Dumb union

Updated 26 July 2009:

And so the New Labour zealots who run, and have nearly destroyed, Unison, have found socialist party members Suzanne Muna, Onay Kasab, Brian Debus and Glenn Kelly guilty of producing an offensive pamphlet more than two years ago...

As we all know, the pamphlet charge was a trumped-up one. The crime the four are really guilty of is calling for Unison to break with Labour - a socialist party platform that has continued to win favour with the union grassroots as hatred of New Labour has grown.

Will update this post soon - in the meantime, here is a photo article with interviews that we did with the four at Unison conference in Bournemouth in 2008. They're great activists, but Unison won't give a bugger about that. There's little doubt in my mind that Unison will expel them.

Update:

Unison has passed sentence on Muna, Kelly, Kasab and Debus - they'll all be banned from office for three years. That's an extremely harsh decision and will likely have a very bad effect on their respective branches. Kelly and Kasab are branch secretaries of Bromley and Greenwich Unison respectively, and they've been in office for years - they're the kind of people who hold a branch together, and who have a wealth of contacts and local union and institutional knowledge.

A branch office can really suffer when people of this calibre are removed from it - doubtless Unison's intention. Fatally affixed to the Labour party, Unison needs a quiet, biddable public sector workforce as Labour starts to implement public spending cuts and heads into a general election - the last thing the union or the party wants is feisty, left-leaning local union branches kicking up rough about public sector job and service cuts.

Hopefully, these four branch officers will appeal Unison's decision and that the appeal will take at least as long as the original investigation did - ie, about two years. That ought to buy the grassroots some time to fight public spending cuts.

A lobby to protest the treatment of these four activists will take place on Thursday 30 July outside the Unison HQ Mabledon Place, London WC1H at 12pm.