This site is a one-way rant, but more restrained and interactive sites with different purposes are

http://www.ConsumerActionGroup.co.uk/forum/employment-problems/
- DIY employment law

http://www.MyGrievance.co.uk/component/option,com_fireboard/Itemid,67/func,showcat/catid,20/
- Unions. Links to sites about bullying at work.

About this site:
You have guessed that this site is written by a disgruntled ex-user of a paid-for part of union services: officials & lawyers, paid for at at least eleven pounds a month during a career.

Also that the odd style, with occasional missing words & rambles. It's just because I disabled my short term memory for a few years and needed reasonable adjustments - not the opposite - on return to work. I did not know when writing this site what I had just written or what would come next.
Failing reasonable adjustments, this should have been a great opportunity to prove what public sector and voluntary sector mangement are like: simply unable to be any help even in the rare case where the law fines them for hindering. To anyone who reads this and thinks "maybe you had a weak case", the ramshackle style of the site is an answer: I had a case for reasonable adjustments to disabled memory, or to compensation such as various peoples' heads on plates and commitments to behave in slightly different ways in future.

I had and still have plenty of evidence but could not make my head assemble it all in a simple way. The frustration of trying to concentrate on various impossible jobs like writing a syllabus with a management geared to hindrance; the frustration of studying law while off sick, and then finding that the union was running a no-win no-fee settlement-only service with court collusion so that I was never allowed to present any of the bags of evidence were all good reasons to be angry and good reasons to be curious and rational.

• Like most litigents I reached a point where I had to stop spending years of life on one cause and give-up the appeals-in-person, the risk of massive legal bills, and even more damage to other careers. As a compromise I started writing this site and it just carried-on, ramshackle or not, as a welcome release once in a while to type a discovery.
  
• Like most people, I had some idea how the law worked but handn't known where to look-up case law or get telephone legal advice. That's what the index.html page is about.
  
• Like most people, I had some idea what a union was but I'm not from a union family and didn't now any more than I was told - nothing - about the detail. I was like a well-meaning broadcast or broadsheet journalist, detirmined to believe that unions have had a bad press in the past, employ a few bad apples, but surely can't be quite as bad as made-out because they must somehow "represent" so many members. Looking back on it, I don't remember any formal communication system, let-alone democracy, in NALGO when I belonged to the housing workers branch, in T&G branch 1/1111 which is a hostel workers' branch, or the T&G 1/1148 South London (Communist) branch that I was catapaulted in-to unwillingly on asking for help. The concerned sympathy of journalists has a sour outcome. It has become a failure to report on a scam against ordinary non-political non-journalistic people that works worst of all against those on most trouble. This is what the union-failure.html page is about.
  
  Oh and my mum told me that unions can be good. She also told me that the Saharah desert could be made more attractive to rainfall if there were enough plants fenced from goats. I think my mum is right in principal about unions, if not in practice about mine, and have yet to prove her opinion one way or the other about goats and the Saharah.

Since starting this site, I have done the same thing as many union activists: I have gradually discovered something about the T&G and the rather wonderful parts of its old rules. I have changed my mind entirely while writing parts of this site - from believing that the problem is one branch controlled by the Communist Party of Britain, to believing that the problem is all regional offices and similar unions controlled by one party or another or certainly not by their members. It's great to write as you discover. If I had got the hang of blog software, this might have been a blog but no: it's a bunch of jossling rants.

Seeing what would happen was another reason for writing this site. Would it be reported? Would it spark a new union movement? As someone changing careers I thought that trade union services were a ripe market for expansion, but the "subscribe" box below has only had a few names and email addresses so far: please add yours. Apparently the argument against most big existing unions is like the argument against faith groups: it is so obvious as not to need to be said, dispite regular media coverage of the other side. Maybe this is all a bit of a side line because most private sector employers simply find ways to make unionism irrelevant and it's only those of us in the public sector or bits farmed-out to the vuluntary sector who would still be interested to know what a union is, but I'm still puzzled. I was ill. I was a prime target for management bullying. Why didn't anyone suggest I got legal insurance. Why didn't my doctor recommend it?

In the rest of life I have occasionally met people with an interest in this sort of thing. An Observer / Guardian journalist said "surely everyone knows that" when I mentioned this site. No. Social workers always see copies of the Wednesday Guardian (we don't read it any other day) where the jobs are. Just as teachers always see the Times Educational Supplement. Neither group sees anything about scam unions reported. A discussion group called Staffroom attached to the Times Educational Supplement had one of its longest ever threads about the teacher who successfully sued the National Union of Teachers for her membership dues back in a county court. A typical post was "why isn't this reported in the main paper?" No answer was given.

A colleague who works with someone who's partner is a Labour counsellor said "you won't get much help out of them", meaning that he'd known all-along that unions were a scam but never thought to mention it to anyone. And the doctors who treated me for a physical illness did not warn me that I would need legal insurance. "They go back to work too early and the get the sack", my main doctor said once. Later "You're a member of the Transport and General: they should be OK". No. One ambition for the next few years is to try to set-up cheap legal insurance schemes for people who are recovering from illnesses, so that they at least have a chance of a day in court an not a conspiracy of the smug amongst professions and the media