Unison

A few more Hammersmith and Fulham goodies for you, comrades:

We hear that the New Labour guns who run Unison have finally given beleaguered workers at Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council permission to ballot for strike action.

The strike will be in protest at a major downgrading of staff terms and conditions - a slash and burn of decent working standards that the council has been threatening for about a year.

It's all surely on now.

We trust absolutely that the regional officers that Unison's London office has parachuted in to help run the leftwing Hammersmith Unison branch are up to the sober task of organising strike action.

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As it happens, Hammersmith and Fulham staff have already chucked a spanner in council leader Stephen Greenhalgh's works with a brilliant little action of their own.

Last week, they were all - technically - sacked, then re-hired on the lesser terms and conditions. They had to sign up to the lesser terms and conditions if they wanted to be rehired.

Staff didn't make this quite as easy for the council as it sounds. It seems that as they signed, hundreds of them also noted that they were signing under duress. Then, they each lodged a case form for unfair dismissal - the argument being that they were sacked, unfairly, before being forced to sign up to the new terms. 

Now, the council has a great big pile of forms to process. That's got to be a pain in the butt. HR will surely lose its rag. 

Enough for now: suffice to say that it takes an awful lot of anger and energy to organise the sort of Up Yours action we've described above.

We expect plenty more of the same.

We've said it before, comrades, and we'll say it again - people who use and provide public services have no time for the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem line that they and the public sector must be destroyed if the nation is to be saved. Take it from those of us who talk to people who use and provide public services. They don't believe they're responsible for the recession. They want the banks to pay.

More to come.

News reaches hangbitch that Hammersmith and Fulham's Tory council has derecognised H&F Unison branch secretary Noreen Morris and two other branch officers.

These are most unpleasant times. 

The derecognition is punishment for a post that appeared on the H&F Unison blog last year. The post (rightly) slagged off several overpaid management sycophants who had helped rush through plans to shift the council contact centre to Rochdale. Management insisted that the union branch turn the post author in. The union branch told management it was unable to comply.

Now, Hammersmith and Fulham Unison has effectively lost its branch secretary and two of its best officers - at a time when H&F jobs and public services are being annihilated by the Conservatives, too.

And what is Unison's regional office doing to help its beleaguered branch comrades? Is it offering its considerable legal and financial resources to help these three officers mount a defence against this most wretched of Tory councils?

Is it hell. It has sent in a couple of regional officers to negotiate on employee matters directly with management, circumnavigating the branch.  

More soon. 

Four union activists take their own union to tribunal:

Lousy news from the trade union front, people: the New Labour-loving horrors who run the public sector union Unison have stepped up their campaign to purge their Labour affiliated union of all grassroots socialists and leftwing activists. We on the left are not pleased.

The union has just banned four of its best grassroots activists - Glenn Kelly (Bromley Unison branch secretary), Suzanne Muna (Unison's Tenant Services Authority branch secretary), Onay Kasab (Greenwich Unison branch secretary) and Brian Debus (Hackney Unison chair) - from union office for three (Kelly and Kasab), four (Muna) and five (Debus) years. 

And their crime? - well, that depends on who you ask, and how highly that person thinks of Labour. I'm one of the many who believe that Kelly, Kasab, Muna and Debus are being strongarmed out of Unison because they are Socialist party members (and NOT racists - you'll read more on that offensive and ridiculous charge below). They are passionate critics of New Labour, passionately opposed to this government's privatising of public services, and - and this is doubtless the kicker, as far as Unison's New Labour lubbers are concerned - galvanising grassroots enthusiasm for Unison to break its formal funding ties with Labour.

The Socialist Party has long held that Unison ought to cut the Labour party loose - and that's a line that is making a lot of sense to more union members than, I imagine, Unison cares to see. The government's war in Iraq, various doomed love-ins with big business, privatising of public services, and failure to repeal this country's draconian anti trade union laws have stirred a poisonous - and possibly permanent - loathing for this Labour government in the average union member.

The likes of Kelly, Muna, Kasab and Debus (and SWP members Yunus Bakhsh and Tony Staunton, who Unison has already expelled) do not strike one as maniacal, ranting, far-left duffers - they're widely written and spoken of as the real grassroots deal, who were on the money all along (hundreds of people regularly turn up to rallies organised in their defence: messages of support for activists from the likes of Rory Bremner and Mark Thomas are quoted on the Stop the Witchhunt site).

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. 

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.