Union democracy

A worker involved with the “3 Cosas” campaign spoke to Solidarity about their fight for equal rights and union democracy. “3 Cosas” (“Three Things”) is a campaign organised by outsourced workers at the University of London, mainly cleaners in halls of residence and the university’s flagship Senate House building, but also catering staff, post-room workers, and security workers. The three things we’re demanding are equal sick pay, pensions, and holiday rights with our colleagues who are employed directly by the university. We’re employed by Balfour Beatty (except catering staff, who are...

Construction workers recently won an eight-week strike at the Queensland Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. There’s a greater spirit of militancy in the industry now than for some years. The current Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA) campaign has been met with strong employer resistance [EBAs are the main form of collective agreement in Australian industry]. The renewal of some of the four-year agreements have been met with a much stronger resistance from employers than there ever has been in the history of the EBA system. At Laing O’Rourke, workers had a 21-day protected action [legal strike...

Media workers voted today at their union’s conference to make policy and instruct its executive only every two years. Delegates at the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) conference in Newcastle were asked to support the proposal by the National Executive Council to only meet biennially as it would help save the union money at a time when it is in financial difficulties. Outgoing president Donnacha DeLong spoke on the delegate meeting floor and said it was not just about the money but would also give officers more time to achieve things passed at conference. He also said it would allow more...

I am in a local government Unison branch which has a firm branch position of opposition to the pension offer currently on the table. The deal is not that different to what was on offer prior to our industrial action on 30 November. We will all be working longer, paying more, and getting less. How has our union ended up recommending acceptance, and indeed threatening any branch that has a different position? The undemocratic way in which this has been handled has shocked many ordinary members and reps and given us all a lesson in the nature of bureaucracy and the lengths they will go to silence...

On 4 March 2012, the long-held suspicions of hundreds of trade union activists in the construction industry were confirmed when it was revealed that the British state had been colluding with construction contractors to prevent union activists from getting work. The “Consulting Association” (CA), a shadowy body funded by most major construction contractors, held data on numerous individuals which included information that could not have come from anywhere except police records. The CA has also been revealed to be holding an “RMT file”, suggesting that the extent of their data collection could...

To turn round the public sector pensions campaign now will need not much less than a miracle. Activists will work for that near-miracle: to make the London strike by teachers and lecturers on 28 March so strong that it bounces the National Union of Teachers (NUT), at its 6-10 April conference, into organising an escalating series of regional strikes, and forces the leaders of the PCS civil service union, at last, after three months of prevarication, into calling strikes. Even if the London teachers’ and lecturers’ strike cannot rise above the scale of a token protest, still, a token protest is...

A Tory councillor in Redbridge recently described calls to limit tweeting in Town Hall meetings as “Stalinist”. It’s amazing what you can learn from the Ilford Recorder, I guess. When words are commonly used with that degree of hyperbole, you know that the concept has become virtually meaningless in the public mind. Yet according to the home page of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website, the AWL’s raison d’etre is to create a socialist alternative to “both capitalism and Stalinism”. At first reading, terminology like that seems wilfully anachronistic, and perhaps a throwback to the days...

Sally Hunt, the right-wing incumbent, has been re-elected general secretary of the University and College Union. She won 73% of the vote against Mark Campbell, the candidate of the Socialist Workers’ Party-led “UCU Left”. Hunt’s leadership so far has been characterised by witch-hunts against the left and an eagerness to roll over on industrial issues such as pensions and pay. Her post-election address to members, Hunt announced plans for a “review” into the union’s structures. A review conducted by a conservative bureaucracy can only end badly; rank-and-file UCU activists should fight it.

Public sector union committees, branches, and workplace groups should call emergency meetings to reject the sell-out on pensions outlined at the TUC public sector group meeting on 19 December. So far, only the PCS, Northern Irish public service union NIPSA and Unite (after initially signing up to a “Principles Document” with Unison, GMB and the Local Government Employers) have decisively rejected the deal. Unison’s Local Government Service Group Executive voted by 24-10 on 10 January to accept the deal. Its Higher Education SGE also voted to accept, and its Health SGE voted to consult (but not...

As Solidarity goes to press on 10 January, the public-sector pensions battle is in the balance. Many unions have expressed dissent with the “final” Government proposals of 19 December. In fact, it seems that the only actual union signatures on a document are the signatures of Unison, GMB and Unite on a joint document with local government employers, and Unite has withdrawn that. Aside from that, even the union leaders keenest to put a lid on the issue are saying no more than that they will negotiate with the Government on its new terms and suspend action in the meantime. Trouble is, that is...