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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 [more
below]
- Employment lawyers paid up to 66p per member per year - or
maybe they pay to get referrals: the accounts given to Amicus
by Stoy Hayward pre merger
look at a glance as though they're different from accounts given
by Transport and General to Hard
Dowdy and then to the government office that certifies the
union as independent and from there to members. Obviously Hard
Dowdy have their membership of a professional association to
consider, as well as the reputation of the name Hard Dowdy when
accounting for pension funds trade unions and charities. Which
isn't their real name - they're part of Chantrey Vellacott DFK
LLP who for do this line of work under the Hard Dowdy name. Not
that anything fishy would ever happen to pension funds obviously:
Transport and General would be first to agree. Although Hard
Dowdy's T&G union accounts seem to contradict Stoy Hayward's:
Amicus executive council minutes, considering Stoy Hayward's
due dilligence report on Transport and General pre-merger "Legal
procedures were different in a number of ways - the TGWU
charged solicitors’ referral fees," while
the Hard Dowdy accounts at the Certification office - http://www.certoffice.org/links/pdf/375T_2004T.pdf
- seem to show the TGWU paying solicitors fees on the whole,
not charging. [2003
2004
2005
2006
2007Q1]
Hard Dowdy seem a lot hotter on scams as seen from the top of
the hierachy, who hire them, than they are on the statutory duty
to make ordinary members at the bottom of the hierachy aware
of the accounts, or even exposing scams at the top to victims
at the bottom. This is what they suggest in writing about their
sideline of charity accounting: investigations are "confidential"
to those at the top of the tree.
In the unfortunate event of a fraud being discovered, we have
police accredited fraud investigators who can undertake confidential
investigations. We have designed a fraud management plan for
a major charity (income £30m) working with trustees, executive
directors and heads of department. To help embed an anti-fraud
culture, we ran a series of seminars for trustees and staff and
we are the appointed independent whistleblower contact for the
organisation.
So if you work for that charity and follow their staff handbook
in reporting a fraud, you leak to an "independent"
organisation which survives by repeat business from "trustees,
executive directors and heads of department", who could
bethe fraudsters but usually are people putting-up with bad services,
bad hiring and firing, zero useful training, zero clinical supervision,
patronizing and bullying of junior staff or whatever other likely
accusation.
A bit like the position in other jobs where if you get bullied
out of work for taking maternity leave of being ill or just caught-up
in the chaos, the staff handbook recommends that you should have
joined a trades union which is chosen by trustees, executive
directors, heads of department - anyone really who is involved
in unfairly dismissing people, managing chaos, hiking up the
senior management team's wages or fiddling the company pension.
Hard Dowdy find a common purpose in both markets that can't be
attributed to their Chantry Vellecot name, who choose not to
risk their reputation as Enron's auditors did.
- Getting back to unions, there are 400 staff for 750,000 working
members - less than £20 per year spent on staff per member,
out of more than £120 paid per member to the organisation,
depending on the branch. The £20 figure assumes that no
kick-backs are recieved from no-win-no-fee lawyers for settling
lucrative personal injury cases early with minimum fuss. After
all, Rider Support Services appeared to be a union and funded
a union magazine from the same publishers as T&G's. An extreme
guess would be that staff of trades unions are funded entirely
as a claims management agency, with money from no-win no-fee
lawyers, while 100% of membership fees go to an unnacounted zone.
So it looks as though staff of unions know that they are running
a scam - probably not the extreme one above - but are not interested
or able to do anything about it: there are too few of them per
member, the method of canvassing members about who gets jobs
is flawed, and nothing is going to change. For some reason, they
do not go public and set-up a proper unon.
- Every now and then Unite is reported as though representing
its members, for example on TV with video of protesters and their
printed placards saying something like "Unite the union:
stop closures of final salary pensions schemes" which
is very cheap publicity for Unite. Amicus has 83 references to
final salary on its web site, most of them press releases about
how they deplore schemes being closed to new members.
An obvious solution is that the schemes should never be controlled
by senior managers with their inflated final salaries, nor the
liquidators who sometimes follow: they should belong to the people
who contributed to the schemes and pay-out according to contribution.
That way, they wouldn't have to close. At the very least, they
should be separated from employer's control. If for some reason
they are so closely part of the company that the pension fund
is part of the company's assets when it goes bust, then contributors
should know this and ask for something in return for the extra
risk, like control of the company or separation of ex-employee's
pensions from the firm.
