Would that be the “personal” problem of having lost their jobs, and the “political” cause of trying to get them back?

The leaflet pretends that Justice for Cleaners is ploughing on with its important work despite the criticism by Willis campaigners, when in fact it does nothing.

I handed out some leaflets at NSSN which carried Chris’s article on what happened at the Unite united left meeting, but it is a pity (as well as a disgrace!) that Unite was able to get a hearing for their slanders with this leaflet of theirs.

It is incredible that they should tarnish such an event in this way. Together with their repeated references to ‘outside interests’ supposedly controlling the Willis campaign, some Unite officers are showing the extent to which they go to protect their image, and how threatened they feel by unofficial protests directed at the COMPANIES, and public criticisms (shock!) of the union’s official position.

The irony is that the very workers involved in the dispute and their supporters, had done so much to build the justice for cleaners campaign in the past. The same campaign which the same leaflet boasts about.

1. The majority of cleaners did not get a satisfactory solution. The shop steward has prepared a list saying what happened to each one. We do not necessarily blame the union for this necessarily: the horse had bolted once Mitie pushed through the new night shift working. But there were all kinds of outcomes and a very common one was people dropped out and found other jobs because they could not see a solution in sight or an appropiate one was not offered. The cleaning sector has a very high turnover, especially with immigraton raids!

2. The sticking point in the negotiations, ongoing at the time they were made redundant, was the starting time, not the number of hours. There was a 15 minute difference between the times being proposed by each side, according to the workers. Its an issue because these workers, like many low paid workers, do more than one job (or combine it with study).

3. All four are currently still fighting: three of them handed in a petition personally at Transport House at the end of May. It is others who, understandably have moved on. One of the four is the shop steward – they guy who unionized the whole of the original workforce. He is still proud to be a union member.

4. Unless someone can correct me, there were not 12 cleaners branch members at the UL meeting. There was the full time officer, plus two, maybe three branch committee members who’ve worked in cleaning. Of these, three left very early on in the meeting. There were another two persons who are not connected as far as I know to the industry but are deeply involved in the newly created branch. One of those who left early had tried to chase Willis cleaners out of a Justice for Cleaners event where they were collecting signatures for the petition asking the union to reconsider its position. He did not succeed and dozens of Unite cleaners signed the petition. He later turned up at the lobby outside Transport House where we handed in the petition, and started taking photos of us and filming us. He stopped when confronted by members of the branch and Colombia Solidarity Campaign. Is delivering a petition to your union, while wrapped in union colours, a crime?

6. On the day of the United Left meeting, four full time officials met with a member of the Latin American Workers Association (a refugee from Colombia), and the regional secretary said the Association was being anti union, because of supporting Willis, and because of supporting a Papers for All position at the Strangers into Citizens rally on May 4th, to the point of holdig an alternative rally with other groups in Trafalgar Square. A detailed report of this meeting wil come out shortly.

7. Where the Willis case has been heard it has received great support, eg from the Construction branch of Unite in London.

8. Two people regularly supporting the Willis dispute have been arrested by immigration during its course. One is now free (Alberto Durango). The police thought he worked for Mitie…. The other is in Yarls Wood detention centre: Emilia. See her testimony in separate post on this blog.

A young Jake, secretary Latin Amwerican Workers Association.

I suspect the agenda was circulated to the same group of people who received the “secret slate” of officers that put the leadership of the UL in the region firmly in the hands of Labour Party members.

Monica had emailed the co-convenors before the meeting asking for the item to be placed on the agenda. That request was forwarded to the chair.

Chris is not new to the union. He had been a member of Amicus and, as I understand it, only left for a period when his job changed. I don’t think we should criticise people for joining the appropriate trade union.

It should be noted that the chair also refused to allow a discussion on the construction dispute – the most important dispute the union is involved in currently – and one that has direct relevance to London with the Olympics site.

I don’t have sufficient knowledge of the cleaners dispute to take a position on the arguments. The refusal to have that discussion at the UL meeting means that it was impossible for the left to take a position independent of the union bureaucracy.

It was amazing to hear the Chair suggest that those involved in the dispute should take the issue up through the lay bodies of the union when they have been all closed down by the Joint General Secretaries until October at the earliest.

Hi all,

last night at the UnitedLeft meeting a group of people turned up with a cleaner from the Mitie dispute. They had not announced that they would turn up to the chair or the organiser of the meeting. One of the people who turned up is Chris Ford, who recently joined Unite – about a month ago. The others were Monica Gort, who is a good, conscientious trades unionist, and also a young guy Jake, who is an anarchist. The agenda was circulated some two weeks in advance saying that if people wanted to put something on the agenda for the meeting, they needed to do so a week in advance.

