Report of UNISON National Executive Council 26th July 2022

The meeting was an additional meeting to the usual cycle and was of a shorter length (3 hours compared to the usual 6.5 hours).

General Secretary report

Christina McAnea gave her General Secretary report. 

It has been a good TUC demo on June 19th.

Tories are tearing each other apart, but their drift rightward is a concern. 

On pay, the local government offer was £1,925. The claim was for £2,000 or RPI inflation. The offer has got nowhere near inflation except for the very bottom of the pay scale.

There has been a big meeting of the staff and lay leaderships (Presidential Team; Industrial Action Committee chair; Service Group chairs; Chair of Policy Committee) to discuss the cost of living crisis and what we need to do to get strike ready. There will be a meeting of Regional Secretaries also next week to discuss the same and the deployment of staff resources.

We do not underestimate the challenge. We have very large groups of public sector members. The only other union close is RCN with 400,000. We may ballot one million members. Scale is a real challenge for us which some unions do not face. But we have no alternative but to push ahead with this work.

We are talking with other trade unions. If UNISON’s 1,200 staff only did strike preparation work, it would still not be enough so need to build capacity on ground.

The Scottish ballot of 26,000 local government workers closes today. This will let us see if the efforts made there have worked. Several hundred staff have been doing phone banking, pls us the union has used text messaging.

The NEC’s Industrial Action Committee has offered full pay for the lowest paid members called on to strike in Scotland Local Government ballot.

Scotland Health are also doing a consultative ballot which finishes next week; the NEC sent a message of support.

Branches who do better generally with ballot turnouts have more activism before a ballot.

The union is looking at better, quicker, easier to access systems to do telephone banking, allowing us to be more flexible, with scripts etc so we can ring more people. There will be a report to the Development & Organisation Committee about this.

None of the pay offers are fully funded and government will try and play off staff and services.

The NEC agreed messages of support to AQA and OCS members who are on strike this week in the North West. 

The union is launching a Judicial Review regarding the Government change in law to bring in agency workers during strike action.

There has been a win on holiday pay for term-time workers in the Supreme Court. The NEC sent congratulations to the team who had worked on it.

It is good that the Rwanda flights have not gone ahead. UNISON is supporting the next day of action against this which coincides with the next court case in September. Credit is due to the PCS for their legal challenge to this. It was confirmed branches will receive notice of the September court case so they can support any actions around this.

There has been a good legal decision that Long Covid is a covered by the Equality Act. 

Presidential Team report

Amerit Rait, Vice-President, reported for the Presidential Team:

On equality, the Presidential Team has had several meetings with the National Black Members Committee on increasing participation.

Julia Mwaluke will join the Industrial Action Committee.

There has been discussion about a member of the NEC elected to a National Black Members seat joining the Staffing Committee. April Ashley is agreed to replace Sarah Littlewood as Sarah has asked to come off due to personal reasons. The four Black Members rep will meet again for a final discussion on this.

National Disabled Members seat representatives also asked for a place on the Staffing Committee. Two of the current membership of the Staffing Committee declared in the meeting that they had disabilities that maybe are not be visible to others but that disabled members of the NEC are represented.

Further meetings with other national Self Organised Group chairs are planned. 

There is a recommendation for a seminar on the cost-of-living crisis by agreement between Presidential Team and General Secretary. 

The UNISON TUC Delegation was updated to include the two new Vice-Presidents, Amerit Rait and Libby Nolan.

Two additional Labour Party Conference delegates were proposed by the Presidential Team, Mandy Buckley and Mark Fisher.

Cost of Living crisis

On the 19th September there will be a large lobby of Parliament held. 

Health have been offered £1,400 flat rate (one third less than local government). This will go to ballot but nature of ballot is yet to be discussed by the Health SGE.

A Higher Education ballot is currently underway.

To win ballots we need more activists. The union is looking at a formal category of activists: ‘Pay activists’. 

The TUC public services meeting discussed aggregate versus disaggregate ballots. 

Mileage rates is still a huge issue. Should we consider how we lobby HMRC or other forms of action by members, such as refusing to use cars when not contractually obliged to? New bargaining guidance on mileage rates is out. 

