UNION related chat, reflections and experiences. Reps & members alike!
- Thread starter Treacle Toes
- Start date
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
Hmm, with even people on here reading the tea-leaves so wrong, it's no surprise that ballot was lost. Voting yes to strike on this occasion would have been the easiest free money we ever got. Labour was settling disputes left, right and centre in order not to be known as a govt associated with strikes as soon as they came into office. Even the Bank of England made a formal announcement that increasing public sector pay right now wouldn't affect inflation, in order to give the govt a free hand to settle claims. We could have voted to strike and would never have had to lose a day of pay, because the govt would have increased the offer in order to settle. Other public sector workers got more than us this year because they were threatening to strike. To be honest I'm kind of annoyed because I really needed the extra money, but I also know that Unison did nothing to communicate the political landscape to people. They never do.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Agreed. Managers are normally more bullish because the member has limited access to external redress unless a discrimiation claim can be stood up. However, it sounds like in the case Pickman's is repping that HR dept have made the schoolboy error of failing to follow their own policy.
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
I mean, I hate to be that person, but this post does kind of read like the strike ballot as being something that "Unison" as an external entity was doing, rather than something you were actively involved with. Did you offer to help your branch out with comms around the ballot?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Tbh the vote would have been lost by more had he offered his doubtful services
Puddy_Tat
santa paws, do you ever come to the ghetto?
dunno really.
my local authority, while not at the point of issuing a section whatever number it is for 'bankruptcy', is about to start a round of restructuring that is going to lead to redundancies due to budget pressures.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
Council bankruptcies or near-bankruptcies are bound to happen anyway, until such time as Labour 'finds' some money to sort it out (which let's be clear, they could do any time they wanted). That is a political game that is well above our pay grades. You as a worker shouldn't be giving in to real terms wage drops (over the last 15 years) in order to try to 'save' your council services. And sorry but I as a worker can't afford such an attitude, even if you can.
And of course my council is in the shit too. We have no CPD budgets. As in, there is no money for staff training. Great prospects for the future then! Various of the services have required central government intervention. I'm not saying those problems don't exist, I'm saying paying workers less, or settling for wages lower than 15 years ago, is not the way to fix them.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
There seem to be no regular branch meetings. I have been invited to two AGMs, both at times I couldn't make because of family obligations. I'm sorry, you want me to fix one of the world's most de-politicised, bureaucratic unions so that I can get a pay rise? I'm glad some people have time to try and fix it, even if they seem to constantly fail, but it is not something for which I could physically find the time or energy.
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
Well yeah, if you want to get a (collective, negotiated) pay rise, that is kind of what you have to do. I don't want to generalise too much because I've only been actively involved in one branch, which I think is substantially better organised and more active than many others, and also covers a smaller workforce than the local government branches do, but I find it hard to imagine any branch not responding positively if you contacted them and said "hi, I think this ballot is really important and I want to help maximise the turnout in my department, what can I do to help out?" If you don't have the time or energy to help out with a ballot, then I'm not sure who you think is going to run the ballot campaign?
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
Someone who doesn't have a young kid and a chronic illness I would hope.
There were times when I would have had the energy for such things. But not at this stage in my life. And this is a workplace where there is zero sign of union presence except a page on the intranet. I have worked in other places where Unison at least did stalls regularly and left leaflets around. So here you would have to start from scratch. Yet all the time I would know it was useless because I would know that in other workplaces Unison would be making similarly little effort to organise. So to actually win I'd have to get myself elected to the grand committee or whatever and mandate resources to organising efforts around ballots. I have worked with smaller organisations that if they had one paid officer in a building of a thousand, that paid officer would have been expected to speak to every person one-on-one once a year. And those one-to-ones would have fed into the creation of various action groups, and a rolling program of organising activities. That's what using your resources to organise would look like. But Unison doesn't do that does it? It's so far from doing it - and you know it - that I can't even believe we're having this conversation. You bloody fix Unison!
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
we have to fix it a branch at a time and stepping back from that while slagging off the union seems to be surrendering your part in finding a solution. tbh i'd rather join rmt but until they extend to organising in higher education it's unison or nothing. and nothing's no good.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
No, it can't be fixed one branch at a time, because the allocation of resources by the centre stymies that, and if you did get your branch super-active they'd just find themselves butting up against how those resources are used (oh, and the fact that a lot of people at the top don't want a super-active membership). You need organising resources distributed around the structure of the organisation, beyond just volunteer time. So you have to fix it at the centre as well as at branch level.
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
There is definitely truth to that, but at the same time, if you have a strong and well-organised branch, you absolutely can win ballots at the branch level, and that makes it possible to win things locally even if the national union and national bargaining are in a poor state. And I don't know how you imagine the national union is going to be fixed if it doesn't start with local branches getting better organised.
I mean, christ, Unison's democratic structures are in such a poor state that half our SGE seats are vacant, it's not like it'd be hard to get "elected" onto one of those if you really wanted to.
The things we've been able to win locally through striking aren't enough, they're a lot less than I'd want and ultimately I'd much rather be winning things through national bargaining than through cutting local deals, but they're a good sight more than we would've won if we just sat on our hands and went "Unison's rubbish, it'd be great if we won a strike ballot so we could get better offers, I hope someone comes along to sort this out for us."
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
You are proceeding from an assumption, it seems, that I don't know what good political organising looks like, and that's why I don't do it. What I am saying is that I am not in a position to do it at the moment, and it is because I do know what good political organising looks like that I am annoyed with Unison, who I have never once seen engaged in any such thing.
