Principles

This site is free to read and free to reuse. As it grows from a public demonstration into a paid product, three commitments hold regardless — written down here, in public, so they cannot quietly soften later.

No real member data, ever

Everything on this site — the union, the employer, the people, every date in every walkthrough — is invented. That isn't a placeholder until real data becomes convenient; it's a permanent design principle. Trade union membership is legally sensitive information for a real, historical reason: within living memory, lists of construction workers' union membership were used to blacklist them from employment, and the compensation eventually paid for it exceeded fifty million pounds. A community with that history is right to be wary of outside software touching its members' data. The only credible answer is never to hold any, in public, at all — and this site never will.

This tooling will never help contain access

The workplace-access tools this project builds exist to help unions use a right Parliament has just given them. They will never be repackaged or sold to employers as a way of managing, limiting or containing that access. If that ever changed, this project would no longer be what it says it is.

No private-equity sale of anything that touches member data

Much of the commercial software already sold to unions today is owned by private-equity firms. If this project ever builds something that holds real member data, it will not be sold to one. Selling infrastructure built for the labour movement to the kind of owner that movement already distrusts would destroy the one thing this business has to offer — trust — so it's ruled out now, in public, rather than left as a decision for later.

Questions or challenges to any of this are as welcome as corrections to anything else on the site: contact@rightsworkflow.com.