Read this article in:
12 March, 2007
A rank-and-file vote to merge two major British trade unions was approved on 8 March, and the UK will have its biggest union, totalling two million workers, on 1 May. In a mail ballot referendum, union members of Amicus and Transport & General Workers Union (TGWU) in the UK and Ireland voted to merge their unions.
Eighty-six percent of all TGWU members that voted backed the merger, while 70% of Amicus members that voted also gave approval to create the new, yet-to-be named union. The union will now comprise 30% of the UK’s Trade Union Congress, and will be the country’s dominant trade union in a wide swath of services and industries, ranging from transport and manufacturing – including print, paper, rubber, chemicals and oil – to food and farming, as well as banking, public services, and the voluntary sector.
Both unions utilised a full and transparent process which took two years to complete. In the initial stages, the trade union GMB was included in three-way discussions, but that union dropped out due to regional structure differences.
"The new union will be a progressive, organising, fighting-back industrial giant,” said TGWU Gen. Sec. Tony Woodley, that is “focused above all on winning for our members in the workplace, and taking trade unionism to the millions who need it."
"The new union will be the greatest campaigning force on behalf of ordinary people that has ever existed,” stated Amicus Gen. Sec. Derek Simpson. “It is a precursor to the creation of a single global trade union movement capable of challenging the might of multinationals who seek to play workforces and governments off against each other to reduce jobs and hard won pay and conditions."
Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson shaking hands
Woodley and Simpson will serve as Joint General Secretaries of the new union. A sole general secretary will be elected in a membership ballot in 2010. Both expressed a strong commitment to organising, stating that within three years, 10% of the combined union’s budget will be aimed at recruitment.
A short list of possible names for the new union has been developed, and those names will be put before the membership in a democratic vote in the near future.
TGWU was formed in 1922 when 14 unions, representing factory workers, dockers, stevedores, lightermen, transport staff, and clerks, merged into one union. Amicus was a more recent merger of trade unions. In 2002, the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU) and Manufacturing, Science, Finance (MSF) merged to create it. In 2004, The Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU) merged into Amicus and the same year, the financial services union UNIFI did the same.