In contrast, the Unite TGW union web site seems to side with
the employers.
.
 "Insolvent companies pose a real threat to the security
of final salary pension schemes.
- At present when a company goes bankrupt
the money owed by the company to the pension scheme is not a
priority debt - it comes behind money owed to the banks and the
Inland Revenue. The T&G campaigns to make it a priority debt.
- This union has members in United
Engineering Forgings where after a lifetime of employment
employees face losing up to 70% of their pension entitlement.
- We have members at Richards
of Aberdeen Ltd, where more than 18 months after the appointment
of an Independent Trustee the ex-employees are still waiting
to see if they will get any pension at all.
- We know of cases where after 30 or
40 years of paying into a pension scheme members are ending up
with no pension at all. "
The T&G believes that a pension
protection fund should be set up out of central government funds
and not by way of a levy which would add yet further costs to
the provison of final salary schemes, and would give employers
further excuse not to fund final salary schemes"
In summery, Unite-T&G can get free publicity when
a pension collapses by saying something on the subject.
What it says is what Robert Maxwell would have said shortly before
Mirror Group Newpapers' pension scheme collapsed and after he
raided it. The union position is that employer's pensions are
usually just that, to raid, mismanage, open or close as they
want, but if a collapse is so sudden and headline-grabbing that
politicians get involved, then a taxpayer subsidy would be nice
to smooth things over. The union regrets that final salary pension
schemes are closing, but doesn't mind the Director of Final Salaries
managing the scheme, after the Director of Pension Contribution
Holidays and before the Receiver. The union is on the side of
ex-managers with the highest final salaries who ran a paternalistic
or dodgy scheme, and not the contributors who have paid the union
for 30 or 40 years alongside their pension. Amicus even repudiated
a strike on the issue. In the words of Tony Woodley of the T&G:
“What planet is this man off to oppose a windfall
tax [or an employer controlling a pension fund] - when you have
excessive, obscene profits and when every household is struggling
to fill their fridges, let alone their car? This fella is in
the wrong party. He should be working for the CBI.”
Amicus even runs a paternal pension scheme for its own employees
and ex-employees, which
for a union that lost £3.6million in the year up to 2008
and is prone to rapid restructuring and extravagent senior staff,
is a worry for the other Amicus staff. This is quoted on Ian's
Unite site report of an Amicus executive committee:
"29. UNITE has taken a large share in the Peoples
Press Printing Society and as a result Tony Burke (an Assistant
General Secretary) is on its management committee. UNITE is also
working with the Morning Star in a variety of other ways. It
was agreed to pilot subscriptions to the Morning Star at 10 Regional
Offices and the Esher, Quorn and Wortley Hall training centres
for a full review after six months. The Morning Star will provide
daily coverage of the Amicus Regional Sector Conferences in June
and have a stand at the conference centre."
[...]
"48. Five employer-nominated trustees were elected for the
new Amicus pension scheme. These were two of the “senior
management team” (Graham Goddard and Doug Collins) and three
NEC members (Steve Davison, Dave Nestor and Agnes Tolmie)."
Oddly enough the T&G part of Unite's press office, run
by an ex-soviet journalist at the time, could not bring itself
to argue for pensioners' investments and farmed
the work out to a PR firm. The PR firm told them that it
was wrong for an employer to force or encourage employees to
pay into a specific pension fund and then to steal the money.
Or to quote more directly:
"APCO’s team added a real creative dimension
to the work of the T&G. They made possible a more wide-ranging
and effective campaign" - Bill Morris
No statement is made here about Amicus's trustworthyness to
appoint trustees who don't flush money into the Peoples Press
Printing Society, nor about any similarity in appearance or grandiosity
between Robert Maxwell or any union general secretary, living,
dead or unhealthy, physically of mentally. Some abuse is intended
by showing the two side-by-side. Anything more specific is for
the reader to judge. As is the argument that the in-house PR
office would have put, run as it is by a former soviet journalist
and communist party supporter.
"Workers must not own their jobs, even if the employer
runs out of money and owes lots to the staff pension fund. Workers
must not own their pensions. We believe in doing things in the
right order. First, all monopoly capitalist employers have to
merge with each other, then there has to be state control, and
then in hundreds of years the state will wither away because
we will only be interested in working in co-ops and being nice
to each other and stuff. A union is not going to allow the last
bit before the middle bit, even if that's what it says we're
for several times at the beginning of our rule book. Sorry."
