Greetings from Unison conference in Bournemouth
9:00 am - June 16th 2008
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Yours truly is at Unison conference, doing the blogging business. Here’s a little starter post, to give you an idea of the reporting on Unison that yours truly is planning to do:
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 is 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, 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.
But enough about me – the second reason Unison warrants our close attention is that it is so brilliantly close to imploding. It is a classic instance of a Labour-affiliated union that has been dragged through the ideological cesspool by its fatal link to the present government.
It is no secret that union members feel absolutely betrayed by their privatising, war-happy Labour government: more of a secret is the extent to which the union bureaucracy works to stamp out opposition to Labour in its own rank and file. It is particularly hot on left-wing activists – the SWP and Socialist Party members who push so hard for a break from Labour. Meanwhile, Labour councils like Newham are sacking union activists like Michael Gavan for criticising New Labour policy. Activists are being attacked from all sides.
Thrilling rumours abound. Rumour has it that Unison’s unelected bureaucracy is at bitter, all-out war with its activists and members in local branches, and that nobody’s quite sure who’ll be left standing at the end of it.
You hear that Unison’s activists and members are considering open revolt over the bureaucracy’s failure to stand up to New Labour on the privatisation of public services. You hear that Unison’s standing orders committee has chucked out about half of the motions that its local branches wanted to debate at conference this week, and that it got rid of at least a third of branch motions at last year’s conference, with the controversial ones that called for debate over continued funding of the Labour party – and for union officials to be elected, rather than appointed – hitting the trash first.
You hear whispers that Unison delays responses to branch requests for strike ballots, and slaps down like an elephant turd on branches that dare run their own consultative ballots for strikes. You hear tell of expulsions from the union, and of anti-New Labour local branches being comandeered and run by the union bureaucracy, and of witchhunts of left-leaning grassroots activists. You even hear (I trust my notes are correct) that anybody who suggests that Unison break its affiliation with Labour like the RMT did ends up at the bottom of the Thames wearing concrete trainers. I’ll probably find out the hard way if that one is true.
Union on union
You will know – or have guessed – that Labour affiliated unions fall into two distinct camps. One of these camps is the administrative one – the bloated, overpaid, unelected, New-Labour-buttkissing bureaucrats who on paper are there to support local branches and union members in their needs and aims, but who in reality devote themselves to flattening grassroots opponents of this Labour government (of which there are plenty).
The other camp is that grassroots one – the local, democratically-elected and run branches that we join when we take up union membership, etc, etc. I have the utmost respect for people who work in these branches, even though I can’t always understand why the hell they bother do it.
I did it myself for several years and found it extremely challenging. Local trade union officers work as volunteers (either on day release from their usual jobs, or in their own time, if they don’t have agreed time off). The cases they handle are spectacularly depressing – they’re all about representing people who are being bullied by management, or who are being disciplined, or performance-managed out of a job, or who are not being dealt with fairly in context of an organisation’s personnel procedures.
Then, there’s all the other stuff – union offices negotiate leave provisions with management, prepare and present workforce views on organisational restructures, and do their best to make sure that management operates within workplace law. Your reltionships at work can suffer as a result of your work as a rep, even though the law says they shouldn’t: by definition, if you’re any good as a rep, management hate you. You can kiss the idea of promotion goodbye fairly early on in the picture.
So – it’s a thankless task a lot of the time, and it’s become even more nightmarish since New Labour hit town. Union branch office work in the public sector has become a roiling hell of staff upset and service cutbacks, large-scale transfers of staff to private companies and all the associated problems with cuts to salaries and attacks on working terms and conditions, and service standards.
You’re always fighting and campaigning at the request of your members and local communities. At any one time, your branch will be fighting to convince your council to keep council housing in council hands, or keep area housing offices open, or to stop spending Christ knows what on IT consultants, or to keep social care homes open, or to pay carehome staff decent wages, or not to sell off playgrounds – my word, the list goes on.
It is time to start telling some stories. Am off down to the morning session of local government conference now. Back soon.
Regular updates on debate on conference business, motions and votes:
Jon Rogers’ blog
MarshaJane’s blog
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Kate Belgrave is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. She is a New Zealander who moved to the UK eight years ago. She was a columnist and journalist at the New Zealand Herald and is now a web editor. She writes on issues like public sector cuts, workplace disputes and related topics. She is also interested in abortion rights, and finding fault with religion. Also at: Hangbitching.com and @hangbitch
· Other posts by Kate Belgrave
Story Filed Under: Blog ,Trade Unions
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Reader comments
Not quite sure why the union thinks it’s well-placed to comment on the council’s IT strategy. Or the sale of houses and playgrounds, come to that.
Maybe if local activists dropped the random campaigning and focused on representing staff interests (which in the public sector mostly means defending people from bad/bullying management and private sector transfers), they’d have more success and less stressful lives?
It’s my experience that union activists spend an enormos amount of time defending people from bad-bullying management – representing people at disciplinary hearings etc is the majority of the work and most of my contacts in union branches put in very long days meeting member requirements in that sense.
The campaigning tends to be at the behest of members – they ask the union to campaign against privatisation, almos, etc, and the union does have a legal right to participate in campaigning, I think as part of its political fund arrangement.
