YES - Bob Allen, national president, Community and Youth Workers' Union
Youth and community workers are increasingly seen as crucial to delivering the lifelong learning social inclusion agenda.
The new JNC agreement, secured in large part by the CYWU's industrial action, is a major advance in workers' pay. There is now the possibility of developing a more coherent framework of training and qualifications.
Transforming Youth Work and the forthcoming youth green paper can be the basis for better collaborative provision with youth workers and a better-funded youth service playing a central role.
The proposed merger is all about winning a better deal for young people and for those thousands of dedicated professional workers not yet on JNC.
As an autonomous section of the Transport and General Workers' Union, the CYWU would retain its identity and expertise but be able to grow its capacity to deliver for many more workers. The objective is to create a bottom-up organisational culture - what youth workers call participation and empowerment.
YES - Doug Nicholls, general secretary, CYWU
A union is as good as its members. Members are only good trade unionists if their workplaces are organised so workers are free from exploitation.
Stress and exploitation have been at the heart of youth work employment practices for decades. British workers work longer than any others in Europe - 43 hours a week compared with 37 in France, for example. Yet youth workers work on average 47 hours a week. Britain has five fewer bank holidays than some countries. Yet many youth work employers still expect staff to work them.
Youth workers do a job as difficult as teaching yet they earn more than 5,000 a year less on average. JNC terms and conditions are now indispensable in taking workforce development forward.
Super youth workers need a super union to achieve the levels of union membership density that exist in teaching, the civil service and social work.
YES - Terry Mattinson, youth and community worker, Lancashire County Council
The CYWU has been looking for a long time to bring play workers, Connexions advisers and learning mentors into the union. To develop that, subject to the motion of conference, is a good move. Sometimes people say big is dangerous, but if we do affiliate to the TGWU we won't lose any of our constitution. We will remain as a kind of association of that union.
But it is very important that we maintain our own identity. Joining the TGWU gives us wider scope to work in a lot of different sectors as well.
If we are going to make inroads with the employers about the JNC conditions, we need to bring some of those other groups within JNC, and joining the TGWU will give us more scope to be able to do that. We will be able to maintain our uniqueness within a large organisation, but the back-up of that organisation is there.
YES - Tom Wylie, chief executive, The National Youth Agency
It is important that strong unions help the individual worker secure good levels of salary and other conditions, and these are important for the recruitment and retention of a skilled workforce.
What we would also want to see, though, is that concern about broader professional issues and the condition of young people is not lost. The merger would be of benefit provided that the concern for greater negotiating strength does not displace issues of professional concerns about young people.
If you look at the CYWU, it has been a very specialised trade association as well as a trade union. So it has a view on the levels of youth service provision. You don't see that to the same extent at Unison. So, even though Unison has recruited a substantial number of youth workers, you don't get the engagement of Unison in professional discourse to the same extent as you do with the CYWU.
But with Unison you are getting greater muscle at a local level because it is covering a much higher proportion of a local authority's workforce.
