LTB 584/16 – 25 Year Certificates

No. 584/2016

4 October 2016

Dear Colleagues,

CWU 25 YEAR CERTIFICATES

Branches will be aware of our current policy of issuing a certificate to commemorate 25 years’ service when that milestone is achieved by our members.

Recently, it has emerged that there is a historic problem associated with our database which has caused a very small number of certificates to be issued in error. (The number of certificates affected is no more than 3 or 4 in any one month).

The problem has arisen because of a practice, ceased long ago, of joining dates on the membership record system being reset whenever a member moved from fully paid up membership into retired membership.

This means that occasionally 25 year membership certificates are issued when an individual has completed 25 years of retired membership rather than membership overall.

The purpose of this LTB is to alert branches to this issue. While the numbers may be small, CWU headquarters is aware that individual members value these certificates highly and errors associated with them are keenly felt.

Where such errors arise, we would ask that the member themselves or branch officers contact membership records department (membership@cwu.org) in order to have the individual’s membership record reset to show the correct date of joining.

I can assure branches that the practice or resetting the joining date when an individual moves in to the retired membership category was ceased more than 15 years ago. However, having discussed this matter in detail with the administrators for the membership database, it seems that the above advice is the most proportionate and appropriate to address this issue.

Any queries on this LTB should be addressed to my office at CWU headquarters.

Yours Sincerely,

Simon Sapper
National Officer