A year from now, on June 1 2006, Natfhe and the Association of University Teachers will merge. The new union will immediately lead further education lecturers out on their first national strike for years.
Both these decisions came out of Natfhe's annual conference last week. The merger will only be stopped if the members of either union vote against it in ballots later this year, which is very unlikely.
The strike can only be prevented by something even more unlikely: a decision by the government that when the Association of Colleges agrees on a pay deal with the unions, all colleges actually pay what has been decided.
It's a long-standing grievance. Even government ministers do not defend a system in which lecturers get less money than schoolteachers, and stingy college principals can decide not to award the national pay rise so that they can buy something else with the money instead. But ministers do nothing, because the union has not been strong enough to force them to act.
So one way and another, 2006 is going to be a big year for the lecturers' trade union. By the end of it, we will know whether the long-nurtured dream of a single union for all those who teach in post-16 education can work, or whether internal tensions will cause unbearable pressure. And we will have found out whether the new union is powerful enough to make some headway on pay.
Two of the most optimistic people in Eastbourne last week were Paul Mackney and Sally Hunt, general secretaries of Natfhe and the AUT respectively. Both leaders have worked hard for a merger that seemed a very long way away when Mackney took office eight years ago. And they have arranged a very unusual merger.
Most union mergers happen because one union or the other is in bad trouble, haemorrhaging either money or members. But Natfhe has put its troubles behind it, and Mackney was able to claim last week that it was merging from strength, not weakness.
Natfhe could, of course, have done without the row about the AUT boycott of Israeli universities blowing up right now, but even that was rapidly defused when the AUT withdrew the boycott the day before the conference began.
In most union merger talks, the first item on the agenda is the future of the holders of the top posts, but Mackney and Hunt appear genuinely not to have discussed this. There will be an election for a general secretary of the new union, and both will stand. The loser will still have a job, working for the winner. That's as far as it goes. "People keep asking me what the deal is, and they find it hard to believe it when I say there isn't one," said Hunt last week.
Most union mergers are strongly opposed by a significant minority of activists. In this one, the opposition that existed eight years ago seems to have melted away. Then, many AUT members saw the idea of merging with college lecturers, and even new university lecturers, as a lowering of standards.
Hunt says: "When I saw Oxford and Cambridge saying they wanted the merger, I was sure it was going to happen." And in Natfhe, though some conference delegates wanted to question the merger terms, almost no one opposed the merger in principle. When it came to the vote, just one delegate voted against the merger proposal. He came from London Metropolitan University, so his attitude towards mergers is understandably jaundiced.
For London Metropolitan University represents just the sort of problem that the new union must show it can solve. The dispute there began a day after Brian Roper was appointed vice chancellor of the merged university on April 1 last year, when he wrote to 387 lecturers who had worked at London Guildhall University, one of the two universities that merged, telling them that their contracts were at an end, and they would be fired if they did not sign new contracts that he had written for them.
They refused, Natfhe supported them, and so far Roper has not carried out his threat to fire them. But the threat is still there. Roper could start firing people at any moment. Nine days of talks at Acas have failed to produce a settlement, and there was a week-long strike just before the Nafthe conference.
The new union must win this sort of dispute if it is to escape from the shadow of the 90s, when new-broom managements set out to show staff and unions who was boss. "It's not about efficiency, it's about control and bullying," said Ross Murdoch of Southampton City College at last week's conference. The union's real test will be whether it can defeat the relics of an era of macho management.
