MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

were also working in a conflictual environment and only now do they at
least have some stability even if conflict may not be absent. There are
expressions of commitment to partnership and many things that have
happened, for example the operation of the forums for a wide range of
members, confirm this. But the extent of activist participation is limited
by the Principal Rules and the constraints imposed on implementing
decisions without ballots. The exact nature of the partnership model in
PCS is therefore still unclear and is certainly contested space.
In UNiFI, the big change for ex BIFU staff was the principle of company
committee autonomy. This automatically restricted the power of the
NEC (although it ensured control of bargaining by other groups of lay
members) and therefore affected the relationships between managers
and lay members. The partnership model seemed to be settling down,
though not without some anguish about poor experiences dealing with
lay members exerting their muscles in the early days of the new union.
In UNISON, as in UNiFI, there was some regret felt by some managers
about the greater levels of trust which they identified as being
characteristic of organisations where managers had comparatively
more influence and were, they perceived, trusted by the lay members
to exercise it. But UNISON has had longer to develop its model and its
managers seem more comfortable with it, though it is clear that many
boundary issues remain unclear.
Managers perceive, then, all four unions as practising some form of
partnership, involving change for everyone. These perceptions could
have been expected to have been influenced by the phase of merger
the union had reached. In the earlier phases, where cultural and role
ambiguity remained, change of this nature and order is likely to be
difficult and unwelcome. With psychological merger could come greater
acceptance. But even in those unions which had approached this,
uncontested models of governance had not emerged.
One point was made several times in UNISON, and hinted at in UNiFI,
to the effect that lay members from more leadership led unions rather
liked what they saw in the unions they were merging with, where lay
members enjoyed, as they saw it, more power and influence and
therefore moved themselves in that direction. This, of course, meant
that the balance of their relationship with managers changed; as their
power and influence increased, so the boundaries with their former
managers moved for them in the direction of having less
predominance. It may be, therefore, that in a merger between unions at
different ends of this continuum, lay members from unions where the
leadership is predominant will welcome the creation of a new
organisation in which they have less constraints; concomitantly
managers from those organisations will be less likely to welcome a new
organisation in which they perceive constraints on them to have
increased. This is not something that can be concluded from the data
here but it would benefit from further research.
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