MORE than a third of the 1,700 officials and administrative staff employed by public sector union UNISON have reportedly applied for voluntary redundancy, while the union remains wracked by financial crisis and organisational incompetence.
Over 600 have applied to leave on enhanced redundancy terms available only to the end of the year. The union, which is projecting a f20m deficit next year and is slashing its departments' budgets by 25%, was looking for 400 to go, at an estimated cost of £10 million.
Whole departments have opted almost en bloc to take the money and run, while large numbers of demoralised regional officials and secretarial staff are also queuing to leave rather than risk compulsory redundancy on minimal terms next year.
The financial crisis is cruelly *exposing the complete organisational fiasco of the merger of the three component unions COHSE, NALGO and NUPE in 1993.
While each Region has been saddled with surplus 'associate' Regional Secretaries, and there are platoons of national officials, the most basic bureaucratic arrangement of all is still missing: there will be no centralised financial administration until 1996.
The present finances are a total shambles. Nobody knows how much money is actually coming in. A visitor to one of the union's four head offices found unbanked cheques in a drawer totalling several million pounds, while employers have been complaining thạt large cheques for subs deducted at source have not been paid in.
At local level the confusion over structures and much poorer representation for many members has run alongside sharp increases in subs for former COHSE and NUPE members, and exacerbated a culture clash with ex-NALGO that is most sharply felt in local government.
Though a current of rebellion and possible splits has been fanned by small unofficial networks of ex-NUPE activists, the rumours of a pending breakaway led by Rodney Bickerstaffe are wide of the mark. There is no easy escape.
There is no obvious way the merged assets of the union could now be disentangled, leaving any splitters with the limited choice of merging with yet another large, bureaucratic union, such as the GMB or TGWU.
For the left in UNISON, the only way forward is to reach out, form links across all three merged unions, and fight tooth and nail for an accountable structure that will end the catastrophic blunders of the top-level bureaucracv.