- More laundry: a retiring official who didn't turn-up
to recognition agreement, disciplinary or dismissal meetings
and was "too busy" to help prepare a case. He
avoided a door-stepping meeting until the receptionist phoned
him to say "it's embarassing", so he finally
showed me upstairs, saw the case, and said "I'm too busy
to read a case. The most I've had is two or three sheets of paper
with bullet points. Once or twice I've had a ring binder".
He didn't say what other job he might be doing for the union
members' salaries, as he certainly hadn't been canvassing member's
needs or attending union-recognition-agreement meetings with
management.
- More laundry: a new official who emails any branch
members on the email list after a meeting to say it "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
& lawyers for branch members until the regional office's
services can be sorted-out. "because what you really
want is a lawyer", and then refuse a lawyer because
"we've tried it" (for an member of the committee
in their own employment dispute) "but it went on-and-on".
Nobody confirmed that my request to email all members with
this motion had in fact been sent-out by the branch secretary,
so I have to assume that it had been sent-out and no response
had been recieved. It turns out that Edwards
Duthie solicitors do sponsor branch banners even if their
employment lawyer service is described as "crap"
by a branch activist ("they never read anything")
and you can see an example of the sort of banner they sponsor
below if you click on the .pdf link. The banner was an item of
expenditure on the branch accounts (shown only to those who turn-up
to the annual meeting) dispite being available free to other
customers of Edwards Duthie. Maybe the branch activists missed
a trick. Just imagine. They did all that work finding the very
best lawyers for their members, and then, just by accident, they
got "crap" lawyers who sponsered things and
they never took a chance of sponsorship and paid for the banner
instead. What bad luck.
So committee members get Bindman and Partners funded out of branch
funds to argue their case and ordinary £12 a month members
do no. All agree the union legal service is crap. The member
who most likely had been defended by large payments on the branch
account budget to Bindman and Partners walked-up and wished luck,
saying that Edwards Duthie are "Crap: they don't read
anything", but he didn't write a cheque or ask his colleagues
to do so.
This is bizarre. Why should a union official rub shoulders with
this bunch who are nothing to do with anything? And in paid time?
Why should they be allowed to meet in one of the ground floor
meeting rooms of Transport House? Why should they be allocated
a "significant proportion" of member's subscriptions,
according to a statement by T&G leadership about negotiations
with Amicus pre-merger. I write these questions because it's
obvious that they should not be: they should either be elected
with a proper electoral system, or they should meet like all
the other causes and groups and meet-ups at their own expense
in their own space. Employers should insist that "time
off for union duties" is only given for union branch
meetings that have some way of canvassing opinion from ordinary
members about what should be done and in these days of internet
freebies it is not difficult for them to find a way. An employer
who funds "time off for union duties" for some
members' perfectly valid and sincere political hobbies, but doesn't
fund time-off for another employee's similar work is asking for
trouble and an unspoken alliance has formed without anything
being said over the years between employers who quite like a
crap union and a union branch committee who quite like being
crap, because they can fund solidarity campaigns and the like
rather than blow the whistle and set-up a proper union if, as
they all agree, the regional office is crap.
About the new paid official. He didn't look stupid. Why act stupid?
Nobody knows. His own words were "I wash my hands of
this" when "I will help you put your case together
from the obviously large collection of ducuments you have brought"
would have been more in line with what members want. "And
you can take your leaflet with you", the man said. Whatever
that means he was talking in a coded way, and as someone paid
by members and responding to them when they have suffered this
kind of thing from an employer, I think he should be sacked.
- More Laundry: a regional secretary (see above) 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.
Funny I didn't get a letter like this when Ken Livingstone wasn't
a Labour Party candidate but his policies were the better. Maybe
this Labour loyalist is new to town: maybe he used to live in
Liverpool or somwhere, he moved to London for the new job, and
then thought
"blimey, my job is union regional general secretary but
this candidate who Londoners respect but are a bit sick of seems
to have some wonderful policies and I just want to spend petty
cash on telling my members all about him and his congestion charges
and olympic bids and opaque accounts and bendy busses that squash
cyclists and circle of partners who have some of them gone a
bit funny but civil servants are still meant to OK budgets for
and deciding that manufacturing in London was dead an beyond
support all the other wonderful things".
