What is the difference between unite and unison

We represent full-time and part-time staff who provide public services, although they may be employed in both the public and private sectors.

We represent members, negotiate and bargain on their behalf, campaign for better working conditions and pay and for public services. Read more. With more than 1. Our members work in the public services, for private contractors providing public services and for utility companies. Our governance is overseen by an elected national executive council of ordinary members of the union and the union is answerable to all our members.

Read Stephen's blog. Watch your local services crumble to dust in front of your very eyes as a result of Westminster cuts in our Marvel-ous film! Watch it now. Join online now. Use the branch finder. We use cookies on our website to ensure you find the information you need in the simplest way. By continuing to use our website you are consenting to their use. I have spoken endlessly to trade unionists who want to give serious thought to how to do things differently: one idea that often comes up is of a lifetime individual membership that could be instantly reconfigured as people move into work, then out, and then in again, allowing them to make the most of different kinds of collective representation and personal benefits.

But such things are still more the subject of tentative conversations after office hours than anything more meaningful. Occasionally, you see signs of improvement. There are people within the big unions who do the hard work of taking trade unionism to people and places from which it is too often shut out: the GMB organisers who make it their business to recruit people working for supermarkets, courier companies, and outsourced hospital cleaning operators ; the Unite activists who have talked to me about setting up credit unions and unionising call centres.

However, across the unions as whole, unfortunately, far too little effort is going into developing these examples into anything that might capture the public imagination and begin to change some of the most iniquitous features of modern work.

The ambitiously named United Voices of the World has been central to a successful battle to bring cleaning jobs at the London School of Economics back in house. By contrast, the big unions can appear to be just waiting for a Labour government to come along and somehow make things alright. Is the work simply beyond them of reinventing their movement for new times so as to renew its liberating purpose? Are they holding back for fear of threats to their power? These questions require attention, before an iron rule kicks in: that complacency usually invites the slow sunset of irrelevance.

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