Category: NEC

NEC hears that building for the NHS strike ballots is the ‘priority’

UNISON’s national executive council (NEC) met today and agreed that the forthcoming NHS industrial action ballots will be its priority after hearing details plans of the work being undertaken now to build turnout.

General secretary Christina McAnea updated the meeting on bargaining, negotiations, disputes and industrial action that the union is currently engaged in, across sectors.

On health, she noted that a ballot opened in Scotland on 3 October, with phone-banking set to start this week. The ballot for England, Wales and Northern. Ireland opens on 27 October.

“These combined ballots will mean we could be balloting over 400,000 members by the end of the year. The key priority is to turn out the vote to get over 50%. This is a huge logistical challenge and requires focussing our resources on the ballots,” observed Ms McAnea.

Earlier, she had said that, while the union will be celebrating Black History Month throughout October, “we don’t just do this for one month of the year, but make sure that this is a part of our work all year”.

More widely, the general secretary said that she couldn’t remember a time when a “new prime minister and a new chancellor have been such a unifying force!” They had no mandate, she said.

“But the mask has now completely gone. They’re not even pretending to be ‘one-nation’ Conservatives any more.”

Ms McAnea said that the government’s aim was to: “Take from the poorest to give the richest”, which “gives us a lot of ammunition”.

She also told the meeting that UNISON has issued proceedings with the High Court, triggering the start of the process to seek a judicial review of the government’s “new regulations to allow the use of agency workers to break strikes”.

The general secretary’s report also updated council members on the developing Together We Rise campaign and explained that the union wants every MP to be visited by a member at the We Demand Better lobby of Parliament on 2 November, organising jointly with the TUC.

Before Ms McAnea spoke, the meeting heard a shocking report from Lesia Semeniaka (pictured above), the international officer of Atomprofspilka, the Nuclear Power and Industry Workers Union in Ukraine.

Thanking UNISON and members for their “very important” moral and financial support, Ms Semeniaka said that she was speaking on the 232nd day of a war in which “Russia is committing genocide of Ukrainian people”.

She talked of recent civilian victims of Russian attacks, together with attacks on infrastructure and on educational and cultural sites.

“According to Putin, he is waging war on all Western countries.”

Ms Semeniaka said that the Russian leader’s wider aim is clear – to deprive Western European countries of fuel in the winter, provoking people onto the streets to overthrow democratic governments.

Speaking of union members facing torture by invading forces and being used civilians as a “human shield”, she reminded the meeting that the international Red Cross is being denied access to any Russian-held Ukrainian prisoners.

No international bodies have any influence over Russians, she said, labelling Putin’s forces as “terrorists”.

The meeting also heard reports on:

  • the state of pay claims and new ballots across service groups, including developments on phone banking to boost turnouts;
  • developments in internal the running of elections;
  • adopting 2023 as the Year of the Black Worker; and
  • received and accepted the latest financial statement.

The article NEC hears that building for the NHS strike ballots is the ‘priority’ first appeared on the UNISON National site.

‘A struggle is a struggle. That’s why we’ve got to stick together’

UNISON president Andrea Egan says she’s given her life to the trade union movement. A committed UNISON and local government activist of over three decades in Bolton, she “couldn’t be prouder” to be from the North West,

Describing how the union has given her the resources and space to help make a difference, she noted: “As a working-class woman, it’s allowed me to really fulfil that deep sense of how unfair and unequal society is, and has allowed me a platform to do that work and given me a structure to influence change.”

Ms Egan’s organising track record is strong: leading UNISON’s first industrial action against academisation of two Bolton secondary schools in 2008; organising to stop the closure of local childrens’ centres; pushing for trans policies in her local council and fighting tirelessly for disability inclusion.

It’s unsurprising that she believes that collective organising is where UNISON is most powerful.

“We’re an organising union. When you’re organised and winning, it attracts people to join the union, as opposed to just servicing.”

Servicing, she explains, is the ‘insurance policy’ feature of unions, that promises protection in case of any workplace issues. For Ms Egan, although this “can’t be the main focus of who we are”, the two features of the union aren’t mutually exclusive.

“In my branch, if somebody rings and there’s a disciplinary or a grievance, we consider: ‘Can that be a collective grievance?’ If it’s an issue of wages or bullying, we consider: ‘Who else in that workplace is suffering from that same issue?’

“We try to collectivise the issues. We’ve supported campaigns when employers want to target or have failed one member, and other workers have stepped forward. We have organised those workers to stand together to take action.”

Referencing successful UNISON campaigns in the region from rehabilitation workers in Wigan to winning the living wage for commissioned care workers across Greater Manchester, Ms Egan said “we can see the model of organising in all of those wins.”

Given that UNISON members work within public services, Ms Egan recognises the union holds a unique position in its capacity to engage the public and local communities.

“I’ve led some fantastic campaigns, which were only fantastic through the engagement of the community. We often forget that.

