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Look at our Laundry: (back to UnionFailure.html#where-does-union-money-go)
 Three
complaints about the branch employment lawyer who goes to court
without evidence
- Employment lawyers paid up to 66p per member per year - or
maybe they pay to get referrals
- 400 staff for 750,000 working members - less than £20
per year spent on staff per member.
- A retiring official who didn't turn-up to recognition agreement,
disciplinary or dismissal meetings and was "too busy"
to help prepare a case; a new one who says the branch "functions
exactly as a branch is supposed to function, making donations
to working class charities" after watching them "put
on one side" a motion to fund proper legal insurance
and lawyers until the central union could be sorted-out and saying
"I wash my hands of this" to requests to get
a strong case sorted-out.
- A regional secretary who (see right) who writes "I
am taking the unusual step of writing to you about the forthcoming
mayoral election" no - that's the wrong letter. The
one with the photo on it. The ordinary one comes after constant
reminders and says that he will not to fund other lawyers than
the union's own panel, despite
a law saying that he has to, and dispite a string of compaints
about the existing lawyer, dispite a statement about the existing
legal panel that doesn't
hang-together, dispite secrecy about what these "procedures
in place" might be. The man doesn't answer letters from
members and if the pressure from reps within the internal world
of volunteer committees gets so great that he deals with a complain,
he asks his secretary to pass-on a message rather than showing
his face directly. If this were a Financial Services Authority
regulated organisation I'd like to know if he'd be in prison
for this.
- Electoral systems that allow a show of hands round a table
to elect a local branch committee and a less than 10% turnout
to appoint a regional manager or an executive committee member
The regional general secretary on the right is a fashionable
Labour party member; most of the branch's six activists (elected
on a turnout of six to control a £20,000 bank account)
are in the photo below. They are all or mostly members of the
39-strong Communist Party of Britain. What the parties have in
common is taking money out of union accounts. Mainstream and
fringe parties are united in taking money out of union accounts
leaving 66p per member per year for employment lawyers according
to an interview with The Lawyer
by Unite the Union's Transport and General Section legal director.
"I'm afraid to say, that having been involved in the
TGWU for nearly forty years, in Region 1, that the TGWU could
leave its self open to suggestion that there may be some history
of funny business."
"I remember Ken Reid - then Regional Sec. of Region 1 -
ripping some kid to pieces over the phone, because he had asked
about a 'Trades Council Fund' held by Region 1: the boy thought
it referred to the trades councils, but Ken was emphatic that
the lad had no business asking questions - and I never did find
out what precisely the £100,000 was actually for - except
it was not for the Trades Councils."- email received 24/4/2008.
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