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Press Release

Research shows unions make business more competitive

25 January 2012

CWU welcomes research carried out by the TUC which has found that the presence of unions in the workplace helps make businesses more competitive.

A report - Facility Time for Union Reps: Separating fact from fiction - found that union representation in the workplace saves employers in the public and private sector as much as £701 million a year or £2 million a day.

The report, published yesterday (Tuesday) comes at a time when right wing Conservative MPs and think tanks are mounting an effort to cut the amount of paid time allowed for trade union activity.

Written by Gregor Gall, Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Hertfordshire, the report found union representation resulted in more productive, and better trained, workforces, safer workplaces and fewer cases being taken to employment tribunal.

The research also found that a good deal of the work of union reps takes place in their own time. Some 16% of union reps said that less than a quarter of the time they spent on union work was paid for by their employer. And the researchers estimated that for every £1 spent on union facility time in the public sector, between £3 and £9 is returned in accrued benefits.

"This report demonstrates the value of union reps to the UK economy, not only helping improve workplace conditions but also enabling private and public sector employers to keep costs down, and so deliver huge savings to the taxpayer," said CWU general secretary Billy Hayes. "Good employers will always seek to work with unions and reap the many benefits that union membership and recognition brings."

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "The highly exaggerated and wholly inaccurate figures being bandied around by groups and individuals on the right as to the cost of unions in the public sector are supposedly borne out of a desire to save money. In reality they are nothing more than a thinly-veiled attack on unions and their ability to represent workers across the public sector.

"Yet our research shows that there are huge benefits to employers - in both the public and private sectors - to be had as a result of the funding of facility time for union reps. Successive governments have recognised the moral, legal and economic case for supporting workplace reps - ministers would be wise to do likewise and avoid what appear to be ideologically driven announcements designed to appease right wing backbenchers."



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