UNISON has a new Presidential Team - what do they have to do next?

UNISON has announced the election of a Presidential team for 2021/22. The first job of the Presidential team is to make some recommendations to the NEC (to be endorsed at its next meeting)(which should be very soon) for the composition of the various Committees of the NEC.

Custom and practice is that NEC members are invited to express preferences in two tranches, first between the “strategic committees” and then between all the others. The Presidential team are then responsible for preparing a proposal on the membership of all Committees to be put before the NEC meeting for approval.

When I was first elected to the NEC in 2003 we were told that all NEC members were expected to serve on at least three Committees, unless their work duties were such that they could only manage two - some members, we were told, would serve on more.

I served on three Committees from 2003 to 2005, just one Committee from 2005 to 2015 and two Committees from 2015 to 2017. I did express preferences for various Committees but somehow I was always unlucky.

The NEC member’s handbook issued to the NEC in 2011 described the “current policy on election/allocation to Committees” with the following series of bullet points;

• where the numbers and general distribution of members facilitate it, members should receive their first preference for the following committees; development and organisation; services to members; policy development and campaigns, and; international. 

These four Committees were, at the time, the “strategic committees” and every NEC member did get allocated to one (and generally only one) of these Committees.

• fair representation should be built in by accommodating the needs of the members in the reserved seats, those in the smaller service groups, additional members and young members first; 

I couldn’t say whether this was actually done since what happened in practice was that the NEC received a paper with proposals for Committee membership which it then endorsed.

• proportionality should be achieved by ensuring that approximately 64% of seats are held by women; 

This was generally done (proportionality being so much easier to monitor than fair representation).

• every effort should be made to ensure broad equality of involvement; 

Had I bothered to read this back in 2011 I think I might have felt that it could have made a cat laugh. Some NEC members would end up on several Committees whilst others (myself for example) ended up on just one.

• where nominations/vacancies outweigh the number of positions on a given committee the outcome should be determined by election rather than allocation; 

This literally never happened in my time on the NEC. Apart from the political fund Committees, NEC Committee membership was agreed when the NEC “nodded through” the recommendations from (or on behalf of) the Presidential team.

• elections for the Labour link and GPF committees should be held amongst the relevant sets of levy payers; 

This did always happen. The majority on the NEC would caucus in advance and issue a list of “who to vote for” (which one of the new members of the NEC once inadvertently showed me) just to make sure that the likes of Bernie Gallagher, myself and Paul Holmes did not get elected to the Labour Link Committee.

• no member should sit on more than one political fund committee; 

This had not always been part of the approach but it was something that the NEC settled upon during my time (as I recall there was some resentment when one individual got themselves elected to both Political Fund Committees in addition to the ones they had been allocated to).

• at least two members of each of the smaller bodies (three in the case of UIA) should be women, in order to reflect proportionality; 

This was easy to implement.

• each committee should maintain a profile of its appointments which should be updated on a regular basis to measure the extent to which fair representation and proportionality are achieved; 

If this was done I never saw any evidence of it.

• flexibility will be required and unforeseen circumstances will have to be dealt with pragmatically; 

Mere ordinary NEC members probably didn’t see this happening. I myself didn’t, but perhaps I wasn’t looking.

• the presidential team will have an important ‘refereeing’ role in determining the eventual outcome and recommending an acceptable balance between allocation and election. 

This was slightly misleading. The “acceptable balance between allocation and election” turned out to be 100% allocation (apart from the Political Fund Committees) every time, and the proposed allocations came up at the NEC in the name of the Presidential Team. If they were referees they were also goalkeepers, team captains and senior officials of FIFA.

The new Presidential Team face a tricky first task trying to satisfy the preferences of as many NEC members as possible. Some NEC members may be unhappy with the proposed allocations. I was part of this process on seven occasions and was unhappy on six of them. I got over it - and so will anyone who is upset this time.

There will - I hope - be many changes in how the UNISON NEC operates over the coming period, but one element of sensible continuity will be if, the Presidential Team having done all they reasonably can to satisfy the preferences of NEC members, the NEC endorses the proposed Committee allocations, so that the Committees can proceed to elect their Chairs.

If the Committee allocations are put to the NEC en bloc then any members who are unhappy can vote against them and, if a majority are in favour, the NEC can get on with changing the Union.