I never get letters from any new regional bank managers or electricity
suppliers to express this delight, nor from my council or pension
fund or anywhere. Expression of delight in dead-bead candidates
who have just joined a favoured political party and were probably
better at their jobs before they joined is a unique habit of
Unite regional managers.
The ordinary letter on the usual letterhead without the picture
comes after several 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.
union-legal-service-solicitorTo be
fair, there has been an improvement: the branch now has a famous
union legal firm to represent it rather than a bunch from Barking
who sponsor branch banners
(if you don't live in London: Barking is not in South London
and so an odd place to choose a lawyer to represent the South
London branch), but reports to another union, the Law Society,
by smaller members, say that it is reluctant to expell the big
fish of the referral-fee-scam market and note that at least one
union lawyer does all the employment law work for free as a bribe
to get the more lucrative personal injury work.
- Empty office blocks where members are not encouraged to go.
If you ring your call is not returned. Edwards Duthie solicitors
offered to use some of the empty space, as do Hard Dowdy accountants.
If you write you a union office you don't get a reply - even
recorded delivery letters or letteres forwarded by an MP. If
you do go to doorstep an official, or your rep does this with
you, buildings like the Woodbery building in North London have
remarkably few people walking in and out of the door as you site
in the lobbey, and nobody in the empty corridors. If the office
is closed for repairs, as it was a year or two ago, there's plenty
of room for officials to move to Transport House which is in
part let-out as "conference suite" and now that
T&G has merged with Amicus, Amicus are able to sell-off a
large stately home that they used for offices without major staff
cutbacks. Office blocks, like bogus local committees, keep up
the appearance of activity. They have ceased publishing minutes
of their executive committee meetings, but unofficial minutes
report this of the union's three colleges: "The General
Secretary reported that Whitehall College remained mothballed,
there were no plans for change at Quorn, and Esher was being
refurbished."
- Regional elections for the volunteer National Executive Committee
or the Regional General Secretary jobs which have negligible
and diminishing turnout each year because the ballots don't tell
you anything that makes much sense - they start by listing who
has been nominated by what branch as though you have to be nominated.
In law you cannot be "unreasonably excluded"
from standing...
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1992/plain/ukpga_19920052_en#pt1-ch4-pb2
...but this is vague and the three Certification Office tribunals
keep lists of people who complained that they were unreasonably
exlcuded, then had to withdraw their case because they were expelled
from the union.
The regional general secretary on the right is a fashionable
Labour party member, and most likely the central office of the
Labour Party is the biggest recipient of money from union members,
whatever official acocunts say about small voluntary contributions
from a political fund. Another slice of money goes to local self-election
committees who are the only people available to field complaints
when the paid staff avoid returning calls or answering letters.
In South London 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 two parties have in common is taking money out of union
accounts. (The Conservative party also recieves slightly smaller
amounts in donations made on behalf of shareholders and other
stakeholders by PLCs like Fidelity Unit Trusts while Liberal
MPs pretend to be local counsellors in order to get in their
local papers.)
What's left in the petty cash tin for tribunal claims is 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,
or charging solicitors referral
fees if you prefer to believe the Stoy Hayward accountant's
due dilligence report commissioned by Amicus pre-merger.
e-mail recieved 24/4/8:
"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."
Assuming it's OK to write "funny business"
next to the name of an organisation, this is the context, just
to be sure:
- "charging lawyers referral fees", since
the the The
Collective Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations 2000 according
to Amicus's report from Stoy Hayward, of the union accounting
to the Certification Office that it paid for legal services to
members in the same year,
- "proud tradition" of donating money to organisations
such as trades councils which don't all publish receipts or accounts
to non-members, alongside groups with "campaign" in
the title that also don't publish receipts or accounts to non
members. I'm making the logical leap here of saying that what
these organisations have in common is not some grand working
class solidarity but not publishing receipts and only publishing
accounts to those who go to ask at the annual general meeting.
This is a sideline from the main point about lawyers; I don't
think it's what this controversy is about but just mention it.
- Publishing information to those who use search has been free
since the 1990s and trades union officials would have known after
reading email addresses with •freeserve or
•freeuk in them, emphasising that free web
pages were available. Union officials might not have been the
sort of people to write a web page in the 1990s - they had another
job to do - but their offices could publish information cheaply.
