Napo Launches our new recruitment campaign

‘What’s Napo doing about it?’

It’s about the most repeated, and certainly not unreasonable, question that you and the team here at Falcon Road hear from members. Given the daily challenges that you face at the workplace, be it as a result of staff reductions on the one hand or the implementation of plain daft policies such as the Attendance Management regime that I covered last week on the other; many members expect us to have all the answers or at least be posing the right questions.

None of this is just specific to Napo of course; it’s what any member of any trade union is entitled to ask. The democratic structures that Napo has in place allow the opportunity for our members, through their representatives, to hold the leadership to account for every decision we take and every penny that we spend of your hard earned subscriptions.

Unfortunately, such a relationship, while absolutely critical to what we do and how we go about it, cannot be seen in isolation from one inalienable fact. Unless we have sufficient numbers of members in place we are sometimes limited in delivering the type of response to your employer in the way that you and we would like.

At the time of writing we await the results of the indicative ballot that we have been running on the need to defend collective bargaining following the intention of the NPS and now nearly every CRC, to withdraw from the National Negotiating Council. This type of exercise tells us much about how members feel about issues of this type or conversely, whether members simply do not see it as their priority. Either way, the union will have to analyse the result and consider how we proceed, and either way it’s also a fact that the decision will find favour with some of our members and not so with others.

Time to rebuild

The point to all this is that we need to rebuild our membership base so that we can increase the amount of resourcing and campaigning that is needed to try and address the issues around your pay, terms and conditions and future employment prospects. That is why the Officers and Napo employees along with the National Executive Committee, have endorsed Napo’s operational plan which sets out our work for the coming months (NEC01/2017) and why we are soon to launch our recruitment strategy to which a great deal of planning and innovative thought has been invested.

We have written out as the first step in Napo’s drive to take Napo ‘out to the membership’, a programme of “Napo Roadshows”. The purpose of the Napo Roadshow will be to share with Branches Napo’s key priorities for 2017 and key actions we hope to achieve over the coming 12 months as detailed in the annual operational plan. These events will be an opportunity to help explain how we can work together with members to deliver a successful Workload Campaign as well as other national campaigns such as Pay. In addition, we will look at how these campaigns can help build a better and stronger Napo through local recruitment initiatives and get feedback from members and we aim to programme in the roadshows during the next 6 months (between Feb and July).

All of this builds on the energy that was apparent at the last AGM in Wales and the last meeting of your National Executive Committee. Members can help us by attending these events and engaging with non-members about the importance of being a member of a trade union and that Napo should be that union of choice wherever you work.

Much more next week