GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

Committee by deliberately seeking to elect up to four younger workers to join

the Executive and by younger we mean 30 and under, so I mean much

younger frankly! (Laughter) Younger than me! I am only going to speak on

my own behalf in this regard. In order to do that, what the incoming Executive

Committee, I hope, will agree to later today is a proposal that we canvas our

affiliated unions to put forward nominations for these four places and then

effectively hold, I suppose, what would amount to a postal ballot of our unions

should there be more than four candidates in order to fill those four seats.

It is a two stage proposal. First, that we maintain our four existing diversity

related Executive Committee members for the next two years and, second, that

we invite the incoming Executive to invite affiliates to nominate up to four young

workers to join the Executive Committee. Does anybody have any comments

or questions on that suggestion?

SIS CHRISTINE BOND (BECTU): I think it is great. I totally support it. My question

is about 30, just because of our experience with our young members. There

are two things that happened. One is that people start to come in in their late

20s to begin to be active in the union, they are just beginning to become active

in the union and then they are maybe getting cut off, because they are over 30,

so we put ours up to 35 just to be able to make sure we kept that level of

activity and the people that really still wanted to be in the youth things, because

35, let’s face it, is young for a trade unionist.

THE PRESIDENT: In a sense I suppose the incoming Executive could consider that.

What I would say is that, firstly, the TUC does have a definition and I think we

are working to the TUC definition which is 30, but we can consider it.

BRO LEE MOON (Nautilus International): Just to echo what our comrade have said

there, our personal union’s age bracket is up to 35, so you would be excluding

a section of our members who are actually in the young members forum, so I

echo the sentiments just made by our comrade just there. If we could extend

that to 35, you would have our full support.

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