Unison

Have got a short photo essay on Unison's witchhunting of anti-New Labour activists here. 

Cross-posted at liberalconspiracy.org.

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.

Warming up for a blogging restart with fantasies for 2008: We @ hangbitch like to think that 2008 will be the year that furious trade union members finally put a fatal gumboot into the traitorous Labour party. We want this to be the year that the majestically hopeless Gordon Brown pays for privatising public services and jobs, and fragging the standards of both for the forseeable future.

We also like to think that this will be the year that trade union members go after the Labour party butt-kissers who run the big public sector unions. Just a fantasy at this stage, but one we're spending a lot of time on. We're getting sick of hearing that left-leaning union branch secretaries are being disciplined on trumped-up charges by their very own unions, etc. We're particularly keen for 2008 to be the year that the career of Linda Perks, the evil New Labourite witch who doubles as Unison London regional secretary, meets a globby end after gross, and very public, hostilties. Slag.

But anyway... here we are, at an unofficial meeting of a large group of union branch secretaries and reps in a cold Houses of Parliament committee room, talking about the malignant environment that branch-level union reps are having to operate in. We won't be naming the meeting attendees on this occasion, in case that crone Perks decides to discipline union members for showing their faces at an unofficial union meeting. That would totally be her style. Attendees aren't in the most festive of tenors as it is: Fighting for the lowest-paid workers and the public services they provide isn't a picnic and this has been a difficult year. It ain't ending on a high note, either.

The economics of the madhouse come to Camden Council. Why are all councils crazy?

Do you live in Camden? Are you poor, or not so well-off, maybe? Do you, or members of your family, use council services and facilities like housing, home care, after-school care, play schemes, special-education services, or any of Camden council's social services?

Tough.

The Liberal Democrat-Conservative administration at Camden Council is about to launch the biggest attack on services and jobs that Camden has seen since the early 1980s. Several hundred Unison members turned up to a Camden branch meeting this week to hear about this - the council chamber, where the meeting was held, was packed, as you might expect. The council plans to cut £23m from the council budget in 2007 to 2008. Some 350 jobs are also expected to go.

As usual, the services that vulnerable people need most will be chopped. The council wants to take £3m out of children's services, and close play schemes and cut care services for vulnerable children. So much for the next generation. Some £9.8m in cuts are planned in housing and adult social servics. The council's interpreting and translation service is also in the firing-line, as is the welfare rights team.

Report and interviews from Organising for Fighting Unions conference on 11 November

Update on JJB Sports strike status sent by GMB Thursday 16 November 2006

Wigan AFC and JJB Sports owner and premier-league wanker Dave Whelan wins this month's Supreme Corporate Arsehole Award, as far as the hundreds of people at today's Organising for Fighting Trade Unions conference are concerned.

Dave treats his staff in the JJB Sports distribution warehouse in Wigan like garbage. Their salaries stink, and their reasonable requests for better money and terms continue to fall on Dave's deaf ears.

Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell speaks to us from Hammersmith 

It is 8pm on a grey, sticky Wednesday and John McDonnell is telling a Hammersmith Stop the War meeting a story about the sorry behaviour of some of the overpaid, moral-free assholes who run the New Labour-affiliated trade union UNISON. He's telling us the grisly true story of the fate of the union activists who walked out in protest against the Iraq War when Tony Blair was prattling through his keynote speech at the TUC conference in Brighton in September.

Publicly, UNISON supported the activists and the walkout - or agreed, at least, that Blair was probably past his best as an attraction - but behind the scenes, the union hierarchy turned on the members like the Reich. Union bosses chucked the protesting activists out of the conference and sent them home and, as McDonnell understood it, were now toying with the idea of disciplining the activists for their attitude towards Tony Blair - the union disciplinary process being a protracted procedural nightmare that could take years and ultimately lead to expulsion of the activists.