Members rights to representation

Unite provides all its members support via its workplace representatives, regional officers, and legal services department. It is important for members to understand what their entitlement is to support. You need to be in membership for a period of time before you are entitled to full support.

For new members, for the first four weeks of your membership, you are only entitled to verbal/telephone advice from workplace representatives.

After you have been a member for four weeks, then you are entitled to representation in meetings by workplace. This is to safeguard our workplace reps time, and ensure staff are not just joining the union for support then leaving. After four weeks membership, you can request that reps attend sickness absence meetings, grievance, capability and disciplinary hearings, and other formal and informal meetings with management.

Unite does not have to provide support for issues that occurred before you became a union member. We encourage all staff to join a union, and workers need to be pro-active in joining the union before they have issues, not just coming to the union when they have a problem at work.

We allow our workplace representatives to utilise their discretion in taking up pre-existing issues. If your issue started before you joined the union, then you will need to discuss the exact circumstances with your workplace representative so they can decide whether they can provide support.

Members are only entitled to legal support from the union after being in membership for three months. You are not entitled to legal support for issues that occurred prior to your membership of Unite.

You are not entitled to legal support for issues that occurred prior to your membership of Unite. As a Unite member, you can obtain free initial advice on any non-work related legal matter by telephoning Unite's legal helpline. Call them on 0800 709 007  or visit their website: Unitelegalservices.org

Unite's network of professional advisers can offer confidential advice on criminal law, family law, consumer law, property and land law, Wills and trusts as well as many other legal issues. Through our legal services package, Unite members are entitled to free initial legal advice on any matter which is non-work related from a Unite solicitor. This service entitles you to receive a 30-minute phone consultation with a solicitor, free of charge. 

All legal support requests to do with workplace issues have to be discussed with our Regional Officer, who will then take the matter to Unite’s legal department if they judge it a suitable matter for support. To request legal support with a workplace matter, email gsttunite@gmail.com, or speak with a workplace representative who can refer the matter to our regional officer.  

All Unite’s workplace representatives are volunteers, they are staff members of the trust who work on your case in time granted by the trust, and in their own spare time. Workplace reps are not paid any money by the union for the work they do, and the time granted by the Trust is very limited. 

Please be respectful and patient with the workplace representative you are assigned as they are an NHS employee just like yourself who also is working in the same understaffed and under resourced service as yourself, and taking on the union representative role in their own time. 

Workplace representatives are granted time by the trust to perform their duties, but this time is extremely limited, so they may take a few days to respond to emails, and should be given at least one weeks notice of any formal meetings you are invited to.