GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

establishing an apprenticeship and Colin from the Executive is going to come in

on that. A really important part of our education programme has always been

the trade union management modules. You cannot manage a trade union

these days with all the complexities just by chance, so we offer a whole range

of training modules to help executives and senior officers manage the business

of their organisation better. We have formed new partnerships, such as with

the Red Cross, which means that certain areas of training, whether it is manual

handling, health and safety, first aid etc can be delivered by expert trainers

throughout the country.

To our surprise, I think, as an Executive when we were putting this year’s

programme together we did not think that five day courses would any more be

popular, because of the difficulties that people were having with facilities and

time off, but it does appear that a number of unions are really pushing the boat

out on getting back to the old days of proper facilities agreements to make sure

that representatives get a good five day grounding in training, so our five day

courses at Northern College (and Paul from Northern is going to come in on the

debate) have been very successful and oversubscribed.

We have revised our reps training completely to deliver a more dynamic

course. We have offered, and the movement has not yet taken up, but it is

vitally important, we believe, a whole range of courses on our history. Our

history as a movement has been forgotten. It used to be the staple of trade

union training. You would do a bit of politics, a bit of philosophy, a bit of

economics and the history of the trade union movement. Most unions do not

do the history any more, so we are offering some history courses which you will

see in the booklet which are pretty exciting, so hopefully we can keep those

going. Sarah will report on the work that we are doing for young members,

because that has been a theme throughout. When we visited Australia for a

study visit we discovered that the Australian and New Zealand trade union

movements had nearly been completely wiped out and they consciously set

about identifying a new cadre of younger trade unionists to become the future

leadership of the movement and they have survived and in our not so small

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