UNISON Special Delegate Conference 2021: Day 1

 

Today was the first day of the virtual (for obvious reasons) UNISON delegate conference. It will finish on Thursday. Last year there was no conference due to Covid, so it seems a long, long time since we had our last conference. 

The "conference" is taking place in the TUC Congress House with the UNISON lay presidential team, a few officers and video technicians. Delegates and nearly all speakers joined virtually. 

The day started at 8.30am with an NEC pre meeting to discuss any urgent business.  That went quite smoothly. The conference kicked off at 9.30am and so far it seemed to have gone quite well with only a few minor electronic glitches.  

The President Josie Bird, gave a powerful and personal address, firstly thanking her family for all their support during her extended term while then making a direct attack on the Tory Government for all their failures over Covid and the recovery. 

I was pleased to see our current General Secretary Christina and our recently retired GS Dave Prentis, Dave was there to receive his award of honorary life membership of UNISON. 

I will blog further on SDC but was made up that it today passed the branch resource review motion and after 10 years of endless debate, we can finally move on and modernise the way we support our branches.