Recruitment crisis?

Over the last two days I have been at the UNISON Greater London Regional Local Government Executive and the Development and Organisation Committee (D&O) of the UNISON National Executive Council (NEC).



Since many readers of this blog are anoraks like myself you'll find this information as exciting to receive as I found it to impart and, over the next couple of days, I'll blog about non-confidential business from both meetings.



One recurring theme is the loss of members we are experiencing in consequence of the draconian job cuts being forced through by the Tory Government. In spite of recruiting in excess of 80,000 members so far this year, we have more than 50,000 fewer members than we had on New Years Day.



The normal turnover which always means that we're running at recruitment in order to stand still on membership (even in good years) is augmented this year by the impact of redundancies. Were it not for energetic recruitment, we would now be 10% (rather than 4%) smaller than at the start of the year.



This is a crisis for all trade unions (UNISON is far from suffering the worst) and underlines the vital importance both of mobilising for 20 October and for further fights against Government policy. If, however, we seriously wish to mobilise our activists in this cause we need to be clear that recruitment and retention of union members is incidental to the fight to protect workers' conditions (not the other way round!)

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