Congratulations to the drivers (though not the management by the sounds of it) of Eddie Stobart’s haulage firm. The Edinburgh Evening news reports that they refused extra payments of £500 each for a special assignment, when they found out that it was to strike-break against the UNITE-T&G distribution members at Tesco in Livingstone, Scotland.

UNITE-T&G’s Tony Trench said: “We think that this is an appalling way to do business - throwing large sums of money to get people to strike-break instead of sitting down and negotiating with us in an orderly fashion. We are humbly grateful to these guys who have turned down such large sums of money to support their comrades.”

Eddie Stobart always used to demand the highest standards of conduct from his drivers, wanting them to be ‘knights of the road’, to help him build a brand as industry leaders (and collect a huge fan club of strange people who like to count lorries along the way). It looks like they’ve passed the conduct test with flying colours, though maybe not in quite the way he intended.

All together now… “I want to be an Eddie Stobart driver…”

PS - Indisputedly the most useless bit of trivia I know (after ringing Stobarts’ unneccessarily helpful customer services for a bet 15 years ago) is the reason Stobarts lorries display a small Italian flag on their side. Apparently, their main contract was an Irish run when they were a small firm, and they wanted to put an Irish flag on the side, but didn’t have any orange paint, so they used red, and stuck to the wrong colour ever since out of quirky tradition. There - now don’t go saying there’s no exclusives on this site…

Sneak preview - Ooh! Isn’t that pretty? Very modern, but with the fluttering red flag / flames of protest merged in there too. Simple enough to resize small on the web or blow up large on a banner - only weakness might be small on black like it is in this snap.

The branding consultants have done them proud. I like - lots! Good luck to T&G & Amicus at the merger announcement later on today.

So Unite it is then - Christine Buckley has the scoop in the Times that it’s the least worst name for the new union. I didn’t think it was even one of the front runners for the name, but I think it fits the bill pretty well.

You may think ‘what’s in a name?’, but I reckon it’s pretty crucial to get right if the union is going to reach out beyond it’s traditional membership - something which is pretty much the last big hope for the growth of the UK union movement.

The name needs to work well on an aspirational basis - all the millions of professional and clerical people in new economy jobs, who are looking for a union, even if they don’t know it or know the first thing about unions (natural recruiting territory for Amicus).

But it also needs to be an immediate and clear statement that it is here to help people sort out workplace problems together, to fit well with the work started by the T&G, aiming at the other big non-union sector of vulnerable workers - the low pay, low conditions jobs that have traditionally slipped through the union net.

Unite seems to be a name that could work well in communications to both groups - fingers crossed now that the visual identity for it comes out in the same way, rather than leaning too much to one side, and risking alienating the other group.

It’s a bit similar to Unity mebbe, and there may be confusions on their planned international focus if they take up joint working with UNITE-HERE in the States. There’s a potential gift to mickey-takers with the name ‘Untie’, but it’s an old joke after it was done so effectively to United Airlines.

Least worst or not, I think you couldn’t have got better with a whole union of focus groups - good luck to them in making it fit the new organisation.

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.