CWU Conference – Pay Fight On The Cards At BT?

For many years now, it was if the only workers that were members of the CWU were posties. Time and time again, most of the time the union was in the news when postal workers struck like lightning to defend jobs,  terms and conditions. The most spectacular example was in 2003 when the union’s national ballot on pay was defeated and bullying managers led by neo-Thatcherite Allan Leighton saw this as the green light to go on the offensive and finish off one of Britain’s strongest unions once and for all.

Postal workers hit the picket lines without a ballot, and beat that attack back. But the war of attrition continued unabated. Unmanageable workloads, threats to close mail centres, privatisation,  a pension holiday creating a massive deficit. Some won, some lost. And there seems to have been a slight pause in the battle since the strikes were called off at Christmas and the posties accepted the recent deal.

With the ConDems putting Royal Mail privatisation back on the agenda, the detente is not likely to last long.

But interestingly, the sleeping giant that is the potential collective strength of BT’s workers has been awoken.

In the two-and-a-half decades  since British Telecom was sold off, as with most privatisations, the drive for profit and the greed of shareholders has been at a high cost to the terms and conditions of their workers.

The assault on BT workers has intensified in the past few years as the recession and competition has seen a massive shedding of jobs, increased workloads, cuts in pay for new entrants and the increase of unsocial working hours.

Why the hell do you want to work at BT, you got an 'OLOGY for chrissakes!

Two tranches of 15,000 job cuts in 2009 and all of the above attacks have not been met with any response by the union.

So why the potential scrap over pay?

I think there are three

major reasons.

Firstly, the leadership of the telecoms side of the CWU have surrendered so much that the huge haemorrhaging of jobs has meant that precious facilities for local union officials is under threat. Also, continued capitulation has raised questions in the minds of BT Operate and BT Openreach workers, in particular, as to the value of their union subscription if the union keeps giving way on their terms and conditions.

Secondly, Labour has lost power. The CWU have always been strong supporters of the Labour Party. On the postal side, Mandelson’s privatisation bid created tensions and Billy Hayes has been critical of the Labour Party. No such criticisms were forthcoming from the Telecoms and Financial Services Executive. Just as with BT, the leadership at national and local level in telecoms has rolled over when confronted by any of the Labour policies that have affected jobs, pensions, etc. The parliamentary aspirations of these officials far outweighed the desperate needs of their members whose living standards were continually under threat. Being employees of a private concern rather than public servants also helped to ease any tensions, although any strikes or disruption tended to taint a Labour Government. Now that we don’t have such a Government, and such dreams of warm, cosy and honourable member seats have diminished for the time being, its safe to take the kid gloves off.

Thirdly, the BT workers themselves have been rendered powerless as wave of attacks has seen their jobs massacred (on one day it was reported that 10,000 redundancy parties took place in the UK for BT employees alone), and their pay and conditions cut to the bone. Being a BT engineer is not the plum job it used to be.

The anger amongst BT workers is tangible. The commentb below from a BT Openreach worker is typical of the mood of many workers.

“As an Openreach engineer for the last three and a half years, I am now sick to death of the way we are treated by BT – we have had a number of negative changes made to our working conditions and we work under the most unfair performance management scheme you could ever envisage. Many of us are fed up now at the lack of respect we receive from the top of the company.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10159149.stm

The top gaffer at BT, Ian Livingstone is on £860,000 a year and gets another £1.2m bonus on top.

Such numbers will rile BT workers that are being asked to work harder and swallow a 2% increase, when inflation is closer to 5%. In effect a pay cut.

The ballot can be won and can start to reinvigorate workplace organisation if the union taps into the anger not just around pay, but also the cuts and the attacks on conditions.

CWU Conference was the perfect place for the union to announce the intention to ballot. There was plenty of media coverage, sunny Bournemouth is not a bad place for a reporter to hang out and interview a union leader. Hundreds of activists are gathered in one place and battleplans can be drawn up.

Added to that is the political atmosphere.

The question for many of the delegates at the conference, both telecoms and postal was – what next for Labour?

Which of the candidates for leader would best serve the interests of CWU members?

Two emergency motions were passed on the Monday of the conference.

One committed the union to encouraging the debate and organising hustings without tying the union to a particular candidate. The second motion resolved that the union would only support a candidate that supported the aims and the policies of the CWU (ie – that they at least oppose the privatisation of Royal Mail).

