One things with which the new UNISON NEC (with a large majority of members elected on the #timeforrealchange slate) will have to deal at its July member is the making of nominations to the TUC General Council and the selection of NEC members to attend as part of UNISON’s delegation to the TUC in September.
As things stand (or rather, stood as at September last year) UNISON has seven members on the General Council of the TUC - four officials (Roger McKenzie, Gloria Mills, Dave Prentis and Liz Snape) and three lay members (Josie Bird, Davena Rankin and Chris Tansley). However, since Gloria Mills holds the seat elected at Congress to represent Black Women workers, only the other six are directly appointed by UNISON - and (pursuant to a decision taken some years ago when the TUC changed its Rules to accommodate the creation of UNITE) we don’t take up our full allocation of seven members (as a trade union with more than 200,000 members our directly appointed members of the General Council “shall [according to TUC Rules] be determined by [our] full numerical membership on the basis of one per 200,000 members or part thereof”). We don’t, but we could.
On the assumption that the UNISON NEC will feel that UNISON’s General Secretary ought to sit on the General Council of the TUC (and its Executive) the question will arise of whether to continue to observe the convention that three paid officials sit on the General Council - the Presidential Team may want (ahead of the July NEC meeting) to take legal advice about whether this has become part of the contract of employment of those Assistant General Secretaries who do currently serve (and may also feel that there is some benefit to UNISON in having some continuity of our membership). On this basis, the July NEC would have (at least) four seats on the General Council to allocate (at least three of which should be women if the overall delegation were to - as it must - meet the requirements of proportionality (as defined in UNISON Rule Q).
The July NEC also needs to determine which NEC members will attend the TUC Congress in September. Under TUC Rules; “Affiliated organisations shall be entitled to be represented at the annual Congress by one delegate for every 5,000 members or fraction thereof” which means that UNISON could - in theory - send far more delegates than it generally does (we could send more than 240). The other constituencies within UNISON who have allocated representation on the TUC delegation (Regional Councils, Service Groups, Self-Organised Groups etc.) will by then already have chosen their delegates. The NEC can decide how many of its own members to send.
Until 2010 all NEC members were able to attend TUC if they wished (given that attending Congress is up there with watching paint dry for many people only about half did, but everyone could have done) - in 2010 TUC Congress agreed, having met annually since the 1860s, to only meet biennially and to have a smaller gathering in the alternate years. The subsequent “smaller gathering” in the basement of Congress House in 2011 was such a fiasco that the decision was politely discarded thereafter, but not before UNISON (and other large trade unions) had taken the opportunity to reduce the size (and expense) of their delegations to future TUCs.
From 2012 onwards the NEC’s contribution to the TUC delegation has consisted of a large number of members of the Policy Committee and a couple of members of each of the other “Strategic” Committees (the Development and Organisation, International and Services to Members Committees at that time). This structure generally allowed for the NEC membership of the TUC delegation to reflect the views of the majority of the NEC (although I myself was permitted to attend in 2012 as a reward for having spoken in support of the NEC at that year’s National Delegate Conference). The powers of the NEC under UNISON Rules, taking into account TUC Rules, will give the July 2021 meeting of the NEC carte blanche as to who should attend the TUC on behalf of the NEC, although in practice the choice to be made will probably be between continuing with recent practice (and therefore inviting nominations from each Committee) or reverting to pre-2010 practice and allowing any NEC member to attend.
None of this may matter very much for as long as the TUC remains irrelevant to the interests of most working people - but if we are ever going to rescue our trade union centre from that irrelevance it may come to matter quite a bit.
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