GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

the Executive. All of those have been signed off and the actual paperwork in

your pack under the yellow and blue tabs are in technical terms given to us for

information at the BGCM. So in commenting on them I will be broad brush,

because I think some of the direction of travel issues are important and I will

not necessarily go into each line, although I will say that one thing that we have

done over the last few years is to ensure that the financial accountability is

better than it ever has been. I think our world record at one Executive was 234

pages of finances, so you can imagine how exciting the meetings are, but we

would rather give all the information than just summarise it. It is all given to

every Executive and as part of improving our systems three or four years ago

we set up the Finance and General Purposes Committee which can meet

between Executives not to spend money, but to look at things in absolute

detail. So I am confident that we have got a background where certainly our

Executive and all our groups of trustees get every opportunity to see everything

to do with the finances and to make informed decisions. So we have done the

improvements on accountability.

We also said four years ago that we would professionalise our internal

accounting by employing professional accountants inside the organisation so

that all of our complicated systems could be improved. So I think our systems

have improved and having professional staff on board has meant that we have

not only been able to manage our own systems better but we have been able

to offer accountancy and audit services to affiliated unions, so we do provide

the full accounts and audit package to some of our affiliates and we have the

capacity to do that and we would like to do more. We also provide the payroll

for some of our affiliates and we have got a capacity to do more of that as well.

I think in talking about the GFTU’s finances we should never lose sight of the

fact that all of the original wealth of the GFTU was a result of contributions from

workers in manual industrial trades who gave a bit more than their union

subscriptions for the General Federation’s own kitty and that became a very

substantial kitty which was a source really of welfare state services for many of

our affiliates in the early days. It was the GFTU which provided hardship funds

which provided support for victimised workers and for unions that had been

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