Possible Emergency Motion?

I’ve received the attached message from a branch I have never encountered before. I’m not sure I am in favour of it but am reproducing it here for any comments which readers have before our branch officers can meet to consider this at noon this Wednesday (1 April).

AN APPEAL TO UNISON BRANCHES

Dear UNISON Branch Secretary,

Please consider submitting the following Emergency Motion to National Delegate Conference;

NO GENERAL SECRETARY ELECTION

Conference believes that an election for General Secretary would be a distraction from the challenges facing UNISON in the aftermath of the General Election.

Conference therefore instructs the National Executive Council to ensure that they give the General Secretary a retirement age a little less than five years in the future, so that no election needs to take place.

Yours respectfully,

Avril Poisson

Branch Secretary

Andover, Portslade, Reigate, Ifield and Littlehampton branch

(Federation of Orthoptic Linguists)

Update at noon on 1 April

This post was, as most readers realised, an April Fool joke.

For there not to be a General Secretary election for a new term of office commencing on 1 January 2016 two unimaginable things would have to happen or have happened.

The first unimaginable thing would be that senior lay members would have to agree (or have agreed) that our General Secretary would have a “retirement age” written into his contract which was later than the pension ages we have been trying to defend for our members. This would be an absurd act which would undermine our bargaining on pensions – and would contradict our policy against age discrimination, the correct interpretation of which must surely be that we would not now have a “retirement age” for any staff (including the General Secretary).

The second unimaginable thing would be that the General Secretary would have to want to use a questionable legal device to hang on in office beyond 31 December 2015 in circumstances in which his decision to do so would be a gift to anyone wishing to make unjustifiable criticisms of trade unions in general and UNISON in particular as organisations lacking democracy.

Since neither of these unimaginable things can be imagined, this blog post can now be remembered as no more than a fairly poor example of humour. (Whilst some in the Union view me as a wit, regular readers of this blog – Sid and Doris Blogger – take the view that I am only half way there).