We had an item on disputes on the agenda where we received reports from Visteon, from the Rob Williams dispute, and a report from the Chair of London buses outlining plans for bus strikes after the summer period – and explaining that at present all bus garages are in dispute with their employer because they are demanding that wages be centrally negotiated.

The history of the Mitie cleaners dispute – as I ascertained from various people in the UnitedLeft, and the people who turned up to the meeting along with the cleaner is that there were 28 people involved in the dispute originally. Their shifts were changed by the employer. Some of them had been involved in the Justice for Cleaners campaign on wages. Of the 28 workers, the officer concerned (a Colombian refugee) found satisfactory solutions for 24. The remaining four would not accept the compromise solution the officer achieved for them – because it involved, as I understand, fewer hours for them to work. While a tribunal was taking place, against the advice of the officer, they held some kind of demonstration. They have continued to picket offices near Liverpool Street . The officer concerned decided that he had found the best solution he could find for them, and that their refusal to accept it was unreasonable. He then ceased to help them out. My understanding is also that there are no longer the original four people still continuing to campaign – the people who brought the cleaner to the meeting explained that some of the four had moved on. The cleaners’ own branch (according to Sean McGovern) has ceased to support them.

This group of people are now going around the movement saying the dispute was sold out by Unite.

Although I did not know all the ins and outs of exactly what happened in the dispute (which I am tracking down today), when the group who brought the cleaner, together with the SWP and some others at the meeting (Ted Knight, Gerry Downing) demanded the chair take a vote on whether to hear the cleaner speak, I took the decision to vote against. The vote was lost 28 to 39.

It seemed clear to me, from the information I was able to gather from people I think I can trust that the officer concerned had done the best he could in the circumstances to get the best settlement he could. The officer concerned was present at the meeting with 12 cleaners. It was clear to me that the group who brought the cleaner there were there for destructive and not constructive purposes – it was to be an attack on the union proving what they already knew – the general principle that the union will always sell out and betray you.

You will no doubt hear more from Chris Ford and Gerry Downing. Let’s hope I haven’t sold out to the beaurocracy – but in the pub after the meeting the kind of people I was talking to reminded me very much of the Liverpool dockers – from across all sectors of the union – public service, buses, Food Drink and Tobacco, porters, general workers, and of course black cabs.

I think I was right to vote in the way I did.

Bronwen

It was not the CPB running the meeting but rather the Labour Party. I believe all the new officers for the Regional UL are members of the Regional Political Committee – by definition only open to individual members of the LP.

