Death of a rightwing union

The great moment has arrived, people: it is time to start publicly discussing Labour-affiliated trade unions and their dreadful betrayal - particularly since New Labour came to power - of the low-paid people and communities who are most desperate for union help.

I'm particularly keen to focus on the bunch of showers that run Unison, the massive (1.3m members) public-sector union that'll be holding its national conference in Bournemouth this week.

There are a number of reasons why putting the boot into the Unison bureaucracy is very important.

The first is that they started it: I was a committed and very enthusiastic Unison branch activist until the (famously rightwing) Unison bureaucracy threw me out of the 2005 national conference for publishing anti-New Labour comment on an unauthorised (ie lefty) website that nobody on the planet ever read.

The union didn't like this, though: at its very earliest convenience (ie many moons after the event) the bureaucracy launched world history's longest-winded disciplinary investigation into my behaviour, with a view to ultimately expelling me. This ridiculous process dragged on for more than a year, and at God only knows what expense. I have no idea where this investigation ended, or even if it did. I left the union in 2006, which hopefully the investigation team noted.

But enough about me - the second reason Unison warrants our close attention is that it is so brilliantly close to imploding. It is a classic instance of a Labour-affiliated union that has been dragged through the ideological cesspool by its fatal link to the present government. It is no secret that union members feel absolutely betrayed by their privatising, war-happy Labour government: more of a secret is the extent to which the union bureaucracy works to stamp out opposition to Labour in its own rank and file. It is particularly hot on left-wing activists - the SWP and Socialist Party members who push so hard for a break from Labour. Meanwhile, Labour councils like Newham are sacking union activists like Michael Gavan for criticising New Labour policy. Activists are being attacked from all sides.

Thrilling rumours abound. Rumour has it that Unison's unelected bureaucracy is at bitter, all-out war with its activists and members in local branches, and that nobody's quite sure who'll be left standing at the end of it.

You hear that Unison's activists and members are considering open revolt over the bureaucracy's failure to stand up to New Labour on the privatisation of public services. You hear that Unison's standing orders committee has chucked out about half of the motions that its local branches wanted to debate at conference this week, and that it got rid of at least a third of branch motions at last year's conference, with the controversial ones that called for debate over continued funding of the Labour party - and for union officials to be elected, rather than appointed - hitting the trash first.

You hear whispers that Unison delays responses to branch requests for strike ballots, and slaps down like an elephant turd on branches that dare run their own consultative ballots for strikes. You hear tell of expulsions from the union, and of anti-New Labour local branches being comandeered and run by the union bureaucracy, and of witchhunts of left-leaning grassroots activists. You even hear (I trust my notes are correct) that anybody who suggests that Unison break its affiliation with Labour like the RMT did ends up at the bottom of the Thames wearing concrete trainers. I'll probably find out the hard way if that one is true.

Union on union

You will know - or have guessed - that Labour affiliated unions fall into two distinct camps. One of these camps is the administrative one - the bloated, overpaid, unelected, New-Labour-buttkissing bureaucrats who on paper are there to support local branches and union members in their needs and aims, but who in reality devote themselves to flattening grassroots opponents of this Labour government (of which there are plenty).

The other camp is that grassroots one - the local, democratically-elected and run branches that we join when we take up union membership, etc, etc. I have the utmost respect for people who work in these branches, even though I can't always understand why the hell they bother do it. I did it myself for several years and found it extremely challenging. Local trade union officers work as volunteers (either on day release from their usual jobs, or in their own time, if they don't have agreed time off). The cases they handle are spectacularly depressing - they're all about representing people who are being bullied by management, or who are being disciplined, or performance-managed out of a job, or who are not being dealt with fairly in context of an organisation's personnel procedures. Then, there's all the other stuff - union offices negotiate leave provisions with management, prepare and present workforce views on organisational restructures, and do their best to make sure that management operates within workplace law. Your reltionships at work can suffer as a result of your work as a rep, even though the law says they shouldn't: by definition, if you're any good as a rep, management hate you. You can kiss the idea of promotion goodbye fairly early on in the picture.

So - it's a thankless task a lot of the time, and it's become even more nightmarish since New Labour hit town. Union branch office work in the public sector has become a roiling hell of staff upset and service cutbacks, large-scale transfers of staff to private companies and all the associated problems with cuts to salaries and attacks on working terms and conditions, and service standards. You're always fighting and campaigning at the request of your members and local communities. At any one time, your branch will be fighting to convince your council to keep council housing in council hands, or keep area housing offices open, or to stop spending Christ knows what on IT consultants, or to keep social care homes open, or to pay carehome staff decent wages, or not to sell off playgrounds - my word, the list goes on.

Nonetheless, they do keep doing it: the likes of Glenn Kelly at Bromley local government, Noreen Morris at Hammersmith and Fulham, Onay Kasab at Greenwich, Jon Rogers at Lambeth, and John Burgess at Barnet (who has overseen the Fremantle careworkers' campaign) have been plugging away on behalf of the low-paid since Labour turned up and started privatising.

So - time to start telling some stories.