Rose Gander

Recorded 07.01.2019

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

I’d been a Unison – or before that a NALGO (National and Local Government Officers Association) trade union member since the age of 18 when I first started work, and my father said to me… ‘as soon as you start work my girl’ -in his big Devonshire accent – ‘you must join a union cos a union will look after you’. And he was very much a working-class man, so of course that’s the first thing I did. I think from the very moment I began work I joined up as a… a… um trade unionist with… with NALGO which then became Unison. And I think it wasn’t until I was umm… oh I don’t know, maybe… huh gosh maybe I was about 50 when I actually went to my first branch meeting and thought that I might become active. And up until then I’d always seen trade union activism as being for people who were supremely confident, supremely able to challenge and deal with agro and conflict, and although in my social work career I had been able to act on behalf of a people, if it came to doing anything for myself or that wasn’t part of my work I felt very underconfident and very inactive. But the… the um lightbulb moment was when I realised that there was no legal… uh… rights for trade unions to train union learning representatives, and I’d come from a background of failing my 11+… um and going to a secondary (inaudible) school, and I think probably just a whisker away from instead of going into a profession, becoming a cleaner or working down the laundry, which is what my father always threatened me with if I didn’t do well at school. ‘You’ll be working down the laundry’ said coney bridge?.  And I thought of all these other women who were in jobs for Devon County Council where they’ve had similar backgrounds to me but they haven’t somehow had the luck or… or the people around them to support them to… to… to develop their education. And I thought the Union learning representative was an amazing concept – it was about training people like me to become a representative and encourage women in the workforce to… um… think that what they never thought was possible and achievable could be achievable.  And I think it was very small steps and unfortunately it was very very difficult to persuade both the old fashioned union members to see this as valuable in a valuable way of recruiting people to become members and very difficult for management to um… totally buy into this concept that if you support people in the workplace to advance their education, they would become better employees.

Notes
Find out more about the work Unison do – https://www.unison.org.uk/