MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

‘Legitimate’ managerial actions - stakeholders
are other issues that you can progress outside of the rule book
(Interviewee H)
The Rule Book sets out formal roles and responsibilities of the various
formal bodies in a union. It cannot, obviously delineate more informal
boundaries and it cannot be comprehensive. On a merger in particular,
it is likely that different interest groups, different stakeholders, will be
looking to establish their own places in the new organisation and
therefore to define their own boundaries to their own satisfaction. There
are likely to be important cultural implications here. In UNISON, there
were attempts to do this on a more corporate basis by a process of
defining the lay member zone, the officer zone and a ‘shared zone’,
representing, in effect, the partnership area. This was a hugely
controversial area, particularly with ex NALGO activists, who saw it
being led by a senior ex-NUPE manager trying to limit their influence.
One manager expresses the issue starkly:-
Very few lay members seem to know the difference between
governance and management. Many of them want to get
involved in management rather than just governance. The truth
is that they are just involved in governance but that is not what
most lay members want. They want to get elected because they
want to get involved in the day-to-day operations of the union,
otherwise they are just coming to London for a fairly routine
meeting every so often.(Interviewee A)
The work on defining a shared zone was never completed, to the regret
of one manager:-
You have to work through a fairly powerful lay structure that is
probably more powerful than, say, a Board of Directors or even
a Management Committee of a local authority. We in this
particular union have never reconciled this tension about
whether they set the policy and we do the work. There isn't a
huge tension and if .T.S. had been allowed to finish his -- this is
what you do, this is what we do and the shared bit -- maybe it
would have been a bit clearer. (Interviewee B)
And another manager thinks that the consequences of this are
serious:-
Even now, I am not sure that people in Unison are clear at all
what their limits of authority are and, if they have got them,
whether they work within them or whether they are quite
extended. I used to think that perhaps it was different at national
level to regional level. When you talk to Regional Secretaries,
the tensions that they have with lay members in that big area
that we used to call the big grey area, the shared zone; it's not
so much sharing, it's people walking about blind folded
(Interviewee A)
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