Regarding commenting on IT – I was asked to do that all the time, because spend on IT consultants was always part of proposed restructuring of staff – reorganisation being a procedure that the union’s comments had to be sought on. I had a reasonable knowledge of web/IT and appropriate spending levels, because that was the part of the council I worked in.
You may be implying that there are far-left activists who put a lot of time into ensuring that union branches campaign around issues that are of interest to groups like the SWP. I think that’s a fair point.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that reps didn’t do the disciplinary hearing work – while I’ve never worked in the public sector, friends who’ve worked there have had massive help from their union reps and I’m aware that there is a great deal of work that goes on there. I did mean what you suggest in the final para.
No worries.
The biggest issue that Unison activists have at the moment anyway is their own bureaucracy – anyone on the left is being flattened by the New Labourites in the union who are so desperate to hang onto power (which they won’t – their beloved Gordon Brown is cruising for one of the all time hidings next election). It’s an absolute shambles and I’ll be publishing more about it.
Good stuff Kate, look forward to more!
2 things:
1. I get that there is a faction fight at the moment about whether or not to disaffiliate from Labour and instead build the fifth international or whatever. Heaping abuse on people who work for trade unions like Unison as ‘bloated, overpaid, New Labour-buttkissing bureaucrats’ is just unpleasant. In my experience, the reasons why people work for trade unions is very similar to the reasons why they become union reps, out of a commitment to the aims and ideals of the trade union movement.
2. Every council is different, and even the most progressive will not always agree with Unison 100% of the time. But I was campaigning in a number of different parts of the country in this year’s elections, and in those areas, the way to keep social care homes open, or pay staff decent wages or not sell off playgrounds was to vote Labour.
It just seems weird that you reserve the fiercest criticism for the people who agree with you on most stuff except details of political strategy and affiliation (soft left trade unionists), and don’t have anything to say about the people who have been cutting services most enthusiastically at a local level and are getting ready to smash the public sector trade unions once and forever if they manage to get into power.
Hi Don,
I take your point, but I don’t agree with it. I have a lot of evidence now that the New-Labour-tied bureaucracy is acting in an extremely aggressive way towards left-leaning branches – am about to post another piece on it now and will continue to do so during the week.
I do believe the bureaucracy – particularly in the London region is bloated and desperate to keep its connection with New Labour alive at all costs. the ‘bloated’ part rather refers to the fact that those regional officers are unelected and misusing their power (and, as you’ll see from today’s post, desperate to avoid any real debate about introducing elections for officials like themselves. At the moment, as I say, they’re appointed. They use union rules to break local left branches. I’ll expand on that as the week goes on).
I think your point about Labour continuing to offer the better electoral option for people in need has merit – I don’t agree with it myself, but I have interviewed people at conference who most certainly do, and who are furious at left activists who insist that the Labour link must be broken. I talked to a guy from the East Midlands branch yesterday who was incensed to think left activists were going to help the Tories win power by attacking New Labour. I will post his comments soon.
I appreciate your views, and hope that you’ll return to keep commenting on this discussion. I’ve got to run now to get this first post finished for today and then get to the first sessions and meetings for conference, but I’ll come back to address more of the important points you’ve raised.
Best,
Kate
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the response and hope you’re enjoying the conference. My point does, as you point out, apply equally well to Labour supporting people in unions who see the main enemy as the ‘Trots’ rather than the Tories. Feelings about affiliating to Labour run high on both sides, but it is always a shame when there is this much polarisation between people who agree on most things.
The discussion about electing rather than appointing reps is an interesting one (I can think of some advantages and some disadvantages) – look forward to hearing more about it.
Hi again Don,
I posted another piece earlier today on the witchhunts of lefties in Unison. There were an awful lot of people at today’s meeting in Bournemouth about these witchhunts – the feeling is that Socialist Party activists are being victimised for so strongly supporting a break with the Labour party.
What was interesting to me was the sheer number of attendees today, and that not all of them where SP members. Far from it. There were a fair few SWP members along – a real development, seeing as it’s been a while since you could have the SWP and SP in the same room without murder being done – but there were also a great many people who belonged to no political party at all. I spoke to a couple of guys from the race equality council in Greenwich, who’d come down for the day just to speak in support of Kas, for example. Others were simply union members who are sick of living in fear of disciplinary action at the hands of the union bureaucracy.
The point is that the Labour link is in many ways neither here nor there in this argument. What union members are finding extremely difficult is the bureaucracy’s heavy-handedness towards people who dare to call for an open discussion on the link and of the union’s funding of the Labour party. It’s a question, quite simply, of a stifling of union democracy.
The point and effectiveness of the Labour link is a discussion that needs to be had in the open, and these attempts to stifle it are causing serious unrest which I would say will cause Labour substantially bigger problems that an open debate about funding would. The unrest and anger at today’s meeting was noticeable, and new in its intensity in my view. I have been attending these sorts of meetings for a while now, and there is no doubt in my mind that they have grown in all ways. I think Unison’s bureaucracy has created a real problem for itself.
I’d be interested in your thoughts and those of other Labour party members and bloggers. Cheers, Kate
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