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).<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7501"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7504,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7501\/revisions\/7504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}