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
I think you're assuming about the assumptions that I make! I don't know what you do or don't know. The one thing I do feel confident in saying is that you do seem to consistently, as in the post above, talk about "Unison" as if it was something external and separate to the actions of workers at your workplace, which doesn't seem like a great organising habit to me.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
sigh There's a lot I could say about left organising and unions here, because once again you're talking as though this is some new topic to me, but I think I'll just leave it at: Unison is a massive bureaucracy looming over my life, not something I chose per se (it's just the union other people are in), so yes, I speak of it as an 'other'. You can blame me for that if you like, but I think you'd be better off thinking about the principle of: The Purpose Of An Organisation Is What It Does.
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
I mean, I'm not trying to come off as a massive Unison loyalist here, so if you find that you and your fellow workers are better off trying to organise with the IWGB or UVW or IWW or indeed a completely informal autonomous affinity group then best of luck to you, whatever works. Feel free to share more of your insights if you want.
Puddy_Tat
santa paws, do you ever come to the ghetto?
In principle I agree, but in practice, i can't help thinking that a bigger pay rise this year would just have meant employers are looking for more redundancies efficiency savings - don't think the new 'labour' government has got much affection for council workers or civil servants
mixed feelings about unison - yes, it can feel like a distant and top-heavy thing.
i agree it's chicken and egg - the union is also the people in it, but if people don't feel it's something for them, they don't join which means it's not got much representation and so on.
i've done the workplace rep thing, and felt somewhat disconnected from the branch officers who spent so much time with management it was hard to tell the difference with one or two of them. (i agree with the concept of facility time, but not entirely sure it's healthy for anyone to be on it full time.)
not sure how big representation is with current employer - a lot of people work 'out and about' and the 'back office' staff are mostly WFH-ing now. i go to an actual office about once a month, and live 50+ miles away so getting involved isn't really practical. think there was one online branch meeting at a time i couldn't get.
and there's TFRC which i've done one or two meetings with, but seems to be a fairly small minority.
mixed feelings about unison - yes, it can feel like a distant and top-heavy thing.
i agree it's chicken and egg - the union is also the people in it, but if people don't feel it's something for them, they don't join which means it's not got much representation and so on.
i've done the workplace rep thing, and felt somewhat disconnected from the branch officers who spent so much time with management it was hard to tell the difference with one or two of them. (i agree with the concept of facility time, but not entirely sure it's healthy for anyone to be on it full time.)
not sure how big representation is with current employer - a lot of people work 'out and about' and the 'back office' staff are mostly WFH-ing now. i go to an actual office about once a month, and live 50+ miles away so getting involved isn't really practical. think there was one online branch meeting at a time i couldn't get.
and there's TFRC which i've done one or two meetings with, but seems to be a fairly small minority.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
I'd agree with that - we try to rotate president role as it is so easy to get into a relationship with managers. Even if you think they're shits if you meet them day after day the tendency for working relationship to start to form is pretty high.
But does anyone get 1.0 FTE nowadays? Would be incredibly rare in HE and after Pickles' changes I would have thought it would be difficult in public sector?
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Puddy_Tat
santa paws, do you ever come to the ghetto?
not sure.
that was (oh heck) 20+ years ago now, at a big shire county, and i've had some time away from local authority and UNISON in between that and current job (have been a member of three different unions in the interim).
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Anyway good luck Pickman's model
I've for an appeal against redundancy on Thursday morning - which is going to go nowhere
The member is a bit of a tit frankly but while he, and I, think it is personal there's no real evidence.
Probably going to be doing a fair few of these in the new year - possibly including myself
I've for an appeal against redundancy on Thursday morning - which is going to go nowhere
The member is a bit of a tit frankly but while he, and I, think it is personal there's no real evidence.Probably going to be doing a fair few of these in the new year - possibly including myself
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
my experience is there is a great deal going on that you don't see. all the casework for example. many branches don't have the stewards for that, let alone the other work you'd have them do. i've three cases on the go at the moment, and they can be really time consuming because of the policies, getting to know them and working out the questions to ask to pick holes in the management case. And sometimes there's not a proper policy to cover eg workload. In my branch we've pretty much a full committee and still there's not enough of us for the number of cases.
And then you need people for other activities like the ones you mention.
Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
I believe our branch sec recently went to 1.0 facility time (was prev. 0.4, I think, maybe 0.5).
Can't remember the exact figures, but over the past couple of years we've also had multiple officers on 0.2-0.4 (i.e. a day or two each) at a time, following negotiations with our leadership team.
But yeah, does seem to be pretty rare in our sector overall.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Yeah this. Especially for small branches dealing with casework and fighting fires can take all the effort and capacity they have - there's none/little left over to try and develop the branch as would be wished.
EDIT: There's also the fact that a lot of union work, like a lot of political work, is pretty bloody tedious - emailing people, updating lists, keeping records, getting minutes and action trackers sorted - not glamorous stuff but vital and something that a lot of people are not really interested in doing.
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
Yeah, our branch is our secretary on full-time and then me supporting them on 0.4 per week, but they're currently off work so we've gone from having 7 days a week to 2. I feel like I can justify that because I'm spending more than 50% of my working time doing a normal job. There is always a tremendous amount of casework that needs doing, and I think the more work that can be done inhouse rather than relying on external paid officers the better.
Puddy_Tat
santa paws, do you ever come to the ghetto?
i'm half contemplating whether to see about becoming a rep or something again, but living so far away, i'm not convinced i'd be a lot of use.
i've not moved nearer for a variety of reasons, and various things on either the national or local political front have made the job seem not entirely long term every time i have started thinking about it...
i've not moved nearer for a variety of reasons, and various things on either the national or local political front have made the job seem not entirely long term every time i have started thinking about it...
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
How did it go Pickman's model ?
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
As I expected no challenge to decision - did get some minor vindication on poor handling by line manager and HR.I've for an appeal against redundancy on Thursday morning - which is going to go nowhere
