Rodney Bickerstaffe is general secretary of Britain's biggest trade union, Unison, which represents 1.3 million public sector workers. He is standing down in 2001 after 30 years of union work.
Although a supporter of Labour - and a close friend of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott - Mr Bickerstaffe has attacked the government's policies to ease poverty as not going far enough. He also criticised Gordon Brown's commitment to hold to Conservative spending plans for the two years following the 1997 election. Calling on the chancellor to release cash from his supposed "war chest", Mr Bickerstaffe said: "Not jam yesterday, not jam tomorrow, but a little bit of jam today."
Unison criticised the level set for the national minimum wage, with Mr Bickerstaffe calling for the lowest level to be £5 per hour for all workers. On the recent NHS survey, championed by Health Secretary Alan Milburn and Tony Blair, Mr Bickerstaffe said: "There's a danger it will be looked at as a PR exercise." He also spoke out against Nato's bombing of Serbia.