The last time Billy Hayes and the National Executive recommended a candidate was during the last Deputy Leadership election and he backed former CWU leader and right-winger Alan Johnson. This was too much for the rank-and-file who had the CWU colours ripped from that particular mast at the 2007 conference.

It could be worse.

David Miliband eyes the crown...

He could have chosen to support either of the Blackadder twins.

Balls and Burnham are also tainted, no matter how hard they try to distance themselves, by their support and involvement in the Blair and Brown regimes.

Diane Abbott is the cuddly left choice.

But even then, too much cuddling with Miguel Portillo (the traitor to his family that fought so diligently and bravely against Franco and the right in Spain) and her insistence that her child should have a much better education than those of the working-class people she represents in Hackney, will not endear her to many.

How much is it to get my kid into Eton, Mick?

 

Then there is John McDonnell,  the only candidate that you could guarantee would support not just the anti-privatisation campaigns of the CWU, but has pretty much been an ever-present in the campaign against the war, anti-immigration policies, the fight against the Nazis and the supported workers rights to strike.

 His failure to appear on the ballot paper in 2007 ensured that Gordon Brown would enjoy a coronation.

The fact that a socialist could not get on a Labour ballot in a twenty-first century already gripped by war and crisis was a shocking indictment on the party.

Aware that a repeat is likely, McDonnell’s strategy seems to be to ask his opponents to pass on their nominations to him  and Diane Abbott once they have received the requisite number of nominations.

McDonnell: Too left-wing to be included on the ballot?

This is hardly likely.

First, the left-wing candidate Jon Cruddas came far too close and won far too many votes in the Deputy Leadership as far as the Labour right were concerned.

With the Labour Party having a resurgence in membership (14,000 have joined since the election defeat), I suspect that the likes of the Milibands would be happy to keep McDonnell and if possible, Abbott out of the race.

Very Precarious

This is a report of the Precarious Workers Workshop held at the Right To Work Emergency Conference on 22nd May 2010:

The session was attended by around 50 delegates and was led off by a Glasgow supermarket worker and Tiago Gillot, a founding member of Portugal’s Precarious Workers movement.

 The supermarket worker said that he and a few of his workmates joined USDAW and set about organising their colleagues to improve the awful pay and conditions suffered by shop workers.

I'm All Lost In The Supermarket.

For instance, a TUC survey found that on average, shop workers put in at least 8 weeks unpaid overtime every year.

As well as poor pay, casual, lots of part-time workers, bullying managers were a problem as well.

They produced a newsletter – Shop Worker and the first issue led on sexism. Most of the check-out staff and shelf stackers are women and sexism means that their pay and conditions are worse than men’s, that they have to take part-time positions in order to take care of their children. They also have to put up with constant casual sexist remarks from customers, but mainly male managers.

Tiago Gillot from the Precarious Workers Organisation in Portugal told how their movement began in 2007, meeting up to rally under their banner on MayDay. He said that social blackmail by bosses made it  difficult for casual workers to break into the union movement.

The movement was formed to give confidence through unity to these workers.

In the discussion, an RMT activist talked about how Jarvis workers had been forced onto agency contracts. He also talked about the solidarity shown by Eurostar engineers with migrant cleaners who fought for the London Living Wage.

Can the Mitie (cleaning contractors) fall?

Another speaker talked about the fight by migrant cleaners around London’s universities and said that it was important for Right To Work to engage with migrant workers’ community organizations.

A London call-centre worker informed the workshop that 1000 call-centre workers had been sacked by Telegen in Brighton last week and he was looking to help organise a response.

A part-time agency worker said that she was sick of how union branch officials treated part-time and casual workers as second-class citizens.

A Camden trade unionist argued that casual workers needed to join the union and fight within the union to ensure that all workers are supported and defended.

Stress in the Call-Centre

Another trade unionist argued that organising temporary and casual workers was the job of all trade unionists. Every workplace had cleaners, security guards, catering staff that were agency or casual.

