Unison recruitment video

What good are Frankie & Benny discounts when you're being made redundant and your local Accident & Emergency unit is closed?

I like that they keep using the word 'cover', you know, coz as they're a toothless organisation that does fuck all to call itself a union, they may as well be open about just being an insurance company for public sector workers.

I thought of putting something together, partly in response to the campaign, but also to indicate some of the developments that are going on in the organisation. The essential crux of the issue, is that the union hasn't expanded like it had intended and it's financial forecast doesn't look that great. Those of us dependent on some RO's, or literally any position within the union, might be able to tell you about 'natural wastage' while lots of cash is being put into a recruitment surge. A cursory glance at their jobs listing might show lots of FTC around recruitment, but organisers arent being replaced, which is the sort of stage were at.

The heads up came last year, and I have the precise figures somewhere, but they did tell us the organisation basically is required to recruit however many hundred or thousand NEW members each week, to maintain their existing structure. Which is pretty fucking bleak. This is spurring gimmicks in favour of genuine need based funding. It's also a disgrace when you realise the head honcho is on something akin to 100k and even the most moderate of people have a problem swallowing that.

The thing is they're not even that good at cheap insurance.

I would very much want to read an article like this.

Yeah, because of the cuts generally Unison are haemorrhaging members: losing the equivalent of one medium-sized branch every month (3-4000-odd). This campaign is an attempt to try to reverse that.

Which is bullshit, of course. If they actually wanted to grow they would fight about something: they recruited over 130,000 people during the pensions strike ballot period in 2011.

Having claimed that the pay freeze would be the next big thing, they are blatantly going to roll over as soon as they get an offer of 1% without strings from the employers…

I think you're talking about local government.

In HE, last year, they asked for 7% 'catch up pay'. Reading this strictly as a tactical issue, they set the bar too high, quite a few floundered over it and the ballot was a gnats whisker in favour, but clearly they didn't have a mandate to call for action. Instead they should have tried to steam roll it, by wining a lower payment to galvanise for a better pay offer the year after. I thought it was badly done and has impacted on our current inertia.