UNISON at 30 – celebrate good times, come on!

Thirty years ago this month, UNISON was born from the merger of three unions: Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE), National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and National and Local Government Officers’ Association (NALGO). Today UNISON is the biggest trade union in the UK with more than 1.253 million members, 75% of whom are women. Numbers matter because numbers bring power – as we illustrated some years ago in our first TV advert. UNISON was the first trade union to advertise on TV – with the ants and the bears, which saw a bear ignoring one ant, and then two ants, before a whole crowd of ants make the bear listen and get out of the way. With a voice over from actor James Bolam, it went on to win best commercial direction at the British Animation Awards in 1998. Numbers also helped UNISON to introduce the national minimum wage. It was a decades-long passion of Rodney Bickerstaffe, who was general secretary of NUPE when the merger happened, and went on to become first and associate general secretary and then general secretary of UNISON until he retired in 2001. In the face of opposition from some other unions, UNISON made the national minimum wage a key campaign, getting it through the TUC and the Labour Party, with the Labour government introducing it in April 1999. A month earlier, thousands had joined a UNISON march from Gateshead to Newcastle, across the Tyne Bridge, to support the new wage. It was followed by a fantastic concert that featured the l...
Source: UNISON meat hygiene - Category: Food Science Authors: Tags: Article News Croyde Bay legal services UNISON 30 Source Type: news