Friday 19 August 2011

Who Do Unions Work For? Well, Not Their Members…

Plymouth City Council has frozen the country’s biggest public sector union out of formal staff negotiations amid a row over sweeping changes to pay and conditions.
Hardcore!
… Unison has been told that the city council would no longer “recognise” it as a negotiator for staff members after the union objected to money-saving proposals, which included changes to the working week, overtime practices, and expenses.
Helen Willis for Unison said: “It was clear that the proposals in their final form presented serious potential legal and equalities issues. We need to protect our members."
How noble of you. What did your members say, then?
Plymouth City Council said “confidence had been lost” in Unison when working towards collective agreements after the union did not implement the result of their ballot.
Oh..? Tell me more!
Unison leaders said they couldn’t sign the “collective agreement”, despite the majority of its members voting yes
Yup, you read that right – they carried out a ballot and got a majority vote to accept the agreement, and, in effect, turned around and disregarded this on the grounds that their members were too dim to understand the consequences!

That’s some chutzpah!
Unison said the council could make it difficult for relations to continue between staff and its representatives by withdrawing its facilities from council buildings. But she added that all union members had a right for their grievances to be heard and that the council could not refuse to hear the union’s voice.
Those members voted in an effort to ‘be heard’ and you ignored them!

Commenters are furious:
Stirlina:

“Good! We can get on with this now.

It's funny how unison say they are being silenced but they didn't listen to their members who voted yes to this deal. I wrote to unison resigning as a member and I got a ratty email back saying I didn't know what I was talking about and they had to fight. We don't want them to fight.almost everyone in my office thinks it's about time we get on with these changes. Not everyone is happy about losing unison but think it's better to do this than lose jobs. For once I support the council on this!”
Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, Unison…

9 comments:

SBC said...

"Who Do Unions Work.."

Sorry but under the Rules Of Grammar for Modern English you can't juxtapose that collective noun and verb in one sentence. Not without a negative anyways.

No, no, don't thank me, M'am...just doing my job.

Unknown said...

Didn't the EU set a precedent here? Either ignore the results of votes or keep trying until they get the "correct" result.It's the lefty way,they really don't do democracy.

Lord T said...

I was going to say something similar.

When they lose their jobs they clearly have a fallback in government with all that training and proven experience.

Captain Haddock said...

@ Jaded ..

I think you'll find that the precedent of ignoring the results of voting, if they don't coincide with the decision one wants .. began with Ted Heath ..

And look at the bloody mess that pompous, mysoginistic old " Boy's Choir Master" landed us with ..

SadButMadLad said...

Just proves that socialist states who are sooooo keen on democracy, especially in foreign climes, aren't so good at implementing it on their own doorsteps. Democracy and Unions - you've got to laugh, what an oxymoron. Or just moron.

David Gillies said...

SBC, I am somewhat perturbed by your failure to: a) use a full ellipsis (HTML entity …, Unicode U+2026) in the truncated quotation in your introductory material; b) the omission of a comma after the word 'sorry' in the second sentence of your comment, which clearly introduces a clause; c) your use of a sentence fragment immediately afterwards, and the inclusion of the barbarous neologism 'anyways'; d) your mis-spelling of the word 'Ma'am' in your fourth sentence.

When one aspires to the post of Grammar Nazi, one must constantly be on guard against the dreaded Law of Muphry.

David Gillies said...

Muphry's Law is immutable: in the comment above, the colon introducing the list should be after the word 'by' and the noun phrase 'your failure to' should prepend the first item in the list and not the list itself.

Due to the recursive nature of Muphry's Law, this comment contains grammatical errors.

SBC said...

"When one aspires to the post of Grammar Nazi, one must constantly be on guard against the "

LOL, missing the point much?

JuliaM said...

"Didn't the EU set a precedent here? Either ignore the results of votes or keep trying until they get the "correct" result."

Good point!

"Muphry's Law is immutable..."

As inevitable as death and taxes.. ;)