MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Resource distribution systems
that's not right. The cheque arrives from BT now, a cheque for
£250,000, and I do not know which members it is for, whether it
is the right amount, whether that is broken down £200,000 for
full-timers, £50,000 for part-timers -- nothing at all. So we can't
predict income. We can only predict it by generally saying that
we are 285,000 strong, our headline rate is £10 so therefore we
are due in about that much money. What kind of work is that, a
£28 million turnover organisation? So we don't have any control
over income and we just pay bills and that is the Finance
Department. Not my idea of Finance or management.
(Interviewee N)
There is an awareness of the consequences of greater control over
budgets and the need to face them:-
I used to sit in my office up there and I would call down the reps
that I needed to deal with when I needed to deal with them and
felt like it. That process costs an arm and a leg. If we carry on
spending like that, at some point I will be saying to all those
people that you will have to change the process of dealing with
reps. And they will say that you can't do that because it
undermines democracy, can't talk to the reps, they can't talk to
the members, can't get the feedback to make sure we do the
deal properly, blah blah blah, and I will be saying to them, well,
we have not got the money for you to carry on doing it.
Understand that. (Interviewee N)
And when control has been gained, activists will be asked to face the
implications:-
We have all got to change because of the way the finances are
going. One, the way we run finances, the way we don't control
spending and the fact that we have got less money to spend.
We have got to change from the top to the bottom. Now it is
dead easy for me to go to Conference and lecture at the
branches about tightening their belts and do nothing up here.
What we are going to put in place by changes in here towards
the back end of the year so that we go to Conference next year
and say "it is your turn now, comrades. We have done it." And
we can prove that we have done it. (Interviewee N)
It could be hypothesised that in a centralised union like the CWU,
changes of this type, which depend on those responsible for spending
money to assume control over what they spend and to make difficult
decisions having political implications, involve significant cultural
change and that, therefore, the way in which the changes are managed
will be critical. In one respect the planning process had already
confronted this:-
What some people have done with a plan, which is easy to see
coming, is that we need more staff. We need this, we need that.
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