UNISON officials threaten branches and activists over pay campaign

UNISON branches have been told they do not have the democratic right to make a recommendation to their members to reject the pay offer. Presumably the same restriction would be applied to any branches which wanted to recommend their members vote to accept the pay offer but since none have so far decided to do so, we simply don't know.

However, UNISON national officers have also criticised individual activists, especially those with elected positions at a national level of the union, for signing a declaration committing themselves to voting to reject the pay offer. This statement was recently published on this website, and over fifty signatures of prominent UNISON activists were collected in a few days. However, in the light of this campaign of intimidation being waged by the UNISON national officials, we have decided to remove the list of individual names from the statement in order to avoid them facing any punitive action by the union bureaucracy.

Of course, UNISON members will be asking themselves why a union which claims to be both democratic and member-led would feel it necessary to make such a heavy-handed response to a statement signed by only a few dozen prominent activists. We can only assume that those who pushed so hard for the union not to make any recommendation against the pay offer did so because they actually want the membership to fall for the idea that the new offer is actually a significant improvement on the old one. Any credible campaign to mobilise members in opposition to the new offer, and in support of the union's original claim - for a pay rise in line with inflation, unstaged and with the abolition of the lowest pay band - would therefore be a threat to their hopes for a peaceful reconciliation with the Department of Health.