Most unions like the T&G had early web pages with pictures
of Bill Morris and such.
- of the Certification Office's report of a complaint about
the cab driver's branch which would count as funny business
in both senses to most people
- lack
of accountability generally about where the money goes if
not officials laywers or political funds: "nobody knows"
it states on another page of this site and it's in the public
interest that those who are let down by trades unions have web
sites to google about the reasons.
The same 24/4/8 email follows with an anecdote about a late
regional general secretary, who's daughter has just written in
after reading the two paragraphs together and perhaps little
else of this site about coping with union let-downs. Apart from
the "I'm afraid to say..." lines, which make
sense as an agreement with one or two of the points made on this
site after a long reading, the email goes on to say Mr was
- very rude to a boy who wanted accountability about where
a £100,000 Trade Council Fund went,
- didn't account
- the title of the account seemed opaque or deceptive to an
insider at the time who did not know where it was spent
I know nothing about the people involved. I type plausible
statements. A quote on the activist's intranet in about 2008
read something like
"I didn't like Bill Morris but at least you'd get
a reply from him, albeit a rude one.
With this lot you just don't get an answer"
Another quote in the papers about Mr Dwomy, another colleague
at the time who:
"Could have a fight in an empty room"
It doesn't suggest that the rude general secretary pinched
money. Someone who read "I'm afraid to say..."
next to the name of her late father and nothing else on this
site, and perhaps statements
about other union general secretaries of other unions, was
worried and wrote to say so on 24/10/9:
"As [the person's] daughter, I can assure you that
his reputation for upholding the highest moral standards, and
for working tirelessly on behalf of his members, is richly deserved.
The implication that he was involved in 'funny business' is as
offensive as it is untrue."
I would love to hear from her again but don't want to bother
her by replying about self-deception amongst union bosses, their
families, those around them, or the journalists who claim against
all the statistics the unions are unpopular but will not do the
work fo saying why they fail. It's like a similar problem of
volunteers who do great work as unpaid reps but don't have the
time or skills or nouse to set-up a proper union that does the
work best left to specialists for them and leaves them only with
the work best left to volunteers. After a few attempts to get
a union official to help a colleage - maybe by booking a meeting
with the official and bringing the colleage - it's easy to guess
why a lot of reps give up or don't volunteer in their next job
because the system is crap, but they don't set-up a better one.
Self-deception amongst such folk who pretend that their charging
referral fees to lawyers, or the understanding that lawyers would
not charge, was not wrong wicked and dispicably cruel to those
they made a living pretending to represent. All of us mix up
right and wrong but "elected" union folk srtike me
as bizarrely unable to tell right from wrong, possibly because
they are exempt from registration with the financial services
authority.
I think this is like the daughter of an Equitable Life director
saying "I can assure you my father was the only one who
thought the figures added-up", or the daughter of someone
from West Midlands Regional Crime Squad in the 70s saying "I
saw the program 'Life on Mars' and am shocked that anyone should
use the words 'funny business' about my late father".
Doubtless there were goodies and baddies at the time who's battleground
is now forgotten; the difference between what a bad person could
get away with and what a good person could do to make things
better, and the way the battleground was seen, is lost in fog
and respect for the dead. It's hard enough to know what's right
and wrong amongst the living without going-back decades, but
here goes.
It would be hard for anybody, let alone a regional general
secretary who paid for a national office, not to know about a
system that's still in place except for a bit of centralisation
and merging I think. Life
of a Trade Union Lawyer, an article in the New Law Journal
of May 2009 reveals a unpaid lawyers settling early and sticking
to the easy cases as early as the 1960s, and the degree of scam
could only have increased with the complexity of employment law
and the new tribunal system later-on. All that has happened this
century is that the idea of no-win no-fee lawyers has been formalised
and made possible for more organisations; the pretence that members
pay dues for accountable service is thin.
The failure to run online or postal elections for obscure self-election
committees is still normal; the secrecy of obscure budgets to
anyone except members of a group who go to the annual general
meeting or perhaps a regional office is still normal, except
that regional offices have used chaos as an excuse to take some
of the bank accounts.
