Where is Amicus headed?

Submitted by Anon on 12 January, 2005 - 5:59

When Derek Simpson was elected General Secretary of Amicus many thought it would lead to greater democracy in the union, and make the union more critical towards the Labour government.

There was a rational basis for such a belief. The two unions (MSF and AEEU) which had merged to form Amicus had both been under the thumb of a right wing, authoritarian leadership — Roger Lyons in MSF, and Ken Jackson in the AEEU. Both leaders were confirmed Blairites.

Simpson, on the other hand, was backed by the Engineering Gazette (the Broad left in the AEEU) and by Left Unity (the Broad Left in the MSF). In taking on Jackson for the position of General Secretary of the merged union, Simpson’s platform included commitments to greater democracy in the union, and to less kow-towing to Blair.

But the past 12 months have seen little or nothing to bear out those promises.

2004 began with golden handshakes for Amicus full-time officials and office staff. This was an expensive ruse by Simpson to get rid of incumbent right-wing deadwood and time-servers.

The redundancies programme was based on the argument that the merged union needed less staff. But so golden were the handshakes being offered that even some “left” full-timers took them up. In one region the entire administration staff opted for voluntary redundancy.

For ordinary union members the redundancies programme only exacerbated a long-standing problems about the virtual impossibility of tracking down a full-timer, and the frequent inability of local Amicus offices to deal with even the most basic of queries.

The financial largesse displayed to departing staff was in sharp contrast to the “smash and grab” raid on branch funds carried out by the union’s head office a few months later.

Under the rules of the merged union, local Amicus branches were allowed to keep 3% of the dues paid in by members of that branch.

For the former AEEU branches this allowed them a degree of financial independence which they had not previously enjoyed. For the former MSF branches it was a small step backwards — MSF branches had been allowed to retain 5% of their members’ dues. However, the union’s head office interpreted the new rule retrospectively and adopted a “Ground Zero” approach. The head office clawed back all money in all branch funds over 3% of branch members’ dues for 2004.

Overnight, branches and Regional Councils of the union suddenly lost accumulated savings of thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of pounds. Some branches were left with less money in their funds than they had debts to pay off. Branches no longer had the money to affiliate to campaigns, send delegates to conferences, or donate to financial appeals for striking workers.

But the Wembley dispute which flared up in the summer of 2004 suggested that support for striking workers was not prominent on Derek Simpson’s agenda anyway.

In August 240 construction workers — members of Amicus and of the GMB — were illegally sacked from the Wembley Stadium construction site after they had refused to accept a radical deterioration in working conditions, including a compulsory 66-hour working week.

While the sacked workers picketed the site to win back their jobs — which they eventually achieved — the September meeting of the Amicus National Executive Committee voted to repudiate the members’ action. The Amicus members were written to individually and told that they should disband their picket line. An Amicus full-timer escorted scabs across the picket line.

The NEC took this line on the basis of (undisclosed) legal advice received by Derek Simpson. Repudiation of the members’ action was backed by Simpson. Only five members of the Unity Gazette voted against repudiation. Two others abstained. The majority of Unity Gazette members on the NEC voted in favour.

The Wembley dispute was still underway when the curtain was raised on the so-called “Whitehall farce”.

Whitehall College is the training and education centre for the merged union and home to the Eastern region offices of the union. With its hotel-standard accommodation, heated swimming pool, 21 acres of parkland, and its location just 35 miles from London, the college was the jewel in the crown of the union’s properties portfolio.

On the first Friday in September, 15 minutes before the end of the working day, college staff received a memo from Derek Simpson informing them that the college was to be closed, at least temporarily, with immediate effect.

Health and safety issues were cited as the reason. But unions representing college staff were refused a copy of the relevant health and safety report. Staff were offered voluntary redundancies, backed up by the threat that any compulsory redundancies would be on much less favourable terms.

The following month the first national Unity Gazette policy conference since the MSF-AEEU merger was held. It adopted a motion whereby the regionally based Unity Gazette steering committee would be replaced by a seven-member Unity Gazette Editorial Board. The new body would have sole responsibility for the day-to-day running of Unity Gazette, and for the convening of national Unity Gazette meetings.

Two days after the conference a meeting of the Unity Gazette caucus of Amicus NEC members voted by 12 votes to six to expel four members of the caucus for having “broken Unity Gazette discipline” — that is, having voted against repudiation of the Wembley dispute at the September NEC meeting.

The four expelled caucus members were all members of the Socialist Workers Party. Another SWP member was removed from his post on the union’s General Purposes and Finance Committee.

Over the past 12 months the size of the Unity Gazette caucus on the union’s NEC has dropped from 23 to 15: four members have been expelled; two have resigned in protest at the expulsions; one has died; and another resigned after getting a full-timer’s job with another union.

The year closed with the moving of a document at the December meeting of the Amicus NEC which proposed a total re-organisation (and effective destruction) of the union’s branch structures.

As a result of its recent merger with the media union GPMU and the banking union UNIFI, Amicus now has about 1,800 branches. According to the document, albeit in the absence of an explanation, this number of branches is “not sustainable”. Instead, and again in the absence of an explanation, the document proposed reducing the number of branches to 500, with about 2,000 members in each branch.

The new branches would be “geographically based” and would be “the main focus for links with the local community, such as community groups”. Unlike existing branches (supposedly), these new branches would have “a genuine purpose for their existence”. The “re-structuring” should be completed “by late 2005”. (This timescale, it might be noted, has been set by a union which cannot even provide branch officers with a list of members of their branch.)

Although the NEC meeting hung fire on the question of branch “re-structuring” — it referred back the document for “re-drafting” — it did adopt a new standing order on Collective Responsibility, according to which all NEC members will support NEC decisions and “shall make no statement, nor take any action, which is likely to have the effect of undermining or repudiating that NEC decision”.

Whatever hopes Amicus activists may have entertained at the beginning of the year, by the close of 2004 there was little to celebrate.

The union’s structures had become less accessible to the membership. Branch funds had been pillaged. Union members in dispute had been abandoned. Whitehall College was in mothballs. Unity Gazette was alienating its core supporters. Dissident NEC members were effectively gagged. The very existence of meaningful branch life was under threat.

At the same time, the union’s publications continued to degenerate into uncritical advocates of a vote for Labour in the next General Election. The “Warwick Agreement” — whereby the Labour Party conceded nothing of substance to affiliated unions — is now portrayed in Amicus publications as an imperative reason for voting Labour in 2005.

The direction taken by Amicus in 2005 will probably be determined in large part by the direction taken by Unity Gazette.

Either Unity Gazette will act as a policeman for Simpson — who, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, increasingly acts as a policeman for Blair — or it will give a lead to the Amicus members who voted for Simpson because they wanted a greater say in the running of the union, and an assertion of basic trade union principles against Blairism.

By Stan Crooke

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