Our History

A measured approach

From the beginning, the union's method was negotiation rather than confrontation. That was never timidity. In a community this size, where the person across the negotiating table is also a neighbour and often a relative, agreement reached in good faith lasts longer than agreement forced.

That approach is written into the union's own crest, which shows the rights of employers and employees held in equal balance beneath the single word Goodwill.

1982 and after

In the period surrounding the 1982 conflict, the union's opposition to any transfer of sovereignty to Argentina was heard well beyond the Islands. The British Trade Unions Congress (TUC) pointed to its solidarity with the Falkland Islands General Employees Union in explaining its own position during the crisis..

The union's best-known intervention came after the war. St Helenian workers were brought to the Islands to help with reconstruction and were housed on FIPASS, in conditions poorer than those of local workers. The union took up their case on behalf of workers who had no one else to speak for them. It came closer to industrial action than at any other point in its history before an agreement was reached with the government.

The quieter years

Membership fell away in the decades that followed, for reasons that had little to do with the union itself.

A separate civil servants' union existed for a time and did not survive the Hay Management Report of 1996, which offered government employees improved pensions and benefits in place of collective representation. In Camp, the subdivision of the large farms broke up the settlements and working patterns that membership had been built around. The economy diversified into fishing, tourism and services, and the shared working life that had made organising straightforward gave way to something more scattered.

The union kept going, but quietly, sustained through those years by a small number of people who were unwilling to let it fold.