I would
suggest that a good test of whether or not to listen to proposal for how the
trade union movement should respond to the unforeseen catastrophe of the
General Election result is how similar those proposals are to the views held by
the proposer before they knew the election result.
Those who,
impervious to all evidence, cling to the conclusion that we must build a new workers’ party have as much to
offer as the senior trade union
official who said that, after the election it is “business
as usual” for the trade unions.
It is
certainly not that.
Any trade
union activist who has started to rethink everything they thought they knew a
week and a half ago hasn’t been thinking since they heard the result.
Thankfully –
and thanks to some senior officials who can see that this is not “business as
usual” – Wednesday’s meeting of the Development and Organisation Committee
(D&O) of the UNISON National Executive Council did make a small but
important start in rethinking. This related to the question of how we collect
union subscriptions.
The Conservative
manifesto has a few things to say about trade unionism – manifesto
including a commitment to legislation to “ensure
trade unions use a transparent opt-in process for union subscription.”
As the
author of the report to D&O wryly observed, this commitment is itself
hardly transparent – but if we want a clue as to what it means we have only to
look at what the Tories were doing to the civil service trade unions under the
Coalition Government.
The
Government have unilaterally abandoned a decades-old practice of deducting
union subscriptions from salaries, forcing PCS
(and the other unions) to campaign to get their members to pay subscriptions by
Direct Debit.
Similar
measures could be taken in other areas of the public sector under direct
control from Westminster (such as the NHS in England) - and whilst it would take legislation to force
compliance from local authorities, it is likely that some at least of the
increased number of Tory Councils would join such an attack voluntarily.
Deduction of
contributions at source (DOCAS) has many advantages for trade unions and our
members. It is the easiest and most reliable means to pay subscriptions. It
facilitates keeping up to date the recording of where our members work, and
makes it easier to comply with the statutory requirements to provide
information to employers when we ballot for action. In unions like UNISON,
which have the progressive approach of charging higher subscriptions to those
who earn more, it makes it easier to ensure that members pay the correct rate
of subscriptions, protecting their entitlements to representation and other
benefits.
UNISON has
spent years working on aligning the information in our membership records with
the information generated by DOCAS – and has made progress which would have
been unimaginable some years ago.
Although the
exponential growth of online recruitment has trebled the proportion of UNISON
members already paying their subscriptions by Direct Debit, 70% of UNISON
members – almost one million people – still pay their subscriptions via DOCAS.
DOCAS is central to UNISON’s organisation and our financial survival.
In the
course of a morning last week UNISON’s D&O Committee turned our practice on
its head, deciding that henceforth all new members will be recruited to pay by
Direct Debit and that we will immediately start a campaign to move all members
to pay by this route.
This bold
and necessary decision challenges us to give meaning to our rhetorical
commitment to an “organising approach” since it is clear that it will take
hundreds of thousands of individual conversations to retain our existing
membership and – as the Committee rightly decided – to seek to recruit so that
we end the process of conversion to Direct Debit with more members than we
started.
The
Committee is recommending to the full NEC that the NEC submits an Emergency
Motion to our National Delegate Conference in June building upon and taking forward a “whole union” campaign to
give effect to this decision. It is evident that the change to Direct Debit
will create more new work in branches to maintain the accuracy of our
membership records.
We are at
the point at which we turn UNISON outwards, towards our members and activists,
to become the organising union we need – or drift on under “top-down”
leadership which, nationally and Regionally, is so risk averse as to be almost
comatose.
PCS are reportedly
recruiting members and activists on the back of the enforced activism of
the transition to Direct Debit. We need to learn from their experience (which also
means that leaders on both sides need to put the movement before injured
feelings).
UNISON’s
Direct Debit campaign must be simply the first step in rejuvenating UNISON –
and all our trade unions – to meet unprecedented challenges.
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