GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

what we have done. I have only been in the PDAU for two years, but, as I say,

it has been around for ten and our attitude shortly after getting our certificate of

independence was, “Right, we need to get recognition so that we can best

serve our members in community pharmacy”. The attitude of my colleagues

was that you turn up at school, you go to the playground and you knock out the

biggest kid on the playground, then people are going to listen to you. So we

chose to start with the biggest and most powerful opponent we could choose

and that was Boots who own and operate about one sixth of all high street

pharmacies in this country and, indeed, internationally nowadays as well.

We wrote to them and asked for recognition. They declined. At that time

Walgreens Boots Alliance, of which Boots are part, had a whole website called

WBA Unfunded, which was dedicated to explaining to workers why they did not

need to be in a trade union, incredibly anti-union. We submitted our claim for a

ballot for statutory recognition. Boots persuaded us to allow talks to continue to

withdraw our application, which we did, but in secret they had met with a

managers organisation which had been around, was a registered trade union,

but had been refused its certificate of independence, and got a recognition

agreement and I still cannot believe even now that this so-called trade union

had signed an agreement which explicitly said, “We will not negotiate pay and

conditions for our members. All we will do is negotiate facilities time and what

resources the company will give us to help us function” and that agreement

was enough in law. We went through judicial reviews, the Court of Appeal and

all sorts of places, but ultimately that was enough in law to keep out a

genuinely independent trade union trying to act in the interests of its members.

So we were faced with a challenge. As many of you will realise, there is a way

through law that if workers are unhappy with the recognition of a

nonindependent trade union they can apply to have that recognition dissolved.

Nobody in the 17 years that that law has existed had even tried, let alone

succeeded, to do that, but, and John was talking in his contribution about

perseverance, we went for it. One sunny Friday in summer 2017 with, if I say

so myself, quite military precision, we submitted an application on behalf of six

of our members to derecognise this sweetheart union. Our website went live,

copies of magazines went to every store and every member. The long and the

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