The workshop agreed the following proposals;

1. Link up the various precarious workers campaigns and seek to organise a conference by the end of 2010.
2. Organise local seminars on how to organise casual workers.
3. Produce a pamphlet on how to organise a union
4. Make links with Trades Councils and migrant workers communities.
5. Protest at Parliament at reading of the budget 

Whaddya Want? Your P45 Or A Promotion

As Cleggie ponders over the choice of who he would like the working class to be fucked by, we need a few moments to take stock of the balance of class forces and how we can rebuild a labour movement that can stop them fucking us. 

Give Us A Kiss, Tory Boy

 

There are some hazards involved in rebuilding or in some places building organisation from scratch. 

I was once told, by someone who knows about these things, that part of the IRA’s induction training included a tour of the Six Counties darkest spots. 

The new volunteer was taken to just two places. 

The first was the Maze prison (aka Long Kesh or the H-Blocks) which until it was shut down for business in 2000, housed paramilitaries from Republican and Loyalist prisoners. 

The next and final stop was Milltown Cemetry in Belfast, notorious for Loyalist assassin Michael Stone’s deadly assault on the funeral procession of three Republicans gunned down in cold blood by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988. 

The new recruit is then told by his mentor that his membership of the IRA guarantees him a place in one if not both of these places. 

There is no such induction for new union reps and activists. 

But if a union rep is effective then two options hover into view: 

1. Promotion 

Stop saying No, man and become a Yes Man. 

You know what they are up to when they ask if you are interested in a promotion. 

But you think to yourself: “Less grief, less pressure, more control, more money… 

And you know what, I could do that job better than anyone in post now. And I’ll be nicer than the current crop of bastards running the show.” 

So you take the manager’s job and like so many before you with the same inclinations, the position stays the same but it changes you. 

The workmates you shared a laugh with on the shopfloor view you with suspicion. You view them as workshy fops. You report them for pissing about laughing when they should be working. Before you know it, you have your first scalp. A bit of cheek from a former workmate, you’ve reported it, they’re on a charge and they’re heading for the dole queue. 

Don’t believe me? 

Hark the story of one of the best militants that ever stamped on frightened bosses’ toes in a small Government department in the late 70s and early 80s. 

Long-haired and rebellious, Seamus read Socialist Worker and the uncivil servants’ rank-and-file paper Redder Tape. 

 

Any problem a worker had, Seamus would have the miscreant manager for his breakfast and the worker would be well pleased. 

Seamus resigned his union post when he got promoted. Following a hiatus of a few years, he returned as the Chair for all the unions in the department. One of his first acts was to present a paper for a bonus scheme. 

This was strange. 

The unions had long opposed management’s attempts to introduce iniquitous performance-related pay and bonus schemes. 

The paper was thrown out and soon after Seamus stood down from his union position when he was offered another promotion. 

Now he was head of a whole division. And his new objective was to cut 100 posts from his new division. 

When the cuts were announced, the unions organised an all members meeting to plan action against the cuts. Seamus used all the knowledge  he’d learned and all the favours he’d gained from his time as a union rep to get a motion on the agenda that congratulated management for avoiding any compulsory redundancies. No matter that a few years earlier, the union had fought for and concluded a “No Compulsory Redundancy” agreement. In fact soon after Seamus had pushed through the cuts, unsurprisingly, management tried to wriggle out of the agreement. 

Seamus then cut his long locks, traded his t-shirt and jeans for a sharp suit and set out to impress any boss that fancied a poacher-turned-gamekeeper. 

Seamus prepares to turn his gun on his former poacher friends.

  

The cuts and further restructuring made his division and others that soon followed his example very attractive to potential bidders, who with Thatcher’s blessing were now permitted to buy Government work. 

A Dutch company bought the parts that were profitable and left the taxpayer with the riskiest portion. Seamus became (and I think he still is) a Vice-President and right-hand man to the Chief Executive of the Dutch buyer. 

Having told this depressing story,  there’s worse to follow. The next post will be about victimisation, the other method management use to keep unions at bay.

The Harder They Come…

Over. Done and dusted. Thank fuck.

So the Lib-Dems didn’t do as well as expected but Clegg is still the Kingmaker and it seems that his suitor of choice will be Cameron.

Now I know that this will more than upset the Lib-Dem rank-and-file and many millions beyond that are crying out for electoral reform, but Clegg is no Charlie Kennedy. You won’t find Lib-Tory Nick within a borough of a Stop The War Coalition platform. His elevation to party leader, now with the crown in his hand walking away from Brown who has been begging him all night to place it on the bonce of the Eton trifle Cameron.

