The members say yes
At the merger announcement today, where T&G and Amicus revealed a very high in-favour vote (from a pretty high turnout) in both unions for the formation of a new super-union.
Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley had a strong message about how the merger made industrial, financial and political sense. Derek Simpson said this had made it much easier to achieve than other mergers, and boded well for the future of the new union:
This is an historic day for the trades union movement. It’s the first merger that has been created due to a strategic decision, rather than financial reasons or loss of membership. And we recognise the opportunity in removing competition between ourselves, and enabling our resources to be used to benefit our members.
I know that comments are out there already that what we expect to happen is that we’re going to waste one or two or three years in political infighting. Well, I said that this merger is different to any that’s gone before and anyone who thinks we’re going to waste two or three years before we get round to tackle the problems on behalf of our members will have another thing coming. Because we will not do that. We are as one in our strategic objectives.
Tony Woodley had some good replies to questions about how the merger would affect the Labour block vote - a bit of a red herring as union co-operation has been on the rise anyway within Labour, and merging the unions didn’t give the two of them any more votes than they had apart. He was bullish about the potential for growth that a merger could bring:
It’s not about block votes… It’s not that many decades ago that the T&G alone had two million members. The AEEU had 1.1 million members at one time. There’s no sense in coming together to make one large declining union. And we’re not going to do that. We’re going to put money into organising, helping us grow our membership as opposed to sitting on our declining assets.
Still no word on the name though, and members will get to choose that from a range of options, after there’s been a lot more thought about what it could be.
March 8th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Unions compete with each other for members. In effect, they are businesses, albeit of a specialised nature.
If Unions are merging to make up more than 25% of the service industry in which they operate, then shouldnt this be refered to the OFT or the Monopolies and Mergers Commission?
March 8th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Interesting - though they’re not companies in that sense and I don’t think the Certification Officer have any rules about that.
Unions by and large try not to compete (it’s expensive and wasteful). Plus you can look at a lot of craft unions’ sectors for a different view. Take my own one, the NUJ, which has a near (well, apart from the BAJ) monopoly in media. No-one’s suggesting breaking that into smaller units.
Added to that, don’t forget that unions are a special case in that they’re democratically structured. Most posts are filled by volunteers, and they and the leadership (in most cases) are elected by the membership. If a company gets large and abuses its powers, it could be harder for shareholders to put a brake on its activities than it is for members of a union to turn the leadership out.
March 9th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
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