GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

He said: Comrades, brothers and sisters, it is absolutely wonderful to be up

here today, because two years ago we were one of the new affiliates in the

organisation, so this is our first opportunity to present a motion and we are all

excited. It does not take us much to get excited, but there we go. Doug, I

recall that as part of the Executive Committee we were to get a quote regarding

the history of trade unions. Never one to miss a competition, I noted that, so

here is a nice little quote for you before I start. It is from George Bernard

Shaw. George Bernard Shaw highlighted that: “No king on earth is as safe in

his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him

sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn’t actually fall

down”. So enjoy your night tonight with drink. There you go.

As I say, this is our first motion, so I would like to start by giving an overview of

it. We call on affiliates to support the recent research. In fact it was the largest

research with social workers in Europe in 2018 and it was by Bath Spa

University, Dr Jermaine Ravalier. The research showed that as many as 92%

(and there are 100,000 social workers in the UK) of registered social workers in

England, Northern Ireland and Wales and Scotland were working an average of

10 hours of unpaid overtime. This equated to 64 days per person. It is not a

big deal really, but when you think about it, add that on to your normal job role

and it creates a bit of a problem. Interestingly, we raised this in Parliament to

one of the Tory Ministers and her view was, “Well, what is wrong with that?

That is what being a professional is”. When you are facing that kind of attitude

it makes it hard to move that.

3,421 took the time to sit down and spend time with us. What they highlighted

in the survey in September 2018 makes really worrying reading for us in the

social work profession and the findings have shown that six areas of the

working conditions were particularly worrying for us in the field of social work.

The first one was the demands on social work. As we know, we are a service

that covers from the cradle to the grave, we work in high level work, but then

the demands on social workers were increasing, so that was a problem. The

control in the job was increasing, so increasing control. Not having the control

to plan your day was very difficult. Moving on, the managerial support, we

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