A simlar site to this has quoted reports of employment tribunal
hearings where an ex-employee of the Manufacturing and Science
Federation recounts implausable statements about branch accounts
with names like "MSF Guildhall" and if I'd read to
the bottom there's probably an implication that the general secretary
was diverting the money - maybe to fill a hole in the pension
fund, or his pocket, to pay for lawyers on the last employment
tribunal case against the union, or who knows but that's much
more specific than
"TGWU could leave its self open to suggestion that
there may be some history of funny business"
The Certification Officer's account of a complaint about the
cab driver's branch in Region One is specific. It describes a
system of self-election committees and private budgets. A difficulty
for elected paid officials (regional general secretaries at the
time) is that such folk are active voters amongst a low turn-out,
and sometimes gate-keepers to who can stand. Probably some people
tried to make the best of it all tirelessly.
I think a regional general secretary should have been interested
in making accounts accountable as law and honest business sense
dictate. They are not now; I presume they were not then. To me
and anyone who reads down as far as the bottom of this back page
on an obscure web site with broken formatting - assuming anyone
does at all - this is the context. It's not a suggestion that
the man took £100,000 out of petty cash without a receipt;
just that there were no receipts that the member could get hold
of at a time when this man was secretary. It might look shocking
to the daughter of the late trades union regional general secretary,
but she is probably the only one who reads it in that way and
possibly the only one who reads it at all.
Here's the quote which makes more sense well-apart from the
first paragraph:
"I remember [the] - 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 [he] 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."
With luck the next generation of trades union members, who
are used to seeing MPs expenses reported on the news and googling
facts at whim, will hold their unions more accountable whichever
unions they join. Meanwhile the older generation never did have
much reputation to defend so far as I can tell from this
Mori poll. Most of the questions were about the politics
of trades unions, which is silly because if they had been accountable
for money they would have been accountable for what they did
in more political ways, and Mori didn't follow the money. Anyway
the more general questions simply don't show a "reputation
for upholding the highest" of any standards, as far
as the organisations go. There is far more respect for the need
to have trade unions than there is for the leadership in practice,
among union members as well as non-members. It is a bit like
talking to tory backbenchers about their days at boarding school:
they seem in favour of it and not in favour at the same time
and suggest no change.
Q I am going to read out some statements relating to trade
unions.
For each one, please tell me from this card, how strongly you
agree or disagree with it?
[I am not going to read similar statements about the press and
its publishers.]
"Trade union leaders are out of touch with their
members"
|
|
All adults |
TU members |
|
|
Agree |
Disagree |
Net |
Agree |
Disagree |
Net |
|
|
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
±% |
|
August 1993 |
45 |
22 |
+23 |
48 |
30 |
+18 |
|
August 1994 |
42 |
27 |
+15 |
38 |
41 |
-3 |
|
August 1995 |
41 |
26 |
+15 |
42 |
35 |
+7 |
"Most trade unions are controlled by extremists
and militants"
|
|
All adults |
TU members |
|
|
Agree |
Disagree |
Net |
Agree |
Disagree |
Net |
|
|
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
±% |
|
October 1975 |
64 |
20 |
+44 |
56 |
37 |
+19 |
|
August 1977 |
66 |
21 |
+45 |
58 |
33 |
+25 |
|
September 1978 |
60 |
30 |
+30 |
57 |
39 |
+18 |
|
September 1979 |
67 |
24 |
+43 |
59 |
35 |
+24 |
|
July 1980 |
70 |
20 |
+50 |
55 |
34 |
+21 |
|
November 1981 |
61 |
22 |
+39 |
55 |
30 |
+25 |
|
August 1982 |
65 |
23 |
+42 |
64 |
30 |
+34 |
|
August 1984 |
64 |
24 |
+40 |
55 |
35 |
+20 |
|
November 1985 |
n/a |
n/a |
|
43 |
36 |
+7 |
|
August 1987 |
n/a |
n/a |
|
48 |
35 |
+13 |
|
