Schedule D.24 of the UNISON Rule Book and the General Secretary election

This is a blog post about an obscure section of a trade union rule book. If that is not your thing then please, look away now.

Although it is now more than three years since I last held any office in UNISON, I do like to keep abreast of the latest edition of the UNISON Rule Book.

 

This is handy as, from time to time, people contact me and ask me about UNISON Rules (perhaps because – in the crowning achievement of a lifetime of troublemaking from within the rank and file of the movement – it was acknowledged in a footnote to paragraph 37 of the decision of the Assistant Certification Officer in 2017 that I was known as “Rule Book Rogers”).

 

I have a particular affection for Schedule D to the Rule Book, because – during my last participation as a branch delegate at UNISON National Delegate Conference in 2003 (after which I attended as an NEC member) – I successfully proposed an amendment to that Schedule (this set out how appeal hearings should be dealt with, and is now included in paragraph 26 of that Schedule).

 

As an aside, I recollect that I drafted this amendment, and proposed it in my own branch to go to Conference, based upon my experience of representing, at appeal, Candy Udwin, who had been expelled from UNISON as a result of criticisms of aspects of her leading role in fighting privatisation in the National Health Service.

 

As a further aside, I ought to recall that by correctly calling the vote on the amendment to Schedule D carried the then UNISON Vice-President, Dave Anderson, who would go on to serve not only as our President but as MP for Blaydon from 2005 to 2015, got himself into hot water with those on the top table whose approach to counting votes was to err on the side of what the platform wanted to see, rather than what it could see.

 

All of which is quite irrelevant to the paragraph of Schedule D about which I was today asked for advice, which is paragraph 24 of that Schedule, which states that;

 

“Any penalty imposed on a member will not take effect until the expiry of the time limit within which the member can submit an appeal or, if an appeal has been submitted, until such time as the appeal has been determined.”

 

What that means – bearing in mind that the Employment Appeals Tribunal has found that a UNISON member suspended from holding office remains eligible to stand for election – is that (given the timetable for the current election and the inevitable minimum timetable for pursuing a disciplinary investigation, hearing and appeal in accordance with Rule) there is no practical possibility that any candidate currently under investigation by UNISON could face disqualification before the conclusion of the election process.

 

One thing I find a bit odd, which relates to a topic to which I shall shortly turn in another blog post, is that some of those who (quite justifiably) make a great deal of their worthy campaign to “Defend the Four” (during the course of which they became perfectly familiar with the import of Schedule D.24) have been suggesting that a candidate under disciplinary investigation ought not to be standing in the General Secretary election.

 

Even though they know that a disciplinary investigation is absolutely no impediment to a candidate in these circumstances.

 

That, it seems to me, is either lazy, stupid or dishonest.