MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

The most radical of UNISON’s policies to promote involvement and
inclusion was the policy of ‘proportionality’ – the objective that by the
year 2000 women would be represented at all levels of the democratic
structure in proportion to their membership of the organisation as a
whole – by then around 80%. McBride (2000) charts progress towards
this whilst arguing that the structures take into account the
representation of and by individual women but not of women as a
social group. She notes also that, even with proportionality, in her view
decision making can be detached from members’ experiences.
Studying these issues directly is outside the scope of this research.
The point in referring to them is threefold. First it is to demonstrate that
trade union ‘officials’ have been instrumental in designing and initiating
structures which are intended to enhance members’ ability to become
involved in their unions and, implicitly, to be able to challenge their
officials; thus, not to accept passivity as inevitable. Second, it is to
demonstrate the potential complexity of power structures within modern
unions – the sheer number of stakeholders with legitimate interests in
the union whose interests have to be taken into account. Third, it is to
seek to make the point that unions have changed. Even if they were
once the rather one dimensional organisations of which Michels wrote
and of which the ‘over-simplistic bureaucracy vs rank and file’ (Kelly
and Heery 1994) division was discernible, arguably that is far less the
case now. They are complex bodies with histories, traditions,
structures, cultures and members which are vastly different. Cultural
assumptions about the nature of the relationships between officials and
members are different and can form a prime focus for cultural clashes
when unions merge. Morris and Fosh (2000), for example, analyse the
CPSA (a component of PCS, another of the case study unions) against
four models of union democracy, containing many features of
member/official power, or lack of it, and conclude (inter alia) that
‘assessments of whether a particular union has become more or less
democratic….depends on what one means by trade union democracy’
(page 112). One would not be surprised to learn that, on the merger of
the CPSA, understanding these different meanings became an issue.
A more specific meaning expressed by officials in many unions,
including the one into which CPSA merged, is that of whether a union
is full time officer led, or member led, or something in between (usually
described as ‘partnership’). Cornforth (2000:3) says that partnership is
based on an assumption that that ‘managers want to do a good job and
will act as effective stewards of an organisation’s resources. As a result
senior management and …representatives on the board are seen as
partners….The role of the board is primarily strategic, to work with
management to improve strategy and add value to top decisions’).
Fairbrother (2000:28) proposes a model as dividing unions between
those which accept the principle of ‘leadership predominance’, and
those which are committed to the principle of ‘membership
participation’. He presents a highly loaded description of unions in
which the leadership have predominance as resembling external
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