Last night’s Dispatches “What’s the Point of the Unions?” which you can watch here (skipping the irritating ads) ended up with a bit of union bashing but started off a clarion call to class struggle. Brother Crow was given several minutes of prime viewing time to put the case for militant industrial action causing Mrs Mac to remark “that’s what you expect union leaders to be like. That’s how they are in France ”. Jerry Hicks was given a free advert of a duration Mercedes would have paid a lot of money for to make the point that the salaries and perks top bureaucrats give themselves disconnects them from their member’ lives.
Derek Simpson went on to reinforce Jerry’s point very forcefully. He blustered that he didn’t decide on his own salary inheriting a pre-existing pay structure. Anyway he was getting asked to work really long hours sorting out all types of stuff. The house on which he paid a peppercorn rent was a shrewd investment by the union and on he droned. Oh, and there was absolutely nothing fishy whatsoever about some bureaucrat’s mate demanding a £24 000 “finder’s fee” for lining up a charity with the union.
It was the members’ voices which were the harshest criticism of the bureaucracy’s techniques. Two women cleaners explained how they were railroaded into signing a compensation agreement that left them several thousand pounds worse off. The local council and its union leaderships worked together to deny them money the bourgeois courts could have awarded them under equal pay legislation.
The worst case of all was a UNISON activist who was working 12-14 hour shifts to raise her family. She described how at union meetings the local leadership would take a vote to make her leave meetings at which they discussed equal pay. Her account suggests that some of the other people in the room thought that the Bulgarian Communist Party circa 1953 was the perfect way to run a workers’ organisation.
Instead of encouraging the sort of person who will have to be the backbone of union resistance to what’s just around the corner the bureaucracy has left her completely disillusioned with the whole idea of active trade unionism. That was almost certainly the point. The Channel 4 programme spotlighted the real Achilles heel of British trade unionism – its leadership’s fear of independent initiative. That will prove to be one of the biggest hurdles we face in the coming fightback.
Liam redux 
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