Today it was the turn of new lecturers’ union, UCU, to announce their ballot for their first General Secretary, and this one was a bit closer run than yesterday’s T&G/Amicus merger vote.

Sally Hunt, the General Secretary of AUT won with 52% of the vote under a new Single Transferable Vote system, which saw the count go to a second round, after the third placed candidate (Peter Jones) was eliminated and his votes reapportioned by second choice fairly evenly between Sally and Roger Kline. You can get the full scrutineer’s report here.

I’ve met Sally a few times and she’s very open and personable, so am glad to see the result for her. A bit one-sided maybe as I’ve never actually met Roger, though have heard positive things about him from his former NATFHE colleagues - perhaps why the outcome was so close run.

Happy to see though that Sally’s leading role in Unions21 will hopefully be continuing now - and it’s also very good to have more women at the top of the union movement - despite a lot of changes in the last few years, still less than a quarter of unions have female General Secretaries.

So - Congratulations, Sally, and good luck now in taking UCU on to the kind of success that this merger promises.

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.

Have you had a go at LabourSpace yet? It’s a sort of Big Brother for NGO campaigns. Every month there’s a new theme, and relevant lobby groups add their favourite campaigns. Users to the site vote on the campaigns, and the winner gets to have tea with Tony and Hazel and bend their ears a bit.

Anyway this is ‘work month’, which means unions are up for the prize. And so far there are 3 union campaigns in the house, two from the CWU and one from the TUC. They are:

Give Safety Some Teeth! (TUC)

Fines for work safety breaches are stupidly low in comparison with other corporate offences (compare £980,000 for Nationwide’s slip up in potentially revealing customer information with Granite Ltd’s £10,000 fine for not securing slabs which crushed an employee to death). Hundreds of people are still being killed at work in the UK every year, for want of some very simple safety measures. But bad employers will look at the tiny fines they might get and decide they can swallow lots of those rather than just pay up to play safe. Raising the level of fines will be simple, quick, uncontroversial with any decent employers, and save lots of lives.

Justice for Agency Workers (CWU)

Labour has done a lot of good in upping the UK’s stautory minimum working conditions, but there’s a gaping hole in this otherwise excellent work, which temp workers often fall through. A lot of people like agency work, but it’s also the case that many do it because so many companies are shirking their employer responsibilities by outsourcing that they can’t get a full time job. Whatever the reason, people working as temps shouldn’t be forced to take a huge hit in rights that everyone else now takes as a minimum standard. The Government has put back legislation on this recently, so this is an opportunity to keep up the pressure.

Save Gloucester Mail Centre (CWU Gloucestershire)

A reminder that unions are about standing together to protect their members in local disputes comes from the third campaign, which is seeking to get Royal Mail to reconsider plans to close a mail centre that would affect 400 staff working there. Instead they want to see the company conduct a proper study into the stated reasons for the closure, which look to be a smokescreen for cost cutting, or at least provide more serious support than is currently proposed for affected staff. The branch fear that this could be the start of a round of cutbacks in regional mail provision.

So if you’d like to see some tanks on the No10 lawn (or at least some union campaigners in the Cabinet Office), pick up your mouse and get clicking at LabourSpace.com

Barrie Clement (right) trips the light fantastic at a union reception

Yesterday’s Media Guardian carried a very interesting article by Peter Wilby, which gave a number of clues as to the way work and union issues are reported in the UK. It concerned the apparently rapidly approaching extinction of the last of the UK’s labour correspondents - a once mighty journalistic species, who bestrode Fleet Street, filling significant chunks of the papers, back in the days when unions ruled the earth.

Today though, they’re nearly all gone - with the sad news that one of the last of the big beasts, the Indy’s Barrie Clement, may be about to hang up his trilby. Labour issues are being split into the business section for company news and finance, and the careers section for fluffy employee advice. Serious analysis of what’s happening to the world of work is falling through the gap sometimes, as speculation and political gossip seem to be crowding it out of the limited column inches available. And of course, unions are being mentioned in papers a lot less than they used to be.

This tends to reduce stories involving unions down to two dimensions, and we end up with easy-to-spot row-based stores like “Travel Chaos as Strikes Loom” or “Union Boss Slams Government”. Every season throws up a crop of “___ Of Discontent” headlines, And if your correspondent’s depth of industrial relations expertise only goes as far as the last FPB or CBI press release they read, they mightn’t know that industrial action was a tiny fraction of the real Winter they’re likening it to.

For non-sensationalist stories, unions now compete with any number of shonky PR surveys put out by recruitment agencies, employment lawyers, or office lunch cafe chains. And face it, a union-led story is always going to come 2nd to “99% of workers have sex on the desk, whilst playing minesweeper, on expenses, claims a new survey of 3 people”.

Unions need to up their game on imaginative stories, as they can’t count on people finding them inherently newsworthy any more. This isn’t always a bad thing for the reader, but it is hard to do on voluntary sector money.

The article makes a *slight* overstatement in the number of press officers at the TUC - it’s more like 3 than 11 - but hey, obviously the author isn’t a labour correspondent, so can be forgiven for not knowing anything about it! The big 2 unions might have more than this, but I think 2 or 3 is the norm for large unions, and in the smaller ones, one or two people might cover the entire comms brief, writing the magazine, website and internal newsletters, as well as press and campaigns. Hardly the kind of resources needed for a repositioning of union communications.

There might be a silver lining though in the wonders of teh interweb. Have a look at the output of the Guardian’s own David Hencke, a very hard-working Westminster correspondent who also has the industrial brief. David’s union stories may regularly get spiked for the dead tree edition, but make much more of a presence in his own podcasts and blogs. Let’s hope the grand new multi-channel future hasn’t come too late for the dinosaurs!

Hat tip: James Richards

New evidence suggests that Dave’s rude kid photo-op curse started long before we’d first thought: