MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

CHAPTER FIVE
CASE STUDY – MANAGERS IN THE COMMUNICATION WORKERS
UNION
About the union
5.1. The CWU was formed in January 1995 by a merger between the
National Communications Union and the Union of Communications
Workers. Paradoxically, the logic for the merger was stronger in the
years before it took place than it was in 1995 because prior to the
privatisation of British Telecom, members of both unions worked for the
Post Office, either in telecoms or in postal services. In those days, so
the General Secretary says, it was not unusual to find post office
engineers who started life as postmen, having put in for a test to
achieve this.
5.2. The impetus for the merger dates from around 1985 and had ebbed
and flowed in the years since then. There are three basic
constituencies within the union. The first is communications engineers,
working for BT and some other communications firms. The second is
clerical workers who worked for Post Office Communications, as it was
then, were members of the Civil and Public Services Association but
who were transferred to the NCU in 1985. The third is the postal
workers who made up the UCW. The union does organise in other
organisations, for example the Alliance and Leicester, who took over
Girobank and it does have a strategy of seeking to organise members
in, for example, the expanding telecoms sector.
5.3. The generally received wisdom is that it was the election of Tony
Young as General Secretary of the NCU and Alan Johnson as General
Secretary of the UCW that were the really key factors is the
achievement of the merger. Both were very much in favour of it and
enjoyed good personal, political and working relationships; both were
able to provide the leadership that convinced the activists and,
subsequently, the membership that merger was the way forward for the
two unions. However, fuelled by demarcation disputes, there had been
a good deal of branch pressure for merger over the years, in which the
current General Secretary had been particularly active.
5.4. CWU has declared membership of 279,679 in the current year of which
around 20% are female. It deals with two major employers and
therefore it is not surprising that its paid staff of 187 are concentrated
almost exclusively at national level. Whilst it has a small number of
regional offices, these are largely branch facilities, occupied by people
who are on full time facility release from employers. On the postal side
there are Divisional Officials paid in this way, serving to emphasise the
fact that the regional structure is largely an ex UCW set up, dominated
(contrary to initial plans) by ex UCW activists. The union’s national
structure, accommodated in a single head office in Wimbledon,
acquired in 1997 and intended to be equidistant between Ealing and
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