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Here is a link to my memoirs which, if you are a glutton for punishment, you can purchase online at https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/an-obscure-footnote-in-trade-union-history.
Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. (William Morris - A Dream of John Ball)

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Do we need a General Secretary?

Now that the hearing of evidence in front of the Assistant Certification Officer is over and the complainants and the Union are waiting for Wednesday 22 February when we shall reconvene to make our closing arguments in relation to the complaints concerning last year’s election for General Secretary it is time to begin thinking further about the future of our trade union.

I don’t intend to go into the evidence which was heard this week, or the arguments which will be put next year. The time for that will be once the Assistant Certification Officer has issued her decision.

However, there are questions which UNISON members need in any case to be thinking about, not least as elections to our National Executive Council come round and the deadline for submissions to next year’s National Delegate Conference looms.

One question which popped into my mind this week was whether we really need to have a General Secretary at all. Our Rule Book (Rule E.3) says that we must – but the law only says that if you have a general secretary they have to be elected by the membership (unless they hold office for less than thirteen months).

Branch-level elected positions in the trade union can be job-shared in accordance with Rule G.4.1.5 but our Rules say we must have one – and only one – General Secretary. This certainly entrenches hierarchy at the top of our organisation and I cannot see why it should be essential for a trade union governed by an elected lay Executive to have such a hierarchy of paid staff.

In principle there is no reason why we could not have a senior official responsible for (say) publicity, responsible to a lay communications committee, a senior official responsible for organising, responsible to a lay organising committee and so on. Unity and coordination could be provided by the elected lay National Executive Council (NEC), rather than by a secretariat of paid employees.

Certainly it is the existence of this secretariat which raises the question of how to design, improve and strengthen democratic checks and balances (which are at present seriously inadequate). In the early years of UNISON the Presidential Team (a phrase which does not in fact appear in the Rule Book) was developed by lay members of the National Executive in order to provide lay oversight and scrutiny of senior officials, but in my time on the NEC I have rarely noticed it performing this function.


Realistically I suppose it is this latter question (how to improve democratic safeguards and lay scrutiny) we need to think about, but in doing so, it is at least worth bearing in mind that we don’t necessarily have to have a General Secretary, and that if we are going to keep the role in future we should be certain that the position adds value and effectiveness to our organising.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think we do need a representative figurehead... Not sure that needs to be a general secretary with the authority that the rulebook currently provides.

Anonymous said...

UNISON's ability to organise anything significant under one 'leader' is concerning enough. The idea of a collective leadership frightens me in our current organisation. It will just lead to committees fighting against each other (or the same people sitting on all committees). The biggest problem with Prentis is the absolute lack of any alternative in UNISON that can take a significant proportion of the membership with it. Grim...

Anonymous said...

We do need a General Secretary. To transform our union into the industrial / political heavyweight that it could (and should) be, we need top-down support for a bottom-up, grassroots revolution within Branches.

There are enough talented, experienced and potential leaders in our union to realise a radical change for the better. Unfortunately, they are often stifled by stale
strucutres or bamboozled by the bureaucracy. How can we organise when the resources of the union are ploughed into brainwashing our activists to behave like bureaucrats?

If we had a leader that was truly dedicated to the political education of our activists and the genuine democratisation of our structures, we might have a fighting chance (or at least have decent conferences)...