GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

second one is to do branch official training and we as a trade union have been

very insular in the fact that we have given all our money to hotels who have

wonderful facilities, as you think. We have used hotels in the north, the south,

the east, the west and spend around £30,000 for each training event that we

do, of which three of those take place every year, because, like many trade

unions, we have a massive churn of branch officials. We have around 800

branch officials throughout the country and the churn is probably 25% a year.

It is almost as bad as the retention rate for the Prison Service with new prison

officers, believe it or not, and if you took that churn with the service you can

see where our problems lie. Doug came to the POA. He presented his case to

the NEC which must have been tortuous for him, because our NEC are quite

difficult and challenging and to add burdens to that he actually came to our

annual conference this year and addressed conference, which again I was

grateful for, because it took the heat off us. There are one or two people that

have been there. Ronnie has been and addressed our conference, so he

knows how difficult and challenging that can be, as Yvonne from NAPO has

and Ian, our sister unions.

I wanted to talk about the fact that what have we learnt as a trade union in a

very short time of being affiliated and it is this. It is about reinvestment, it is

about not giving our money, hard earned money from our members to private

organisations, because generally we are all opposed to privatisation. We are

certainly opposed to privatisation of the Prison Service and the Probation

Service, but the reality is that this Government seem hellbent on privatising

everything that they can to line the pockets of fat cats. I was absolutely

amazed this morning alone, having woken up feeling rather hazy, thinking, “I

hope today is going to be a little bit more entertaining than our conference was”

to learn so much in such a short time from our financial advisers that although

we have never engaged, but I will certainly be going over and talking to them

before the end of the week, from Tony last night talking about IT, because as

an organisation and a trade union we sometimes forget that all trade unions are

businesses. Whether we like it or not, we have an income and an expenditure

and, to me, the best 98p that the POA have spent is affiliating to the GFTU,

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