GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

SUNDAY 14 th MAY 2017

The Meeting assembled at 2.00 pm

CHAIR’S INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, brothers and sisters. My name is Ben Marshall.

I am President of the GFTU. On my right geographically is John Smith who is

the Vice President and on my left is Doug Nicholls, the General Secretary of

the GFTU. You are very welcome to the GFTU’s Biennial General Council

Meeting, as it is called, in effect our biennial conference. You are very

welcome indeed and we hope that you enjoy what I think should be an

extremely stimulating conference.

The first item on the agenda is apologies. Doug.

THE GENERAL SECRETARY: From some guests that we planned to have, we have

Stefan Dickers, our archivist from Bishopsgate Institute, he cannot make it.

John Hendy QC is doing the last collective redundancy case for the last pit in

Britain, Kellingley, on Monday. Professor Sian Moore from our trust and Cilla

Ross from the Co-operative College. Glyn Travers from the POA will be joining

us later. Members of the Executive who are joining us later are Robert Mooney

and joining us from the Executive tomorrow are Roy Rickhuss, Manuel Cortes

and Theresa Easton. Apologies for the whole BGCM from Nick McCarthy of

PCS. The apologies for the Executive are significant in that the rules say that

they have to be accepted as apologies in order to continue on the next EC, so I

take it that those are accepted. (Accepted)

THE PRESIDENT: I would like before we go on to welcome some people to the

conference. You are going to meet an awful lot of people over the next couple

of days and there will be opportunities for you to meet them in a more informal

sense at the dinner and so on and so forth, but there are just one or two people

I would like particularly to welcome. I would like to welcome Jane Norman who

is taking our verbatim minutes. Once again, welcome Jane. We have two of

our new members of staff here. Perhaps you could wave when I read out your

names. Education officer John Callow. You are very welcome, John.

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