Tory Boys Dave and Boris: Eating Trifles?

This election was all about the Tories and Labour.  The closeness and the first past-post system did for the Lib-Dems as it did for the left (barring some notable decent results) and possibly put paid to the Nazis getting a foothold (although the size of their vote is worrying and needs to be addressed).

The real question is what now?

As has been said before, whoever’s head  Clegg lays the crown on, that alliance will be looking to give our class a kicking. But as Jimmy Cliff says:

Cliff - Harder They Come

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGE4dnrPPZQ

Dope

The most exciting election since sliced fried bread… the closest finish since one bourgeois workers party beat the bourgeois bourgeois party…is Cameron really Obama…is Brown really fit for leadership…will Clegg have the casting vote…is proportional representation around the corner…blah blah fucking blah!

Cobamaron

You know how Lenin once said that a strike was worth ten elections? You don’t? Well he did say that. But how many elections is the Greek revolt worth?

I mean I’m fucked if I know who to vote for (might have to actually wipe me arse and vote Labour given the lack of choice in my constituency), but if tomorrow morning one of the leaders comes out in support of the Greek protests, I’ll vote for them.

I mean for all the ways that the media have described this election to get folk interested in the blimmin’ thing, I would say that the Sun’s attempt to make us believe that David Cameron and Barack Obama share anything more in common than an ‘O’ and an ‘M’ in their surnames, is so surreal I really did think it was a Chris Morris-cum-Leon Kuhn spoof.

http://yfrog.com/jncm8hj

“Bigotgate” has not pole-axed Brown in the way that the Tories planned, despite the heroine / villainess Gillian Duffy getting more coverage than Susan Boyle. Actually my money is on Duffy winning Britain’s Got Talent this season.

Duffy - More Bigoted Than A Labour Candidate?

If Brown is looking to direct his ire at bigots, all he has to do is speak to leading members in his own party. Why not start with Jack Straw, who, in 2006, blamed Muslim women that wore the niqab (a veil) for damaging community relations, or Jim Fitzpatrick, the Poplar, but not popular, MP who gets invited to a wedding and moans to the press that it was segregated by gender. Don’t bother turning up at my wedding, darling. Never mind segregation, I’ll put you and your noxious notions about Muslims in quarantine.

Then there’s the charming Manish Sood. A man who has brought a new meaning to the term “New Labour”.

Sood : New Labour For The 19th Century?

Now here’s a man that needs some PR. I mean, try on his size 9s for size. The guy has been given North West Norfolk, a seat only re-instated in 1974 after being abolished in 1918. Held by two Tories (apart when the sitting MP defected to the SDP in 1981) in all that time apart from the landslide in 1997, when the not even the bluest rinses could bring themselves to vote for their man Hooray Henry Bellingham in that election. They relented in 2001 to let him back though, and if he doesn’t win it tomorrow, then I’ll be taking BMWs out of the local showroom, turning them on their side and setting light to them. So, hopefully you can gauge Mr. Sood’s chances of realising his ambition of becoming an MP – No Hope and Bob Hope.

So why not make a splash and stick the boot into your Prime Minister nigh on the eve of the election?

And what does he say?

He says that Brown is a “disgrace” and should apologise to the people and the Queen. The Queen? What the fuck for? Did he start luncheon using the wrong fork? Of all the people that Brown needs to apologise to (and there are literally millions), the horse-loving, tax-grabbing, racist-loving parasite with a tiara ain’t one of them.

Oh yeah and of course, just in case we hadn’t noticed it was an issue that the British National Party (oh and by the way, my main election wish is that Nazi Nick Griffin is royally fucked in Barking) are hoping to capitalise on, he also says:

“Immigration has gone up which is creating friction within communities. The country is getting bigger and messier.”

How is it that the only people that get any decent coverage for sticking the boot into Brown are bigots? Where’s my prime-time opportunity? Why isn’t Brown caught on a radio mike moaning at his erstwhile aides about having to field a few questions from a Trot?

Who Will Eamonn Sell The Paper To In Parliament?

But there are some candidates worth the votes of decent working folk.

One candidate I would give my right arm to have on the ballot in my local constituency is the socialist, writer and Civil Rights legend Eamonn McCann. The people of Derry in the 6 counties will have that honour and will no doubt respond positively to his call to arms:

“In the words of the Beatles, ‘Come Together – right now’ – not in a passive way but to fight together for our common interests.”

