MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Deploying resources
expressed by some staff when the decision to close Bournemouth was
taken:-
One or two people are saying that, well of course, Bournemouth
was always going to close anyway. I don't think that was
necessarily true. Following the merger, we transferred all the
membership down to Bournemouth, all the membership records
and people looking after the membership records, membership
was Bournemouth, negotiations was Raynes Park and teams
was Haywards Heath. Which was a nice split between the three
offices. So I would argue with those people. If there had been
some covert decision all the way along that Bournemouth was
going to close, we would hardly have transferred the
membership there post merger. (Interviewee M)
Earlier, reference was made to open plan working. It appeared from
that discussion that there were differing views about its utility and no
sense that there were cultural issues involved in this form of
organisation of space, particularly in terms of cultural integration.
However, the Joint General Secretary did express an awareness of the
potential importance of layout of office space in terms of its ability to
convey cultural messages:-
When I went to Raynes Park and I was going to have an office in
Raynes Park, people were making coffee in the corridor. And I
said "that is just not on." So we had a kitchen made. The stir
that went round the office. And I was sharing an office. And
people said "aren't you going to have an office?" And I said that
I did not care who was going to use it. But the old BIFU
management structure was very much that if you are a
negotiating Officer, you are male, predominantly, you have a
secretary and you have an office and that confirms your status.
So management is very much about flattening status in some
respects, in getting people to understand that there is not an
apartheid in the workplace. If you are a member of staff you are
just as important as if you are a negotiating official, or the most
senior negotiating official whoever that person might be.
Even though the decision to keep open the union’s three head offices
invited a scenario of retention of old union cultures, managers had
different roles in UNiFI. They sought to convey the message that the
union was new and that the old unions had gone by seeking to
maintain the proposition that the union had three head offices. This
seems to have had mixed success but the awareness of the cultural
implications of the decision, and beliefs about the importance of finding
some solution to perceived problems, seem to have been as high in
UNiFI as in any other merged union.
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