Young Workers Better Off in UNISON

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Conference
2003 National Delegate Conference
Date
25 February 2003
Decision
Carried as Amended

Conference believes that young workers join a trade union for the same reason as every other worker, regardless of age, for the work-based benefits membership brings. For too long sections of the trade union movement have stuck to the outdated view that a whole generation of workers is ideologically opposed to joining a union. This has resulted in some well intentioned but misdirected attempts to recruit young people into the union movement.

Conference notes that UNISON is radically reforming its young members’ campaign, rejecting age specific messages and promoting the simple message that in relation to your terms and conditions you are better in a union. The union is doing this by using modern marketing tools to compare unionised to non-unionised workplaces. For example advertising the fact that the average trade union member working in a unionised workplace will be paid, overall, eight per cent more than their counterparts in non-unionised workplaces.

This new campaign has been tested nationally with, for example, promotional postcards being distributed in workplaces, bars, cinemas and clubs across the UK. At a regional level it is being tested with a pilot recruitment project in the West Midlands, involving the extensive mapping of key workplaces backed up by a targeted regional advertising strategy, for example billboard adverts outside of the selected workplaces.

Conference believes that these new activities contributed towards the large increase in young members’ recruitment during 2002, but recognises that an increasing tendency on the part of employers to recruit young people through agencies and on a variety of atypical contracts including casual, temporary, and fixed term, presents a major obstacle to recruitment; and that these and other groups of workers, such as modern apprentices, are in definite need of representation. Conference recogises that such representation will be most effective within the context of improved employment protection, including employment rights from day one.

Conference also believes that young activists are key to the future recruitment of young members and that there is still a lack of young members in mainstream branch, regional and national positions which needs to be addressed.

Conference calls on the National Executive Council to:

1)roll out the recruitment campaign piloted with young members in the West Midlands across the whole of the union and ensure that all the promotional items used during this pilot are made available to branches and regions;

2)work with branches, regions and service groups to place the key work-based issues confronting modern apprentices, agency workers and those on temporary and atypical contracts at the centre of our bargaining agenda. And that this information is used to launch campaigns at national, regional and branch level, relevant to these groups of workers;

3)work with the National Young Members’ Forum, branches and regions to encourage branch young members’ officers to move into mainstream branch, regional and national positions.