Read the Kennedy report online here
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In the summer of 2022 Helena Kennedy KC, began an enquiry into sexual harassment in the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association (TSSA). She wrote that her overall terms of reference sought answers to the following two questions: was there, or is there, sexual harassment, discrimination or bullying within TSSA? Was there, or is there, a culture or leadership that enables, reduces or prevents sexual harassment, discrimination or bullying?
The conclusion of her report in summary was: “... there has been sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying within the TSSA and that the leadership and culture has enabled these behaviours through wilful blindness, power hoarding and poor practices.”
The best way we can honour the brave women who publicly called out the harassment, bullying and poor practice and went on record against it to make this enquiry happen is to read the report, reflect on its contents and then challenge the unacceptable behaviours it identifies.
Here are some of the salient points:
“It gave me no pleasure, therefore, to uncover a series of appalling incidents, alongside leadership and management failings in the TSSA. These incidents included inappropriate and sexual touching, sexual assault, coercive and manipulative behaviour, violent and disrespectful language, humiliation and denigration of members of staff, reps and members of the Executive Committee (EC). Some of this behaviour was actually witnessed – or heard – directly by me. I was disappointed by behaviour I witnessed in the EC and by some of the language used by senior staff when I spoke with them.”
“One of the more distressing aspects of this Inquiry was how little the TSSA leadership seems to have moved with the times. Attitudes to women, knowledge and insight into organisation power dynamics, and gender, sex and race relations, all appear to be entrenched in a historic moment... Movements such as MeToo and the hashtag #Ibelieveher have been around for some time now. Even before their inception, it would have been alarming for an organisation that stands for rights and justice not to be able to demonstrate an understanding of the basic dynamics of power and how it is used and misused in organisation contexts."
“... sexual harassment and assault rarely exist in isolation. They occur in environments that tolerate, or support, misogynistic attitudes. They occur on a spectrum, where at one end there is ‘banter;’ at the other end, the most egregious forms of male violence, including rape and domestic abuse. In my mind, ‘banter’ can never be harmless if it in any way denigrates, objectifies or humiliates women. And sexual harassment should be called out for what it is – an abuse of power derived from patriarchal systems - that harms not only the immediate victim, but all women.”
The report also identified a clique of five people, which it calls the "internal leadership", who effectively ran the union. Of them, Kennedy says: “I conclude that the internal leadership at the TSSA [...] is not fit for purpose. It is impossible for me to imagine any of the current internal leadership taking on the role of next General Secretary with the backing of staff or with a moral legitimacy [...] I believe that none of the internal leadership ... should remain in the organisation. A Crisis Administration should be appointed to support the TSSA as it initiates a sweeping culture change.”
The report rightly calls on TSSA to "examine its democratic standing and traditions", and flags up dwindling engagement at branch level as a key problem. These underlying problems of democracy and the domination of union life by an unaccountable clique of officials and staff, often unelected, are far from unique to TSSA. As the Kennedy Report, and the similar Monaghan Report into the same issues in the GMB union, have highlighted, control by bureaucratic cliques - which are invariably composed predominantly of middle-aged, white men - is a recipe for obscene abuses of power and toleration of abusive behaviour in general.
Part of the response to the two reports must be to undertake a thoroughgoing project of democratisation throughout the labour movement, ensuring that rank-and-file members in the workplaces control what the union does - not out-of-touch bureaucrats on inflated salaries in the union's head office.
But the issues the whistleblowers have exposed are not reducible to organisational questions and not resolvable solely through improving democratic structures. They are also political and ideological. They reveal appalling political attitudes from sections of the labour movement on questions of women's rights, gender oppression, sexual equality (and other issues). The most charitable thing that can be said about these attitudes is that they lag behind the best of even mainstream-bourgeois, let alone socialist/radical, thinking on these questions. Our movement will be inhibited from pursuing its aims of freedom and equality if these attitudes are not confronted and challenged.
So, alongside a drive to democratise our unions, we need a political and educational drive to establish a politics of equality that makes the fight for liberation from gender, and other, oppression integral to the aims of the labour movement.