GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

MONDAY, 15 th MAY 2017

The Meeting re-assembled at 9.00 am

THE PRESIDENT: I hope you had a pleasant evening last night. I thought it was

very nice actually, a very pleasant evening.

EC COMPOSITION AND EQUALITIES SEATS

THE PRESIDENT: If you recall, we agreed yesterday to change the order of

business slightly in that the first item of business this morning would be the

question of the equalities seats that we have on the GFTU EC. Can I just

explain the background and explain a little bit about what it is that we are

proposing to do. I hope that we will have a document for you in due course this

morning, but in the absence of that document for now let me explain. Some

time ago the GFTU Executive put a proposal to a BGCM designed to improve

the degree of diversity on the GFTU Executive Committee. We were very

mindful of the fact that most members of the Executive Committee look like the

three of us up here, old white blokes, and we were actually quite concerned

about the lack of diversity. So we introduced a quite complicated arrangement

actually whereby following the election of the Executive for the BGCM we

would then, so to speak, top up the Executive with people with various, so to

speak, protected characteristics to improve diversity of the EC a little bit.

The current four members of the Executive who sit in these diversity related

seats are Yvonne Pattison from NAPO, Sarah Woolley from the Food and

Allied Workers Union, Robert Mooney from Community and Bindu Paul from

the Musicians Union who is not here this week for the very good reason that

she is on maternity leave, but she will be back late this summer.

What we would like to propose, with your agreement, is that those four would

remain on the Executive Committee for the next two years. As a matter of fact,

all four have been extraordinarily active and effective and made a major

contribution to the work of the GFTU and we really would not want to lose any

of them, so with your permission and agreement we would like those four to

carry on. We also want to further increase the diversity of the Executive

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