RMT’s Executive is consulting about the constituencies from which delegates to the union’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) are chosen. The Executive quite reasonably suggests re-aligning boundaries to match the regional structure of the union, but a closer look at the issue shows other problems.

The most pressing is accountability. Now, most delegates are mandated by meetings based on out-of-date districts. In mine, I’ve never known these meetings happen in the last five years! Under the Exec proposals, they may be even less likely to happen as regions cover wider areas. In any case, head office gives papers to delegates saying that regional mandating meetings have no status and they do not have to follow their orders!

Another issue is fair representation. RMT has around 75,000 members - not too long ago, this had fallen to 55,000. The formula for calculating delegate numbers stayed the same, with less than 70 AGM delegates. Any democratic body must have a sliding scale of delegates based on the number of electors.

We need our AGM to be bigger and more diverse. 70 delegates is small compared to other unions’ annual conferences, and can not reflect the differences in both views and backgrounds of RMT members. More delegates would mean more debate.

Solutions?

There should be one AGM delegate per so many members, say one per 500.

The closer the delegate is to the members, the more accountable s/he can be. We need a direct line of democracy from the member to the AGM. If you want to make (or change) union policy, the process should be clear: write a resolution, take it to your branch, get it passed, then your branch delegate proposes it to the AGM. It should be as simple as that.

This would be more democratic since more members attend branch meetings than regional councils and many branches meet more often than regional councils do.

A delegate per branch might be ideal, but the size and duration of the AGM limits this. A fair compromise: each region to have a number of delegates based on the 500-member rule. Any branch with more than 500 members would be entitled to a delegate. Smaller branches in the region would be ‘pooled’ and share a delegate, maybe rotated between them; if these branches together have more than 1000 members, they would have two delegates. Any other delegates in the region’s allocation would be allocated to branches having more than 1000 members.

Under these proposals, RMT would have a larger AGM, more accountable, democratic, representative and diverse, more likely to include women and ethnic minorities. It would be an AGM that union members could be more involved in and could be proud of. It would be a big change, but we should not be afraid of change.