“During the academy campaign, I would attend branch committee and remind our stewards: ‘Don’t forget, this isn’t just about the children’s section fighting the academy programme. It’s about you – grandparents, parents, aunties and uncles who have kids in those schools. You’ve all got a part to play’.”

Equalities

As newly-appointed president of UNISON’s national executive council, Ms Egan is keen to lend her power to amplify issues of equality. She said: “I use every power and opportunity I’ve got, and I won’t leave any equality group behind. We’ve got to do whatever we can where people are disadvantaged, or there’s a potential for them to be treated differently and unequally in the workplace.”

Ms Egan is a proud trans ally and recently celebrated the launch of UNISON’s new trans equality campaign: “Being president of the largest union in the UK gives me a platform to be able to advocate and be a trans ally. I’ve always been an ally.

“I might be a white, heterosexual, able-bodied female, but that doesn’t mean I cannot understand what [trans people] are going through. As a white working-class woman, brought up by a single mum on a housing estate, I understand struggle.

“A struggle is a struggle. That’s why we’ve got to stick together.”

Ms Egan at UNISON’s trans equality campaign launch

As her presidential project, Ms Egan has chosen the Endeavour Project in Bolton, which supports survivors of domestic abuse and “doesn’t leave anyone behind”. The organisation offers a pet fostering service, to ensure that survivors of domestic abuse don’t have to give up their pets or leave them with abusers.

Every July, the organisation coordinates a ramble on Holcombe Moor in memory of Ellen Strange, and also honours the women who have been killed by domestic abuse in the past 12 months, which Ms Egan attends as part of group of local UNISON members.

As president of the UK’s biggest trade union at a time where the government are openly targeting unions, Ms Egan recognises UNISON is facing a “massive challenge”

In response to Tory leadership candidate Liz Truss’s statement that she will crack down on trade unions, Ms Egan said: “It’s not solely an attack on the trade unions, it’s an attack on the working class, because it’s the trade unions who organise the working class and have the power to give people a voice.

“When Truss says she wants to undo all the red tape, that won’t just affect union members, it affects the whole of society and all the things we’ve worked for.”

The article ‘A struggle is a struggle. That’s why we’ve got to stick together’ first appeared on the UNISON National site.

General secretary reiterates need for branches to be ‘strike ready’

General secretary Christina McAnea reiterated the need for UNISON branches to be “strike ready” when she addressed today’s meeting of the union’s national executive council (NEC).

Rearranged from last week, after being postponed due to the heat emergency, this was the first meeting of the council after June’s national delegate conference (NDC) and was chaired by the new president, Andrea Egan.

Ms McAnea looked back to conference and to the TUC demo in London that came at the end of the union’s week in Brighton (pictured).

It had been a big ask, she said, coming as it did the day after NDC closed. Yet, “as ever, UNISON was the biggest grouping”, she noted.

Since NDC, where she had spoken of “the dying days of an out-of-touch government”, she had been watching the imploding of the Conservative Party, and the race among leadership candidates “to go as far right as possible”.

Of the final two candidates, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, they were “both trying to out-tough each other” with “ludicrous” promises. Describing the spectacle as “unedifying”, Ms McAnea said that she had “called for a general election”.

After outlining the situation across service groups in terms of ongoing disputes and pay campaigns, the general secretary offered “huge congratulations to our UNISON communications team who have just won two TUC comms awards.”

In terms of upcoming work, Ms McAnea reported that there would be a national lobby of Parliament, and a rally in Westminster on 19 October as part of campaigning around the cost of living crisis.

That would also involve coordinated local campaign activity in constituencies across the country on the same day, town hall meetings and rallies, media activity and policy interventions ahead of the autumn budget.

The meeting also heard of the successful legal case that UNISON had taken to see long COVID classed as a disability, and it was stressed that the union should promote this more to branches and activists, to help them tackle employers who are refusing to treat it as such.

The meeting also applauded UNISON’s involvement in the recent Supreme Court case on holiday pay for term-time workers, and offered “congratulations to our superb legal department”.

There was a lengthy discussion of balloting and the use of phone banking in building turnout to ensure votes succeed in passing thresholds.

The council heard that UNISON is looking at ways of making phone banking easier and better, as well as exploring peer-to-peer texting.

The meeting also:

  • agreed a message of solidarity to Barnet workers who are in dispute;
  • heard about the work the union is doing around the government’s Rwanda deportation scheme;
  • agreed to hold a seminar on the cost of living crisis;
  • gave thanks to assistant general secretary Stephanie Thomas, who is retiring later this summer;
  • discussed the problems faced by low mileage rates, hearing that the union is doing lots of work in the background, including targeting some Conservative MPs on the subject, and has also issued new guidance on the subject.

The article General secretary reiterates need for branches to be ‘strike ready’ first appeared on the UNISON National site.