TUC Equality Audit 2024
How unions identify their key collective bargaining priorities
While unions’ national policy making conferences are generally supreme for setting priorities in collective bargaining, most unions have a range of mechanisms for proposing equality priorities and/or ensuring that equality issue are embedded within the overall bargaining agenda.
These include equality or specific-strand committees and conferences, industrial sector committees and conferences, informal discussions between equality and industrial officers, consultations with branch, workplace and equality reps and membership surveys.
In terms of the national bargaining agenda, these mechanisms are not usually decisive in themselves but feed into national conference debates and decisions. However, where there is local bargaining, priorities are often decided and put into practice at that level.
The response from the NUJ sums up the situation in a small multi-employer union. Its equality bargaining priorities are “defined through our bi-annual delegate meeting as well as through the work of our equality reps within workplace chapels/branches, officials and equality councils, with overarching equality planning responsibility residing with an appointed lead Equality Officer.” It also runs surveys, seminars discussion networks and workshops and encourages chapels 3 to consider equality issues when conducting annual pay bargaining.
In Unite, a larger multi-employer union, there is a whole range of structures and means for getting equality issues on the bargaining agenda, including discussions with union reps and industrial officers, combined with motions from the union’s equalities and industrial sector conferences and its equality/single strand committees. This is helped by the equality representation present on its industrial structures, while every agreed industrial plan must include bargaining targets for equalities. However, “the final decision is with the lay membership in the bargaining area covered”.
- 3 NUJ term for workplace or employer level union structures
The most common areas for new or renewed emphasis are menopause, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, support for disabled workers, equal pay and pay audits.
Changes to equality priorities
The Audit asked if there had been any changes in unions’ bargaining priorities in the last four years. A majority (58 per cent) said there had, including all large unions. The most common areas for new or renewed emphasis are menopause, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, support for disabled workers, equal pay and pay audits to identify ethnicity and disability pay gaps.
There are also some new priorities related to the specific sectors in which unions organise. For example, Equity has been working on the provision of hair and make support for Black artists as well as the right to consent for scenes involving intimacy or nudity, while the NUJ has pushed the issue of programmed bias in artificial intelligence.
Monitoring and reporting on equality gains in collective agreements
A growing proportion of unions monitor their collective agreements to gain a picture of equality gains or other impacts, 44 per cent saying they do this compared with 36 per cent in 2020. Medium sized unions were more likely than large or small ones to say they do.
The CWU is aided in this by an agreement with one of its employers to be provided with ‘in confidence’ breakdowns of disciplinary, attendance, performance and NDA cases and outcomes broken down by gender, age, ethnicity and disability. This data enables the union to monitor, with the employer, the impacts of practices on protected groups. The union’s departments use this data to report to the senior structures on any collective bargaining achievements, which are then communicated to the rest of the membership.
The NUJ has a quarterly reporting system in which collective bargaining achievements on equalities issues are reported to the national executive by equality councils, equality servicing officers, equality reps and the equality lead, as well as an overarching report to its delegate conference.
Prospect’s research team conducts monitoring based on review and evaluation of agreements by industrial officers.
Action in response to the TUC Equality Audit
A number of unions said they had taken action directly in response to previous TUC Equality Audits on collective bargaining. For example, following the 2020 Audit, the NAHT started developing a process for collecting demographic data for its membership and linking it through to its casework analysis.
The CWU has a draft collective bargaining guidance booklet for its national officers and negotiators in promoting equality best practice. It has also produced model polices on specific equality issues.
Stay Updated
Want to hear about our latest news and blogs?
Sign up now to get it straight to your inbox