johninnit

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.

Very interesting piece by Jonathan Guthrie in the FT (read it before they slap the curse of subscription view on it), “Unions need to swap the red flag for pastel shades”. He’s drawing together the T&G/Amicus merger with a new paper on unions’ finanical outlook from LSE/PSI (with the snappy title of “Accounting for Collective Action: Resource Acquisition and Mobilisation in British Unions”).

His opinion is that unions need to revise their offer to prospective members to break out of a gradual decline. In many new industries, he believes, people’s view of work has moved on, to the point where there’s no longer a natural understanding of what a union might offer them.

“Unionists should not take Billy Bragg’s rallying call to ‘bring up the banners from the days gone by’ any more literally than modern Christians do biblical prescriptions on camel husbandry. Leave those dusty banners in storage, comrades, they remind nervous punters of Arthur Scargill. Instead, pop on pastel polo shirts, brew some fresh coffee and organise a speed networking event.”

Now, I like the old banners more than most people I think (always look forward to a good march behind them on May Day), but he has a powerful point. Fingers crossed there are signs of a change here, with one of the proposed merger names (OneUnion) sounding very fluffy and aspirational - just right for the large gains the union could make in the union-wastelands of the business services industry.

Funny how some of the unions’ best and fairest coverage (outside the Morning Star) seems to come from the FT. You’d not expect it given their readers, but I guess if there’s one thing a capitalist takes seriously it’s capitalism, so they’d want to hear pretty accurately when unions have something to say which might affect them. Union analysis seems to be taken much more seriously there than at the Times or Torygraph. Not enough to make me read it mind… (except Martin Lukes!)

Still a lot of speculation about who will get the union votes in a Labour leadership contest - Amicus are cheering for Brown, and the non-affiliated RMT declared for McDonnell - Everyone else seems to be waiting to see the final cut, and maybe see what they might get from any of the candidates.

Whoever gets it though, and whoever promises unions the most, it’s nice to see we’ll all know very clearly who’s promising the least for people at work. This sort of thing should focus minds nicely come the next election:

Ridiculous Politics: David Cameron: I’ll make it easier for companies for fire you