what they actually received. Employers count on a union overselling a settlement, because it makes the next round easier for them. Members who feel they were managed into a vote remember it for a decade.

We edit what trade unions, staff associations and labour organisations produce — bargaining updates and negotiation reports to members, tentative agreement summaries and ratification material, ballot and industrial action communications, branch and workplace newsletters, member handbooks and rights guides, grievance and disciplinary representation material, health and safety reporting and representative guidance, recruitment and organising material, submissions to pay review bodies and tribunals, policy and campaign documents, member survey questions, rule book revisions and constitutional amendments, and correspondence with employers and industry bodies. Our editors work in the register your members expect rather than a corporate one.

The tentative agreement summary is the highest-stakes document a union produces, and the temptation in it is structural. Negotiators have spent months on a settlement, believe it is the best available, and write a summary that leads with the gains. Members then discover the shift-pattern concession in clause fourteen after they have voted. We write these so the summary states the full package including everything conceded, in the same prominence as everything won; so the money is expressed as members will actually experience it — what this means monthly, after tax, for someone on a named grade — rather than as a headline percentage; so the recommendation is separated from the description, with the committee's reasoning and any dissent recorded, since a committee that was split should say so; and so the alternative is described honestly, including what industrial action would involve and what the negotiators think it would achieve. Members who are given the case for and against and then vote yes have ratified something. Members who are sold a yes have been managed, and they will act accordingly next time.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including negotiation positions, member data and material about individual cases. We are editors rather than industrial relations or employment law advisers, and we offer no view on any agreement, dispute, ballot requirement or legal question. What we can do is make the writing plain and the case honestly put.