Can’t you hear the Gulag calling?
By Gerry Downing
“There was uproar at the Unite London ‘United Left’ on Thursday night (18th) when any discussion of the Mitie workers’ dispute at Willis was blocked and the sacked Unite cleaners’ rep at Schroeders, Alberto Durango, was denied the opportunity to address the meeting.
Two branch officers from the Clerkenwell and St.Pancras Branch of Unite who have supported the sacked cleaners attended the meeting – the Secretary Monica Gort and the Organiser Chris Ford, and also some lay reps. They came with Alberto a member of the Unite Cleaners Branch Committee. They attended expecting to secure solidarity from other Unite activists in London in widening support for the cleaners and to back calls for Asst. General Secretary Jack Dromey to reverse his withdrawal of support for the dispute. The complete opposite occurred.” (Chris Kane, The Commune Blog; http://thecommune.wordpress.com)
What a sick bunch of class traitors who would do this to a representative of the most oppressed workers in the land. But Alberto’s method was to fight the bosses and mobilise the ranks of his membership; the actions of Unite officials was to broker a class compromise to achieve some union subs but leave the workers where they were – remember JJ Fast Foods, Brother Kelly? (Jim Kelly, the bureaucratic chair of the meeting had supported the JJ Fast Foods strike about a decade ago, making just this point about the T&G bureaucracy himself). As Alberto observed, “United Left? These people are just right-wingers”. Of course they are and Alberto’s intervention tore aside the mask of these fake leftists completely on the night. He and his supporters won the taking of a vote at the second time of asking because of the intervention of a SP steward (the No2EU rotten block surely cannot survive this ‘treachery’). The 28 to 39 vote (Jim Kelly’s count has been questioned) to silence Alberto (because there were six people in the meeting who did not agree with the conduct of the dispute by Alberto) revealed the truth – a cynical resignation would not have provided the basis for a campaign against this betrayal.
The meeting of about seventy was already highly charged as both the SWP and the CPB-dominated bureaucracy had mobilised for it. The United Left is fundamentally a nomenklatura organisation, a jobs-and-positions-allocating Woodleyite front. Every vote against Alberto was bought and paid for by that system. It combines the former TGWU Broad Left and the Amicus Gazette group. This was set up at the 21 February launch AGM as a ‘consensus’ organisation where no votes were to be taken except in extremis and even then they were to be ‘weighted’, i.e. bureaucrats would arrive at meetings with members’ votes in their pockets to ensure no rank-and-file mass movement could swamp them. And of course a ‘slate’ of leadership contenders would be agreed in advance to be ‘consensus-ised’ at the AGM. Applause was the method of testing support, you could fold your arms if you were a ‘troublemaker’ and did not approve. Both the SWP and the SP had agreed to this but events in the class struggle had ripped this consensus apart (see Socialist Fight No. 2, pp.12 -14 for an analysis of these events).
In short the SP was welcomed into the No2EU CPB-Bob Crow Chauvinist Europhobic ‘platform’ whereas the SWP was excluded because it took a ‘bad’ (i.e. half-good) position on Bj4Bw. So Ted Knight got hold of a leaflet at the start of the meeting containing a slate excluding himself and the SWP. He was given short shrift by Jim Kelly, the chair, when he objected to the undemocratic nature of the slate and the breakdown of consensus. In fact the SWP did not force a vote on their exclusion because they could see that the CPB/fulltime bureaucrats had mobilised heavily against them, and their slate was duly elected.
The meeting demonstrated the rise and rise of the TU bureaucracy and the snuffing out of democracy for the ranks of the membership itself. Every vote there was bought and paid for by the nomenklatura system developed by Joe Stalin himself and operated by every union bureaucracy in the world now; if you want to advance in the union structures you must comply with the system of patronage, you must vote as required, you must betray your class to advance your own career. To some of the hard-line Stalinists present this was back to the Gulag days and so was no problem. Rod Finlayson, was confident in his Stalinism and in his attacks on MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and “their supporters here”, obviously beginning with the troublemaker Ted Knight. The MPs had supported Alberto and the Mitie cleaners, this was interfering in the internal affairs of Unite and so exposing the anti-working class ‘partnership‘ methods of Unite. A TGWU RIO, Pat Mahon, made just this accusation in a letter and subsequent telephone call, on loudspeaker in the Woodberry office, from Ken Livingstone (my MP in Brent East at the time), who had just intervened to prevent my sacking in 1999 by a joint union-management effort. Your nostalgia for the good old days of the Gulag was palpable, Rod!
Jim Kelly excelled himself in his bureaucratic railroading of the meeting. “Are you sure” he shouted at a wayward supporter who voted to hear the victimised cleaner speak – “no seat on the regional committee for you comrade”, he might as well have said as the power mad former rank-and-file supporter of the Building Working Group (remember Brian Higgins, Jim, that super scourge of the bureaucrats in UCATT?) displayed his allegiance of Stalinism and the other side of his coat.
But surely the accolade for class traitor of the night (there were many rivals!) must go to Bronwyn Handyside. This former Trotskyist, fellow WRP CC member, editor of the Workers Press and champion of the Liverpool dockers against Bill Morris’s treachery sold her soul to Stalinist bureaucracy on the TGWU Broad Left some time back when she accepted their patronage to advance in the union structures. When she voted to deny the victimised cleaners’ rep a voice she at least had the good grace to blush and afterwards say she wished it had not come to a vote. Never mind, Bronwyn, like the old German Social Democrats after the 4 August 1914 vote to supply the Kaiser with the war credits to enable the slaughter of WWI to proceed, a feeling of great freedom and liberation will quickly overcome those feelings of shame and sympathy for the oppressed. This is an account of their terrible dilemma post 1914:
“Taking their cue from the SPD, trade union leaders suspended strikes and established a policy of class collaboration, known as the Burgfrieden in Germany and the union sacrée in France. The party and trade union leaders …had already travelled down the reformist road, (this) was well illustrated by a member from the left of the party, Konrad Haenisch:”
“The conflict of two souls in one breast was probably easy for none of us… This fear: will you not also betray yourself and your cause?.. [Thus it was] until suddenly…the terrible tension was resolved…until¬, despite all principles and wooden theories¬ one could, for the first time in almost a quarter century, join with a full heart, a clean conscience and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles”. Issue 76 of International Socialism, Prelude to revolution: Class consciousness and the first world war, Megan Trudell
Surely the SWP and the SP must now recognise the hopelessly undemocratic nature of this full-time officer dominated group and begin to fight within it to form a new principled, anti-bureaucratic rank-and-file opposition of class struggle fighters.