Thursday afternoon after the NEC meeting was the TUC Congress delegation meeting. This is where UNISON's delegates to TUC Congress come together to decide what motions we want to be submitted to Congress on behalf of UNISON.
The TUC Delegation is made up of people from across the union with spaces for NEC, regions, self organised groups, service groups and of course the young members forum. There were about 80 people there so it's a big delegation.
The key thing to be decided was which two motions we should submit to be debated at congress (which is the TUC's version of National Delegate Conference). Motions were on Affordable Housing, Public Services and Public Sector Pay. When I first looked at the motions, submitting a motion on public sector pay seemed obvious. As the debate continued it seemed much more sensible to submit pay as an emergency motion because lots of things are going to change over the coming months. We would then be able to submit a stronger and more accurate emergency motion on public sector pay. In the debate I spoke in favour of submitting the affordable housing motion, citing young members problems getting affordable social rented housing or getting onto the property ladder.
I'm glad to say that when the vote was taken we decided to submit the motions on public services and affordable housing.
3 comments:
But James what on earth made you think Pay isn't a huge issue to young members?
Of course pay is a huge issue for young members - to be dealt with in a different way.
Tactics
I didn't notice anything in the item saying pay WASN'T important to young members? What James says makes sense to me - UNISON could probably build some unity amongst unions for an emergency motion on pay as well. Just because it was an emergency motion at UNISON Conference doesn't mean its the most important thing we discussed. And what's the point in wasting our motions when we can usefully get other key issues raised and still get the pay issue discussed as well?
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