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Fighting for Jobs | Pay | Conditions
Our Campaigns
Unite the union is a campaigning and active union. A campaign is a group of actions that are taken around a single issue or set of connected issues. Campaigns seek to use pressure to secure a change, agreement or intervention from an employer or government to address the issue and improve conditions for workers.
A campaign’s issue can impact every worker in the bank or only a small group of workers in a single team, department or local area. The actions taken are carefully planned and are designed to achieve specific and measurable goals. Actions are taken together by our members in what we call ‘collective actions.’
Our campaign collective actions are focussed around three key elements:
Educate
Providing information and resources explaining what the issue is, why it matters, how it impacts you and other workers, and what can be done about it. For example, in a pay campaign the educational arm might cover what inflation and real terms pay cuts are and why they matter.
Agitate
This element builds on the education work and drives members to take action. We might highlight the risks of a change proposed by the bank, demonstrate the threat that issue poses to terms and conditions or outline the employer’s responses to date. In a pay campaign where the employer has made a low pay offer, we might discuss the CEO’s latest pay rise or a large shareholder dividend.
Organise
Meetings, focus groups, petitions, solidarity rallies, ballots, surveys, statements, industrial action ballots, recruitment drives and many more actions organise ordinary members around the issue and make it visible to the employer.
Through these interlinked approaches and effective collective actions, the union’s strength grows which in turn gives us leverage. By organising members and using our leverage effectively, we address the power imbalance between the bank and its workers, our members. This is how we win on the issues important to you and bring the Unite motto to life – we fight together to protect and improve your jobs, pay and conditions.
Being a member of a trade union is not a spectator sport. Each and every issue we campaign on comes directly from members. Equally, every win relies on members coming together and organising around a campaign to build collective strength.
Keep reading to learn about our active campaigns or explore or archive of previous campaigns since 2018.
Current campaigns
EPG TUPE transfer terms and conditions
Unite members in NatWest’s Mentor arm have been organising around a TUPE transfer to EPG Group which threatens long-held terms and conditions including enhanced redundancy pay.
Test Campaign
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Past campaigns archive
Pay 2021
The campaign for Pay 2021 took place after a two year deal had covered the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The bank took a robust stance that inflation and cost of living were not a concern or obligation for any employer. Unite took a very different view and gained significant concessions.
Unpaid Overtime
In NatWest Group, unpaid overtime has been endemic for years. Unite has maintained a strong position that all hours of work, even those that the bank has a culture of not recognising as work, should be paid.
Pay 2019 & 2020
For the 2019 pay negotiations, Unite launched a Fair Pay for All pay claim. In the resulting negotiations, the bank offered a two year pay deal and continued to argue that their approach to pay was well liked by workers. The Unite pay survey found the opposite.
Branch Closures
NatWest Group has closed literally thousands of retail branches in communities up and down the country. As the bank returned to profit after the 2008 financial crisis, rather than pause or slow the pace of closures, the bank accelerated it. Unite the Union has been at the forefront of the fight to protect jobs and community access to cash. Click through to read up on our key branch closure campaigns and learn about the scale of the closures.
Pay 2018
The Pay 2018 campaign was fought at a unique time for NatWest Group. Then known as RBS Group, the bank had been left on the brink of collapse in the fallout of the 2008 global financial crisis. In the years that followed, the organisation reported astronomical losses well into the billions of pounds. The organisation had been bailed out by the UK government in the immediate aftermath of the crisis and the tax payer remained the majority owner and shareholder.