Bickerstaffe goes after 34 colourful years

Rodney Bickerstaffe, general secretary of the country's largest union and a union official for 34 years, retires at the end of this month at age 55.

Bickerstaffe has been the top man at public services union UNISON and one of its constituent unions, NUPE, for 19 years. He has been a long-term supporter of the Labour Research Department and in April 1998 launched its internet-based pay and conditions information service.

He joined NUPE as a trainee officer at 21 and saw members through some of the major strikes of the 1970s. These included the 1978-79 "winter of discontent", when he had to defend a gravediggers' strike.

He recently told Unions Today magazine that the gravediggers were having to dig through ice and snow and were "being paid peanuts". He said that, at that time, the Labour trade secretary Peter Shore called him in and said: "What about the dignity of the dead?" to which Bickerstaffe replied: "What about the dignity of the living?"

On his retirement from UNISON he is going on to take over from Jack Jones as president of the National Pensioners Convention.