Ethnicity Pay Gap

Conference believes that the ethnicity pay gap (EPG) is a major cause of in-work poverty experienced by Black workers and the cause of severe intergenerational inequality in Black communities. Conference welcomes the moves made by the National Black Members Committee (NBMC) to highlight and campaign to close the gap. The EPG is as high as […]

Council provided care

Conference notes the campaigns for a National Care Service in each of the 4 nations and UNISON’s support, in principle, for such a proposal. Local government in Scotland, Wales and England and that any proposals for a National Care Service should respect and build upon this. Conference notes that social care is essentially a community-based […]

Menopause awareness and support in local government

Conference notes that as a union of one million women, women will always be at the heart of UNISON. Conference also notes that UNISON has proudly campaigned for many years to remove what many campaigners and activists call the last great workplace taboo. Conference further notes that the demography of UNISONs membership in social care […]

Equality is UNISON Business

Conference notes that one of UNISON’s main aims is, as per UNISON’s rule book, “to seek to ensure equality of treatment and fair representation for all members and to work for the elimination of discrimination on grounds of race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, disability, age or creed”. To achieve this, UNISON seeks for branches to […]

Cost of Living Crisis and Black Workers

Conference notes that everything is going up fast – 12 percent now but forecasts of upwards to 22 percent. However, the pay of many UNISON members has been effectively frozen for almost 12 years. We can’t make ends meet! We have a cost of living crisis because of the decisions made by political leaders and […]

Cuts and funding

Conference believes that, due to years of under-funding and cuts from the Westminster government, local government across the UK is in grave danger. Extensive UNISON research from last autumn revealed that councils across the UK were facing a funding shortfall of £3.2bn in 2023/24 and a cumulative funding gap of £5.3bn for 2024/25. A small […]

Tackling Health Inequalities and Closing the Life Expectancy Gap

Conference notes that health inequalities in the UK, that were already unacceptably large, have intensified in recent years. Conference notes that one of the most measurable demonstration of such inequalities is the “social gradient in health” which outlines differences in life expectancy for different groups of people. For example, women living in the least-deprived 10 […]

Integrated Care Systems

Conference notes that the government’s new Health and Social Care Act introduced Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) into 42 areas of England, which became fully operational in July 2022. Under the act, former Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) have been absorbed into the ICSs – specifically into their boards (ICBs). Each ICB will take on the commissioning […]

Radical Change in Social Care in Wales Can Influence the Whole of the UK

Conference welcomes the good work UNISON is leading in Wales in partnership with the Welsh government and other unions to address the long term crisis in social care and recognises developments here have enormous potential to influence how care is delivered across the UK. UNISON’s campaigning resulted in Wales TUC and Welsh Labour’s adoption of […]

Defend the Right to Strike

Conference is alarmed at the new Strikes (Minimum Services Levels) Bill for Great Britain which further attacks the right to strike and with draw your labour in this country. Conference believes that the right to strike is a fundamental human right and needs to be exercised now to win better wages and conditions in the […]

Organising to Win – Building Workplace Power through Participation

Conference notes that following a period of membership decline in early 2021, UNISON fought back in the latter half of 2022 to achieve net membership growth. Record recruitment of over 180,000 new members was 30 percent above 2021 levels and exceeded even the highest surges of joiners during the 2020 Covid pandemic peak. Membership growth […]

A Vision for a National Care Service

Conference recognises the need for change in social care. The current system values neither staff or service users. It creates a low paid workforce and fails to recognise the skills required for the high quality social care that our most vulnerable citizens deserve. The current system across the UK enables and promotes a market approach […]

Trial the 4-day work week

Conference believes it is time that Universities actively participated in 4-day work week trials. Universities are centres of research and innovation and many want to be ‘employers of choice’ (employers that people actively want to work for). They are the perfect institutions to try new approaches to work. Findings suggest that a 4-day week enhances […]

Securing the legacy of the year of disabled workers

Conference notes the success of UNISON’s Year of Disabled Workers 2022 and places on record our thanks to all of our disabled members and activists who have driven this success throughout our union. Through this year, we have seen renewed focus on the experience of disabled members in our union, in the workplace and in […]

Towards an inclusive Women’s Health Strategy

Conference notes the December 2021 government policy paper ‘Our Vision for the Women’s Health Strategy for England’, published after 100,000 women shared their personal experiences around the way the health and care system listens to women. The document looked at the approach to women’s health by putting women’s voices at the heart of this work. […]