What Falls Apart During Your Strike
Your union has probably prepared its mobilization well. What is rarely missing is your members' conviction. What falls apart is the communication logistics while the conflict is underway.
Tracking Attendance on Your Picket Lines
Knowing how many of your members are present on which line, at what time, is critical information. It serves to verify your picketing commitments, document participation for legal or contractual purposes, and reassure your executive that the mobilization is holding.
When this tracking happens with paper sheets and text message threads, two things happen systematically: errors accumulate, and someone on your team spends hours compiling what could have been centralized automatically. During the STTP-Montreal strike, over 3,000 members across more than 30 sites: before Fortisia, it took four full-time people to manage attendance.
Each member confirms their attendance directly from their phone. Your executive sees every site without compiling the numbers afterward.
Your Directives Taking Too Long
During your strike, news changes fast. An employer decision, a mediation proposal, a schedule change on a site: it needs to reach your members in minutes, not hours. With communications scattered across Facebook, Messenger, and individual calls, information is delayed. And in that gap, rumours travel faster than your official facts.
Your Remote Sites You Cannot See
Your strike coordinator cannot be on every site at once. On the ground, managing distant sites often relies on informal phone calls, with no structure or documentation. When a problem arises on a site 40 kilometres away, your executive often finds out too late.
What Your Executive Needs to Prepare Before Day One
Preparing your strike communications happens before the trigger, not after. What we observe in unions that handle their disputes well: the structure was in place before the first person took position on the line.
Designate a Communications Lead Per Site
This person is the relay between your site and your central executive. They receive your directives, distribute them locally, and escalate important information. Without this structure, your strike communications rely on ad hoc calls that exhaust everyone within a few days.
Establish an Official Channel for the Duration of the Dispute
Not a Facebook group created in a rush. Not another Messenger thread. A channel your members recognize as your reliable information source throughout the strike, the one they check first, not last. And above all: a secure channel, accessible only to your members, not readable by the employer or outside parties.
Define Your Information Types and Their Frequency
How often do your members expect negotiation table updates? Who issues your picketing directives, and how quickly after a change? Which channel do you use for a message that needs to reach people in under 30 minutes? This is not unnecessary rigidity. It is what prevents confusion during an already stressful time for everyone in your organization.
What Information Changes During Your Dispute
Uncertainty is the enemy of your mobilization. When your members do not know what is happening at the table, when rumours fill the void left by your official communications, doubt sets in. Not because your members lack union conviction. Because they do not have the information.
Communicating regularly during your strike, even to say nothing has changed, is an act of leadership. A daily update at a fixed time, even a short one, tells your members your executive is present and they are not alone on their picket line.
Internal and Public Communications: Keep Them Separate
Your communications intended for picket line members should not be public by default. Your tactical discussions, your negotiation table information, your internal issues: these belong in a secure channel accessible only to your members. Your Facebook groups without access control and your Messenger threads can be read by the employer. In a labour dispute, that can have concrete consequences on your negotiation.
Access to your communications in Fortisia is limited to the accounts your executive has explicitly authorized.
After Your Strike: Document for Next Time
Which channels worked well in your organization? Where was information slow to circulate? Which sites had difficulty receiving your updates? This data lets you improve your preparation for the next mobilization. Unions that do this debrief arrive better prepared next time, not because they have more experience, but because they documented theirs.
How we help
No more paper attendance sheets and overflowing Messenger threads in the middle of your strike.
Fortisia brings together picket line attendance tracking, field alerts, and official communications in a single mobile app.
During your strike, your members get direct access to:
- Real-time attendance tracking across every site
- Your mobilization directives the moment they change
- Your urgent alerts directly as push notifications
- Your negotiation table updates as soon as they arrive
Result: less manual entry, better field coordination, an average adoption rate of 90%.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need a specific tool to manage your strike, or does your normal setup work?
Your normal setup holds in regular times. During a strike, the pace of your decisions and the logistical complexity increase considerably. Managing multiple sites, frequent table updates, and attendance tracking demand a more rigorous communication structure than what works day to day. Fortisia was built for these moments.
How do you manage attendance across multiple picket sites at the same time?
With Fortisia, each site can enter attendance in real time from a phone. Your executive sees all sites from one place without calling each coordinator individually. STTP-Montreal managed over 30 simultaneous sites this way, saving over 100 hours of manual entry.
How do you make sure your directives reach the field quickly?
By having a single official channel where your directives are published with a push notification. Your members receive the alert directly on their phone, without monitoring a Facebook group or waiting for a call. The message is seen within minutes of publication.
What do you do if some of your members stop checking communications during the strike?
Designate a site coordinator who ensures your members have received the information. Push notifications significantly increase read rates compared to email or messaging groups. Some members prefer direct calls: the site structure handles these cases without putting it all on one person.
How do you document decisions made during your strike for future reference?
By centralizing your communications in an official channel, your history is automatically preserved: which directives were sent, when, by whom. After your strike, this log helps you debrief, identify what worked, and prepare your next mobilization.