NEC members felt that it was right that the cost-of-living was a priority for the union. It was raised whether the union could hold a national meeting online similar to the one in December 2021.

A statement by the NEC on the Cost-of-Living crisis for branches and members was agreed.

Two papers on NDC conference motions were not reached and will be discussed at an additional NEC meeting to be scheduled in early September.

National Executive Council statement 26th July 2022

The NEC wants to thank and congratulate all UNISON activists, members, and staff who ensured we had a tremendous turnout on the 18th June TUC Demo in London. It was a great day and the level of engagement from our union, especially coming immediately after our National Delegates Conference, was deeply inspiring.

Demonstrations, however great they are, should never be stand-alone events. They need to lead to activity focused on delivering on our objectives – and there is no greater objective at the moment than defeating the cost-of-living crisis and ensuring fair pay for working people. So, it was wonderful to leave the demo and find ourselves immediately thrust into activity to support the RMT dispute – a dispute which has focused everybody’s minds on the inequality that exists within our society and the power ordinary people have to fight for what’s right. We congratulate everyone who made it to an RMT picket line or strike rally, or helped spread the message through social media that their fight is our fight. We will continue to support the RMT and other unions approaching key disputes, including Unite at British Airways and the CWU in BT and Royal Mail to name just a few.

Not only are we proud to support other unions in dispute, but we are especially proud of UNISON members and branches fighting back. We send our solidarity and support to OCS strikers in the North West, St. Monica’s strikers in the South West, University of Leeds strikers in Yorkshire and Humberside and all UNISON members everywhere demanding fair treatment and decent wages and working conditions.

At our recent National Delegates Conference, our General Secretary Christina McAnea made it clear that in order to secure the pay awards we deserve, our union needs to be “strike ready”. The NEC intends to do all we can to heed this call. As an NEC we are committed to taking action on the motions agreed at NDC and we fully recognise the urgent need to tackle cost of living crisis.

Starting with our own NEC and committee meetings, we will ensure that every meeting includes an agenda item on “How we defeat the cost-of-living crisis”, in order to guarantee this question is a clear focus of the work we undertake and that we are able to throw the full weight of our union behind tackling this urgent challenge. 

Our Industrial Action Committee has already raised strike pay, but this is not just a question for that particular committee. 

Our Finance Committee will be doing all it can to make sure our resources are directed to organising for ballots and the action that may follow. 

Our Policy committee will be working with Christina and her team to ensure our communications strategy continually reinforces our need to be strike ready, offering best practice examples from branches that are well-versed in achieving strong ballot results and highlighting testimony from members who are struggling under the weight of low pay. 

The Development and Organisation committee are already undertaking focus work on organising, and this will be incorporated into ongoing work plans. They will also be bringing forward our experiences around organising from all corners and across all representatives within our committees, locally, regionally, and nationally.

Notes that the Campaign Fund Committee has already committed significant funding to campaign on the cost of living crisis and encourages regions and branches to access the fund.

As an NEC we will play our part in showing UNISON members that we are up for this fight and we hope in turn that this will inspire branches to do the same, convincing members that when the ballots come, there is every reason to vote and every reason to vote for action if that is what is required.

We know that engaging and inspiring our activists will be vital if we are to succeed, so we intend to build on the activist rally we had last December and organise a similar (but bigger) event, a “Cost of Living Summit” with a clear focus on how we win on pay…and we want to use this and other initiatives to increase the number of UNISON activists because we know that makes us all stronger.

We aim to be as proactive as possible, and we want everyone reading this to feel the same way. We want service groups to know that we will help them to coordinate activity where possible and that if they want to organise activity in advance of ballots to capture the anger that exists over pay – lobbies of parliament, town hall meetings, online rallies – we will support them to do so. In fact, we want branches, regions, service groups, self-organised groups and anyone else to know that if you have a plan, or even an idea on how we can strengthen ourselves to win for our members, the NEC will support you.

It is vital that we deliver for UNISON members and the NEC doesn’t intend to leave a single stone unturned to do so. The time for action is now. Enough is enough. We demand better and UNISON is ready to fight for it!

Statement of the NEC, agreed at its meeting held on 26 July 2022.