Sunday, June 17, 2007

Guide to UNISON Conference 2007


This year’s annual NationalDelegate Conference (NDC) is in Brighton. It starts 10am on Tuesday, 19 June, and lasts until Friday afternoon. It is the union's ruling body and decides upon campaign priorities and policies.

To anyone who hasn’t been before I would recommend clicking onto the UNISON website and watch the short video of last year’s NDC at Bournemouth. The NDC is huge, you don’t realise how big an organisation UNISON is until you go to conference and see how widespread geographically the membership is. You’ll hear accents from all over the British Isles (and much further afield).

Last year over 1875 delegates registered (60% females which are pretty close to the 2/3 female to male make up of the membership). However, only 786 out of 1200 odd branches in UNISON registered.

Just to confuse matters, UNISON is also holding a number of other conferences. UNISON is divided into “service groups”. Each service group holds its own annual conference. As well as service group annual conferences it also holds conferences for Retired members, Black members, disabled members, LGBT members and women members. Some other trade unions will tease UNISON activists about the number of conferences we have. They have a point, but in such a diverse national trade union of 1.3 million members there has to be some way of involving members in the running of their union. I am more concerned with the problems that many branches have getting members to become delegates in the first place.

The conference is really an Annual General Meeting. An annual report is tabled, the union accounts are published, rule changes debated, senior officers of UNISON such as the General Secretary, Dave Prentis, makes an address (Tuesday afternoon), guest keynote speakers such as Ashok Sinha from “Stop Climate Chaos”, Baroness Amos on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Alison Shepherd, President TUC. There will also be a briefing on Equal pay. The unions elected National Executive Council members sit en masse behind the platform. There are massive TV screens and union logos everywhere. There is a mysterious and mystifying organisation called, “Standing Orders Committee” which appears to have a lot of influence. Outside the conference there is an exhibition fair. What many activists are most interested in are the annual “bun fights” over union policies. Delegates will “debate” the pros and cons of particular motions and amendments. These debates can be confusing, silly, exciting, boring, fascinating, funny, sad and utterly bewildering to first time delegates. I will not even try to explain the “Snake” on Friday.

There are also “fringe” events (official and unofficial) held during lunchtimes and early evening. I’ll be going to the Health & Safety fringe on Wednesday lunchtime, the London Region fringe on “Gun Crime” Wednesday 6pm and the “Are we the New Capitalists?” fringe on Thursday 5.15pm Alpha East 1 (which I will be chairing – see motion 101 “Pensions Funds and Capital Stewardship – Towards the Citizen Economy” I’ll post something later on this motion.). Finally, there are the late evening functions, the best being the “Labour Link” and the London Region socials.

2 comments:

Mark said...

An interesting guide to the Unison conference, John. I hope new delegates found it useful. I bet Unison doesn't publish anything like this though, these days. Probably just as well.
Best wishes

John Gray said...

thanks Mark - no it doesn't (hope you don't mind if I nick some of those brill NALGO posters for future use!