I understand why. "But your members are entitled to representation." A glossed HR person will say to me smugly when I explain that I can't attend a meeting at 2 days' notice because I am mostly a teacher. You have to attend is the implication. Your member is entitled to representation, we, as an organisation, are not obliged to make sure they have help. And I'll turn up to this meeting, and you'll probably sack them anyway. Even if you're in the wrong.Even if I prove you're in the wrong. You're prepared, happy even, to settle out of court, with a privacy clause.
So the press, the public, the politicians, remain suspicious of the unions. Jeremy Hunt is currently imposing a change of conditions on the doctors. Because, pretty much, he does not give a damn about maintaining their good will. As with teachers, politicians seem to assume there is a large cohort of potential junior doctors just waiting in the wings, waiting for all these lazy, uncommitted doctors to emigrate/quit so that they can leap into this new world of 24/7 hospitals (which apparently doesn't exist at the moment-who knew?) and accept the new terms and conditions. No wonder they are resistant. Perhaps they have witnessed teachers struggling with their new performance related pay and effective privatisation. But look at the success. Oh no, that's right. Teacher recruitment targets have been missed for the third year running.
Hunt and others portray "the unions" as part of the blob. A huge amalgous mass which has been criticised for being negative about teaching, standing in the way, looking backward. They seem to assume that there is a very top down approach with some driven ideologue at the head, cascading its poison down to the lower ranks. A model, in fact, more similar to a political party.
That is not what unions are. Unions started with the workers, trying to ensure safe working conditions, promoting the idea of coming together so that it was more difficult to single out individuals. Now they are a body of professionals, and in the case of many jobs like teaching and medicine, a body of skilled, dedicated professionals who drive themselves into an early grave by their hard work and are led by a vocation, with the interests of their patients and pupils at heart. Unions are fighting for the best medical, educational and professional outcomes, not their best interests as is suggested by MPs. Believe us, if we were in it for the money we'd have done something else. Like politicians. And we still could. We are highly qualified, unlike the bank of people who will be dragged in to replace us when we are driven out by unattainable targets and unsafe working conditions that do not have the best interests of professionals or those they are looking after at the centre.
