Glenn Kelly

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. 

Excellent chance of it all hitting the fan at Unison conference today: The four left-leaning union activists that the union bureaucracy is presently trying to expel are holding a special protest meeting at midday. It's a meeting which anybody who is anybody in Unison has a substantial stake in.

The union bureaucracy's witchhunt of these four respected officers is easily the biggest issue at conference this year. There are those who think that the union's future is written in this battle. Either left or the right in the union must win.

A bit of background for you: in the kind of extraordinarily risky, go-for-broke, ill-thought-out sort of move by which Unison's increasingly desperate bureaucracy is beginning to distinguish itself, the bureaucracy is disciplining - and trying to expel - branch secretaries Glenn Kelly (Bromley local government and Unison NEC member), Onay Kasab (Greenwich local government), Suzanne Muna (Housing corporation) and Hackney branch chair Brian Debus. These four are popular, effective and respected Unison activists who have been around - and working hard for members at branch level - for a very long while. (Their stopthewitchhunt website is here).

Ostensibly, their crime against the union was to criticise the union's famously rigid standing orders committee last year for throwing out controversial motions presented by local branches for debate at Unison's 2007 national conference. The standing orders committee ruled out about a third of the motions put forward for conference debate last year (word is that this year, about half of all branch motions have been ruled out).

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.