Brian Debus

Rang around a few union branches for views on last week's local government strike action, and on the list of demands that unions will apparently put to the Labour national policy forum this week. People reported a bit of a mixed bag:

Barnet Unison branch secretary John Burgess describes rallying the troops at Barnet Council for last week's two-day strike action as 'pretty hard, to be honest.' About 900 people went out on the first day (16 July) at Barnet and about 1100 on the second (Burgess thinks he had about a 55% turnout). The strike action closed about 20 schools, and partly-closed about ten others. 

Burgess says that the logistics of organising strike action on this scale, and in this environment, were almost too challenging. The sentiment is there - public sector workers are as worried about the credit squeeze as anyone, and they are incensed about the privatisation of public services - but unfortunately, the sector is also disparate, disorganised, and easy for management and strike-breakers to circumnavigate. 

Burgess estimates that about a third of the staff providing council services at Barnet are temps and/or agency workers, or are outsourced workers who are as frightened of the consequences of taking strike action as they are difficult to co-ordinate into it.

Another problem this time was that members of other public sector unions weren't out on strike (the GMB, for example, accepted the government's 2.45% pay offer, which meant that GMB members were at work, although some wouldn't cross the picket lines).

Things are made even more challenging by the behaviour of Unison's leadership - specifically, the leadership's ongoing reluctance to acknowledge that its members are demanding that the union break its formal link with the much-loathed Labour party.

'You could see the response that the leaders got at the [strike] rally (in central London on Wednesday). Any time that they mentioned Labour, they got booed. People were shouting 'Disafilliate! Disaffiliate! [Unison deputy general secretary] Keith Sonnet got a real howling when he spoke... People want someone to lead them. It gives them confidence.'

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

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.