Sometimes people aren’t aware of the great things that UNISON can do for its members or how being in a strongly unionised workplace makes a difference. Dan Jeffrey looks at some recent victories.

UNISON has recently won cases where we have secured our members significant compensation pay outs, back pay in sick pay, and had grievances that have resulted in senior managers being retrained and put through the disciplinary process.

We also successfully won a job evaluation appeal in housing in August, with an officer raised from SO1 to SO2.

Our reps  successfully represented a member who was asked to take on work outside of their job description. The duties which were far above the grade of their JD and would have put both the employee and the Council at risk. UNISON’s “just say no” campaign will encourage staff to take up issues of overwork, and being given tasks not appropriate to your grade.

Staff need to be very vigilant about this as doing work outside of your grade and JD can put you at risk, put residents at risk and put the Council as an organisation at risk. It is also morally totally unfair to expect staff to take on work which they are not being paid for appropriately.

Also, we successfully represented a member on a sickness appeal, where the time period of the sickness warning on their record was halved. UNISON then represented the member with a grievance but our member won the grievance and was given a full apology by the Council for the way they had been treated and training schemes set up for management for not following procedures.

Being in a union is so important to defending ourselves at work, if you know people who aren’t in the union, recruit them today!