Workers' Liberty

By an Amicus member

Some 30 Amicus members lobbied the March meeting of the Amicus National Executive Council (NEC) in protest at the previous week’s sacking of three Amicus employees: Des Heemskerk, Jimmy Warne and Cathie Willis. The three had been suspended from their jobs in Amicus in mid-September of last year.

All three are leading members of the ‘Amicus Unity Gazette’, the broad left grouping in Amicus (although it is becoming ever less broad, and ever less left as time goes by – see below).

Des Heemskerk is a former Deputy Convenor at Fords. At the request of Amicus General Secretary Derek Simpson, Des gave up his union position at Fords to work in the Amicus campaign department. Until recently he was the Amicus Unity Gazette editor.

Jimmy Warne is a former shop steward at Swan Hunter. He was a prominent member of the Gazette group on the Executive of the AEEU (the union which merged with MSF to form Amicus). Like Des, he began working for Amicus at the request of Derek Simpson. Until recently he was the chair of Amicus Unity Gazette.

Cathie Willis worked for Amicus, and its AEEU predecessor, for eight years. When Ken Jackson was AEEU General Secretary Cathie suffered victimisation because her husband was a prominent steward in the construction industry and a leading supporter of the Gazette (the predecessor of Amicus Unity Gazette in the AEEU). Cathie also played a prominent role in Derek Simpson’s election as Amicus General Secretary.

The Amicus Three, who, as union employees, are members of the GMB, were suspended the day after last September’s meeting of the Amicus NEC. At that meeting Simpson had launched a tirade against the amicus.cc website (the ‘alternative’ website for news about the internal machinations in Amicus), denounced “former friends out to get me”, and claimed that his leadership and the union as a whole were at risk of being destabilised.

The NEC meeting authorised Simpson to “take the necessary steps” to “investigate the source of the defamatory allegations and unauthorised disclosure and circulation of internal union documents.” This referred to material which had recently appeared on the amicus.cc website concerning the so-called “Baylissgate” affair, involving Amicus Assistant General Secretary Les Bayliss.

The following day, even though the possibility of suspensions had not been mentioned at the NEC meeting, Des, Jimmy and Cathie were suspended. Des and Cathie were escorted off the union’s premises, while Jimmy discovered his suspension only after his return from holiday.

The leaflet distributed at the lobby of last month’s Amicus NEC summarised events subsequent to the suspensions:

”For two months they were not even told what the accusations levelled against them were. The investigation into them has been flawed as well as biased. It did not look at all the facts. There has been no real evidence uncovered against the three despite thousands of pounds of the members’ money having been wasted on this pointless exercise.”

”Yet despite no real evidence and based only on hearsay and gossip, the three have been sacked. The three are totally innocent of the charges. This is a clear political witch-hunt of those who were the stalwarts behind Derek’s election campaign and have stood by his election promises. Only an unbiased and non-political disciplinary appeal can offer an independent examination of the facts.”

The suspension and subsequent sacking of the Amicus Three are part of a broader move by Simpson and his closest supporters to consolidate their grip on the union’s structures and to stifle dissenting voices.

The first sign of the clampdown came back in late 2004 when one member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who sat on the union’s General Purposes and Finances Committee and four members of the SWP who sat on the union’s NEC were banned from attending the Amicus Unity Gazette pre-NEC caucus meetings.

Their ‘crime’ was to have breached Amicus Unity Gazette discipline. The Gazette had backed Simpson’s position that the NEC should “repudiate” an industrial dispute then underway at Wembley. The SWP members on the NEC, however, voted against repudiation when the issue had come up at the NEC.

A few months later the North-West region of the Gazette expelled four of its supporters (two of whom, Jane Stewart and Ian Allison, were also members of the union’s NEC) for the ‘crime’ of having breached the Gazette region’s discipline.

The North-West region of the Gazette mandates its supporters before national meetings of the Gazette. In this instance, the four expelled supporters had voted at a national Gazette meeting to uphold the Gazette’s national policy of supporting the election of all union full-time officials, whereas the position of the North-West region was to fall in behind Simpson by dropping support for implementation of the policy.

(Simpson’s stated position is that the election of officials is a good idea. But with the recent wave of redundancies of full-timers and a further merger with other unions on the horizon, the policy of electing full-timers should be suspended pending completion of the re-organisation. And then, no doubt, it will again have to be suspended pending something else.)

In the late summer of last year Simpson then began to turn his guns on the amicus.cc website, threatening various forms of legal action and internal disciplinary procedures against those involved in it. It was at this stage that the suspension of the Amicus Three occurred.

In February of this year, at the Gazette’s Annual General Meeting in Preston, Simpson’s supporters managed to gain control of Amicus Unity Gazette itself.

(At the instigation of the North-West region, the Gazette is constitutionally obliged to hold all national meetings in Preston. Preston is, of course, in the North-West, and the North-West region is the most pro-Simpson region in the Gazette. The location alone of the AGM, therefore, automatically boosted the numbers of the pro-Simpson faction.)

At the AGM Jimmy Warne was replaced by Steve Davison as chair of the Gazette. Davison is chair of the union’s NEC and argued at the Gazette conference that the Gazette should be working more closely with Simpson and the NEC. Des Heemskerk was also voted out as Gazette editor. In both cases the margin of defeat was just two votes.

All of the above – the suspension and sacking of the Amicus Three, the abandonment of the commitment to electing full-time officials, the expulsions from Amicus Unity Gazette, and now the takeover of the Gazette – are part of a bigger picture: the New Union.

Amicus, the TGWU and the GMB are currently engaged in merger negotiations. (The product of the merger, if it goes ahead, is currently referred to as the ‘New Union’.) The question at the heart of the merger is the extent to which the New Union will be subject to democratic rank-and-file control.

As is the case with the TGWU and the GMB, Simpson is certainly prepared to pay lip-service to the idea of a “lay-membership-led” New Union. His practice, however, is very much to concentrate the real powers of decision-making within his inner cabinet, and to stamp down on those elements within the union – whether it be the Amicus Three, the Left within the Gazette, or the amicus.cc website – who are seen to be a threat to his control.

The demand for re-instatement of the Amicus Three is therefore part of a more general campaign to maintain democratic norms within Amicus, and to ensure that, if the planned merger goes ahead, it does so on the basis of lay-membership control.