MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Cognitive rules and culture
The big fear from the staff was that BIFU was perceived as
being a union which was totally dominated by its lay people.
What the President or the Vice President said was law. That
they ruled the roost and that in itself was not an attractive
proposition to many people who saw it as an unnecessary
interference in the way they did their jobs. The first transitional
National Executive Committee confirmed the worst fears of
many of those people. Officers were summoned to appear
before the NEC -- "have you anything to report"; "no."
"Goodbye." They had spent a day struggling to get there. But I
have to say that very strong management and a President who
is of a different mind resulted in the whole structure and the
whole attitude and the whole way of operating moving more
towards the partnership model. I think that in the length of time
the union has been in existence and particularly after the
transition, which was only in May this year, it has worked quite
well (Interviewee C)
The reference to the President is particularly relevant because when, in
May 2000, UNiFI reduced the size of the Senior Management Team, it
invited the President and Vice-President to sit on it; the researcher
attended a meeting of this body in October 2000.
BIFU managers seem, not unnaturally, to be less censorious about
practices in their old union and comfortable with changes in the new
one:-
I think it was very much member led and I think there was a
degree of the dynamic between the members and the officer
corps was an interesting one and a difficult one. I think that has
changed and I think that has changed significantly. I think it has
also partly changed because of the position that the union finds
itself in although the union still is very centralist in its approach.
The power is concentrated very much at the centre and whilst
we have industrial autonomy in the sense that the National
Executive now cannot directly interfere with what I negotiate and
what my committee negotiates, they still hold the purse strings.
So if we wanted to plough a particular furrow that required a
particular degree of expenditure, it is to the National Executive
that I have to go. When I say "I", the National Committee, there
is autonomy up to a point. But I do believe that the overall
relationship and the way in which the union formulates policy
and executes policy has improved and I think that is largely to do
with the influence of the two other organisations on the existing
BIFU structure that was in place. (Interviewee L)
I think in BIFU the position was definitely that it was lay member-
Ied albeit that senior officials had some influence, but it was
definitely lay member-Ied. There was a bureaucracy that was
there that in many ways stifled the national Company
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