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South West TUC Rep Awards 2013

This month the South West TUC held its reps awards and, I’m pleased to say, two of the recipients were from Dorset.

Trade unions would be nothing without the army of unpaid volunteers who work at a local – and sometimes national – level, keeping members informed of union activities, running campaigns in their workplaces and representing colleagues in negotiations with employers.

They save employers money too. A recent TUC report showed that the presence of reps in a workplace can save the UK economyas much as £701m a year, or £2m a day.

The two Dorset reps were Amanda Brown, who won the Union Learning Rep Award for promoting learning at Dorset County Council, and Tim Nicholls, who was highly commended in the Campaigning and Organising Award for helping resurrect Dorchester’s May Day Festival.

Amanda – a UNISON member – is a social worker who organised special learning days at work to encourage colleagues to return to education.

“Like many other women, ‘education’ was a scary word to me because I had little confidence in my ability,” she said. “I was always told at school that I could do well if I put my mind to it but, living in South Africa with a punishing style of teaching put me off learning in formal settings.

“UNISON and the TUC have changed that for me and I want others to know that learning does not need to be academic and that it can be tailored to individual’s needs and can be supported all the way.”

Tim is a civil servant and PCS member who is secretary of the Weymouth and Portland Trades Union Council.

“When I first joined the trades council, it was moribund,” he said. “We turned it outwards and made it so it actually mattered to people, supporting local union branches and taking up community issues, such as campaigns to maintain lollipop people and libraries.”

The TUC report I mentioned earlier shows how beneficial union reps such as Amanda and Tim are to their employer as well as the economy.

The financial savings come in the form of more productive and better trained workforces, safer workforces, fewer cases taken to employment tribunals – so as staff tend to stay in post for longer, less is spent on recruitment and retention.

The report says a good deal of reps’ work takes place in their own time and that for every £1 spent on union facility time in the public sector (where the employer pays the union rep to represent colleagues), between £3 and £9 is returned in accrued benefits.

Other benefits are creating a ready-made structure for consultation and negotation, early intervention when it comes to complaints, grievances and disciplinaries, helping to stop issues escalating, better communication when it comes to restructuring and a reduction in the number of days lost through industrial action.

Let me finish by congratulating Amanda and Tim on their awards and thanking them – and the thousands of volunteer reps across Dorset – for their invaluable work.

Nigel Costley

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