When ACE became NCU
In 1985, I was a national official with a trade union called the Post Office Engineering Union, although most of our members did not work for the Post Office (they were then in newly-created British Telecom) and they were not engineers (they were technicians who liked to think of themselves as engineers).
We were about to merge with another group of trade unionists with the snappy title the Civil & Public Services Association (Posts & Telecoms Group). What should we call the new merged union?
We employed consultants at some expense who came up with the idea that we should be called the Association of Communications Employees. Then we could be known as ACE – the No 1 union.
Predictably the activists were having none of this fancy thinking. Instead we went for the most boring name we could find: the National Communications Union. A decade later, the union merged again and became the Communication Workers Union.
I recall this episode because, when I hear about trade unions these days, most of them have names as modern or obscure – depending on your standpoint – as Community, Prospect, Unison, Unite. How times change.