This amendment ceases the post of National Organising Secretary.
Before merger both former unions had at least one Officer responsible for the functions of organising and the recruitment of new members.
At merger there was a duplication of responsibilities but the basic functions of the Organising Department were: Membership records - Organising and recruitment of new members - Conference and events organisation - Branch organisation -Regional organisation - Balloting.
And a number of lesser functions such as Gold Badges.
At the time of merger there were 350 Branches and 5 constituencies. Now there are 145 Branches and 2 constituencies.
After 17 years the functions of the Department have been radically reduced to focus on organising and consist of :
Membership records - Organising and recruitment of new members - Branch organisation.
Branches are aware of the process we adopted last year where we collated all the decisions of conference and the NEC and then reported on progress by publishing the colour coded matrix.
One of the tasks was to establish if there was any scope for a reduction in the number of Officers and following conference 2010 the GS and SDGS interviewed every Officer to ascertain what their individual aspirations were.
It became apparent that there was scope to cease the NOS post.
The NEC then set about the job of how to cease the post of NOS but at the same time improve the service to members and the viability of the Union.
It has co-incidentally long been the policy of the industrial executives and the NEC to shift the responsibility for the actual organising and recruitment of new members closer to the workplace and therefore the transfer of the work to the industrial departments is a logical step in the evolutionary process.
The proposal of the NEC is that the two industrial departments will become responsible for the organising and recruitment of new members. The NEC will retain control of the overall process of organising and recruitment. It is the clear responsibility of the NEC to ensure the ongoing viability of the CWU as an independent organisation.
The proposal of the NEC is aimed at improving the organising and recruitment of new members by placing the responsibility with the industrial departments, nearer to the workplace.
The key objective is to organise the many thousands of unorganised workers in the communications sector.
An added result of the proposal is a substantial financial saving but the driver for the change is the continuation of the process of making sure the CWU is able to effectively represent all members. This process began in earnest at the Rules Revision Conference in 2004 and has been continued at each Rules and General conference since .
