Adrian Askew, Connect's General Secretary, said:

I am delighted that our members have strongly backed plans to merge with Prospect.  This promises an exciting future and we look forward to working closely with colleagues in Prospect, sharing our expertise and our innovative approaches to trade unionism to represent and protect our members.

While it would have been nice to remain independent, Prospect offers us many more benefits than the moribund CWU.

Connect South have further details.

Unions - in the UK at least - are democratic structures. What gets proposed at conference has to be approved by a majority vote of members - not just those who could take a few days off to go to Blackpool.

Casting My Ballot

The irony is that the strikers at the CWU will be delaying our votes from reaching their destination. I'm sure the bad press and ill-sentiment that the CWU are generating has influenced more than a few votes to fall from their hands into Prospect's.

I cannot conceive of a union, workforce, or employer allowing industrial relations to deteriorate to such a point as the CWU and Royal Mail now have. That is one of the many reasons why I hope Connect members will vote for a merger with Prospect.

The other potential merger was with CWU.

There's a plethora of articles about the CWU ruining businesses.  Is this really the union people want representing them?

Let's face facts, the postal service is dying.  I literally can't remember I posted a letter.  Email does for me.  To tie our fortunes to a sector which is rapidly vanishing is madness.

Some talk of the synergies between CWU and BT.  Well, that may have been true - once.  If it's still true, it's an irrellavance.  Connect is more than BT. Much much more. Members now come from T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, Yell, Seimens etc.  We have nothing in common with the CWU.

There may be some managerial members of the CWU - but over 70% of members are posties.

Imagine your boss asks you about your union - do you want her thinking you're a striking postal worker or a professional worker?

When the Connect ballot paper comes, I'll be voting for a merger with Prospect.

However, I found an anonymous article in the Socialist Worker decrying the merger vote.

Socialist Worker accept comments for publication in the paper, but not on their website, so here's the response I emailed them.

Dear Sir,

I was a delegate at the Connect Conference.  I must take issue with your statement "The whole weight of the union machine was used to force this through in the debate."

There was a fair and open question and answer session.  We had a polite and orderly debate.  Everyone who stood to speak for the CWU was called.  We heard a wide range of opinions, discussed them and voted.

In the end there was more support from the members for Prospect.  That wasn't a "union machine" that was democracy.

You also say merger with CWU would have created "one industrial telecoms union".  70% of CWU members work for the Post Office - how are they in any way connected to the telecoms industry?

The Post Office is in crisis - I don't make any comment on whether it deserves to be or what should be done.  But without a doubt, the massive CWU will spend the next few years fighting for its members' rights. How can they possibly represent professional and managerial staff in the flourishing telecoms sector when concentrating on the Royal Mail pension crisis, possible privatisation, redundancies and modernisation?

The CWU is, I'm sure, a fine and noble union.  But its critical lack of resources means it would be poorly placed in serving Connects members.

That is, in part, why we voted to merge with Prospect.

Yours,

You can read more about the conference and the order of business etc. (Via Calvin Allen's Connected Research)

Edit 31/07/2009 My letter has been published in issue 2160 (18th of July 2009)