Chaired by Kebba Manneh (pictured) and hosted by the national Black members’ committee (NMBC), the first day of UNISON’s virtual Black members’ conference began this morning.
Day one featured a range of guest speakers, including UNISON general secretary Christina McAnea, TUC head of equalities and strategy Kudsia Batool, the union’s Nelson Mandela award winner, Kemoy Walker, and UNISON president Paul Holmes.
Institutional racism, amplified by the pandemic, was a strong theme of the day. Black people were four times more likely to die of COVID-19 than white people, but as one conference speaker said: “They weren’t dying due to genetics, but due to a racist society.”
Ms McAnea said: “Black workers were more likely to get ill and sadly die during this pandemic, yet they still kept going, still did their job and held people’s hands.”
Conference stated that these disproportionate deaths of Black workers by COVID-19 were driven by institutional racism in the workplace, which has resulted in Black workers more often being in low-paid and precarious work, more likely to be in frontline job roles and not reflected in management structures.
Recognising that proper sick pay can be a matter of life and death, as well as evidence that suggests both ethnicity and income inequality are associated with COVID-19 illness, two motions were passed in relation to sickness policies.
One motion was also passed on Black disabled workers and home working policies, calling on the NBMC to work with service groups to negotiate with employers to include front line workers in home working policies, with deployment as an option for those who want it, as well as campaign for an increase in sick pay.
Another motion was also passed for the NMBC to develop bargaining strategies to ensure COVID-19-related absences are not counted toward sickness absence, and that enable Black women who are absent due to COVID-19 and long COVID to receive a full wage for the duration of their absence.
In a rallying guest speech on race equality, Ms Batool encouraged members to “put tackling racism at the heart of how we organise and collectively bargain”, adding: “Now is the time to mobilise and organise for racial justice work”.
Several motions were passed in relation to the development of Black activists within the union, including support for branches to ensure the development of a mentoring programme led by Black activists to support new Black activists.
The last motion passed for the day was one to ensure fair representation of Black members at branch leadership level by encouraging all branch officers to have their ethnicity recorded on the union’s RMS membership system – specifically activists elected into secretary, chair, treasurer and convenor roles.