Across the country Trade Union and Socialist Coalition candidates are giving some an alternative to the vicious neo-liberal agenda that will rip into the heart of our schools, our hospitals and other public services as soon as we wake up on Monday morning.

Particular best wishes to Angela McCormack and Willie Black in Scotland, Karen Reissman in Manchester and Jenny Sutton in Tottenham.

I also hope that Labour left-wingers Corbyn and McDonnell hold their own and that Respect’s George Galloway and Salma Yaqoob convincingly trounce ex-Trot-turned-Blairite Fitzpatrick and right-wing trade union shitehawk Roger Godawful.

More than that I hope that our class has what it takes to defend ourselves from a violent assault on our interests. For inspiration, lets look to Greece. If we don’t manage that, we’ll have to make do with Manish Sood’s rendition of “Who’s Sorry Now” on Britain’s Got Talent.

Sharpening the appeal of unions to traditionally under-represented groups of workers?

As promised, I said that I would talk about one of the objectives that was set by the TUC’s New Unionism Task Group (NUTG):

“Sharpen the appeal of unions to traditionally under-represented groups of workers: women, young workers, workers from black and ethnic-minority backgrounds and those at the fringes of the labour market for whom trade unionism appeared to have little or no relevance.”

Young Rosie Leads The Way...

My partner told me that a couple of months ago, a gay lad of 18, who had only just joined the union at the call-centre approached him and asked:

“How do I become a union rep?”

Jimmy, as my boyfriend shall be aka, lit up and said “Come this way”. The local union committee was full, elections were due, but there’s always room for new activists, he explained. The project he gave the keen whippersnapper was to survey his fellow young agency workers and find out about their issues. Arising from that was this article on a blog and for the local newsletter:

http://callcentreworker.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/working-with-nl-recruitment/

Jimmy is proud of what he and fellow union activists have achieved.

One the best achievements as far as he was concerned was when the committee was elected in 2009, out of 9 officers and committee members:

• 5 were under the age of 30 (55.6%)
• 4 were women (44.4%)
• 4 were black or asian (44.4%)

More importantly, all were there because they had proved themselves as advocates for the union, had recruited members, had written articles for bulletins, had petitioned for more pay or to defend sacked colleagues, built and came to union meetings, etc

Politically, 4 described themselves as Labour supporters, 2 described themselves as revolutionaries, at least one other had been around the revolutionary left in their youth, and one had been on many demonstrations over the past 25 years, but was disillusioned and spent more of his time reading 9/11 conspiracy theories and attacking the union for its engagement strategy with the local works council.

What was the attitude of the union branch, one of the largest and richest branches in the union with more than 3,500 members.

Well, lets start with the make-up of the CWU Capital Branch:

The branch committee, such that it is, is made up of around 30 officers.

• There are no non-recognised or non-BT members on the committee, despite the fact that 30% of the CWU’s membership is made up of workers that do not work for BT.
• There are 4 women on the officers’ committee (13.3%)
• There is one black woman on the committee (3.3%)
• There is not a single person on the committee under the age of 30 (the current youth officer has now breached that particular landmark)

My guess is that this is the story in union branch after union branch around the unions and around country bar the odd decent exception.

Jimmy tried to get the new young activist (lets call him Dai) to the CWU activists conference.

http://callcentreworker.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/combative-spirit-as-cwu-activists-meet/

This request was turned down by the union branch and this decision was confirmed by the National Organiser on the basis that Dai had only just joined the union and had not as yet paid any subs. Jimmy was not best pleased, he felt that this was a mistake.

However he relayed the decision to the disappointed Dai.

Dai was then contacted and taken for a drink by the youth officer. This is the first time that a branch officer had contacted anyone active in the union at the call-centre, apart from Jimmy.

Dai was happy that the youth officer said that he would develop Dai to take over as the new youth officer. Jimmy was again not pleased. There were many activists under the age of 30, including the former local chair and a young man, just 20 now, who had been recruiting workers to the union over the past few years, ever since he joined the union.

Our union branches need to change. They need to be fit for purpose. Far too many are not, and in this particular objective, despite a plethora of opportunities, our movement is still failing.