Amicus goes for Election of Officers

By Jim Barnes (TU Review)
The Amicus conference agreed, by a narrow margin to go for the election of officers above the level of local official.

This is a policy the left in the manual workers’ parts of manufacturing unions who made up Amicus have fought long and hard for. The Gazette group campaigned for it and they held a fringe meeting at the conference to promote the policy. It had standing room only with about 300 people attending,
Some within the Gazette group regard the election of officers as the holly grail.

Of the unions who made up Amicus the banking and finance sector would regard the election of officers as an anathema. On the other hand the GPMU operated the policy for some time and they saw it as working well, some of what was the AEEU divided on tribal left/right lines while the right in what was MSF worked hard to try and defeat it.

A number argued that this will make it difficult for women or ethnic minority people to gain position in the union, although this is a reflection of the education service rather than the method of appointment and there’s a lot to suggest that using the appointments process to compensate doesn’t actually work — there is little to see why it should. One young woman argued that she had a choice, if she was to have a career as a union officer, between getting a job in UNISON, where she would have a job for life (her words) or in Amicus where she would have to suffer an election periodically. This contribution didn’t go down well.

This decision creates a substantial difference with the TGWU where patronage is an important factor in the power struggles now so prevalent in the union; it will be a factor as they move towards merger with Amicus.

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