Union representatives play a central and unique role in promoting equality. They are often the first point of contact when members want to make a complaint or sometimes just to talk something over that is worrying them at work. It is important that reps are seen to support their members in discrimination complaints.

Rather than just reacting to incidents in the workplace, being proactive about promoting equality will increase confidence in union reps to deal with equality issues and will support awareness raising within workplaces. Ensuring that equality is part of the role of every rep will encourage the mainstreaming of equality into all aspects of union work.

Unions have a key role to play in:

• Making the union accessible for everyone via pro-active recruitment of diverse members and by providing services for all members. This can also improve the image of the union and make it more relevant to a greater range of potential members. • Involving members and ensuring that the union provides equal opportunity to everyone to be active within its different structures and activities. • Monitoring what goes on in the workplace and ensuring fair practices in employment and promotion. • Workplace Bargaining: Negotiating and enforcing agreements with employers that promote equal treatment for all workers. This can be achieved via policy/practice development, or learning programme initiatives in partnership with employers. • Having access to specialised legal and personal advice on dealing with discrimination in the same way as they have access to financial or health and safety information. • Being fully trained on equality and diversity issues. • Ensuring that equality is at the core of activities and functions and not left as a specialist activity (mainstreaming).

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Bargaining for equality

Equality is not a separate consideration when dealing with general bargaining issues with employers. Bringing equality considerations into the bargaining agenda finds a common ground that can be beneficial to employers and unions and also ensures that negotiations are effective for as many members as possible – minimising marginalisation of groups of workers. Many day to day workplace issues have an equality aspect to them.

Understanding the barriers that people face in the workplace is crucial to identifying an bargaining agenda that also seeks to address equality issues. See the word documents on
Identifying Bargaining Issues
and
Mainstreaming Equality

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