August 1989 |
54 |
26 |
+28 |
43 |
42 |
+1 |
|
August 1990 |
50 |
30 |
+20 |
43 |
44 |
-1 |
|
December 1992 |
34 |
42 |
-8 |
26 |
56 |
-30 |
|
August 1993 |
35 |
40 |
-5 |
28 |
55 |
-27 |
|
August 1994 |
30 |
47 |
-17 |
19 |
68 |
-49 |
|
August 1995 |
31 |
45 |
-14 |
23 |
61 |
-38 |
"Trade unions are essential to protect workers'
interests"
|
|
All adults |
TU members |
|
|
Agree |
Disagree |
Net |
Agree |
Disagree |
Net |
|
|
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
±% |
|
October 1975 |
73 |
15 |
+58 |
88 |
6 |
+82 |
|
August 1977 |
75 |
18 |
+57 |
85 |
11 |
+74 |
|
September 1978 |
78 |
16 |
+62 |
87 |
11 |
+76 |
|
September 1979 |
80 |
16 |
+64 |
88 |
10 |
+78 |
|
July 1980 |
72 |
16 |
+56 |
90 |
6 |
+84 |
|
November 1981 |
73 |
16 |
+57 |
85 |
6 |
+81 |
|
August 1982 |
71 |
21 |
+50 |
n/a |
n/a |
|
|
August 1983 |
77 |
16 |
+61 |
89 |
8 |
+81 |
|
August 1984 |
71 |
18 |
+59 |
86 |
9 |
+77 |
|
February 1985 |
n/a |
n/a |
|
91 |
5 |
+86 |
|
November 1985 |
n/a |
n/a |
|
76 |
12 |
+64 |
|
August 1987 |
n/a |
n/a |
|
88 |
5 |
+83 |
|
March 1989 |
72 |
17 |
+55 |
81 |
11 |
+70 |
|
August 1989 |
77 |
12 |
+65 |
91 |
7 |
+84 |
|
Dec 1989-Jan 1990 |
69 |
21 |
+48 |
85 |
10 |
+75 |
|
August 1990 |
80 |
11 |
+69 |
90 |
7 |
+83 |
|
February 1992 |
81 |
14 |
+67 |
93 |
6 |
+87 |
|
December 1992 |
74 |
12 |
+62 |
86 |
9 |
+77 |
|
August 1993 |
80 |
10 |
+70 |
92 |
4 |
+88 |
|
August 1994 |
82 |
10 |
+72 |
93 |
6 |
+87 |
|
August 1995 |
79 |
10 |
+69 |
88 |
4 |
+84 |
Below is another example of a plucky cause, quite right in its
right to speak but wrong to take money from obscure bank accounts
that could have paid for lawyers in employment trubunals:
- This site is to expose the scandle of derelict
unions which have become claims handling agencies with a little
PR and volunteer-co-ordination thrown-in.
The rest of the money - over ten pounds a month per member -
probably finds its way to the Labour Party's central office with
a little going to other causes and charities that have found
ways of working the system. One such - to be reduced at the end
of 2008 - is the T&G's generously funded volunteer branches
which in this case have no paid staff, no connection with an
employer, no way of electing volunteer committee members except
turning-up, no system of accounting to members unless they turn-up,
and "a proud tradition of donation to other causes",
according to the Region One web site. The paid regional office
also donates to the same list of causes and provides a handy
list of political causes and charities with names like "solidarity
movement", or "trades council" that
do not make their accounts public at all or only to members:
they do not give receipts. Phone calls and google research reveals
that they are more honest than expected, given a system that
seems designed for corruption. Wandsworth Trades Council and
the causes it funds seem quite popular and some of them such
as Bananalink provide real accounts that anyone can read. But
the system of "donations on bahalf" by people
"elected on a show of hands" to causes that
don't give receipts is still considered normal among trades union
activists, whether or not they benefit from it.
- Phrases like - washing dirty laundry in public; money
laundering, tax evasion, fraud, - might already be in the
mind of a reader: this site did not put them there, but since
you ask the first couple of definitions of money laundering that
come to hand are about money transfer confused to conceal illegality
at one end of the chain from legality at the other. "Donations
on behalf", (or just "donations" and
"affiliations" with the "on behalf"
taken-for-granted) can't be called "Money laundering".
I'd like it to be called money laundering but can't find a dictionary
to back me up. The destination of the money might found by the
Daily Mail to be Lee Jasper's relatives or declared to the electoral
commission as South Eastern Labour Party or at least 22 organisations
that T&G region one funds or the Communist Party's landlord
and the Morning Star overdraft which this branch funds are all
legal payments, allowed by elected officials elected by dodgy
electoral systems.
- This page isn't to discourage anyone from
doing ridiculous things like joining a campaign, working as a
regional manager in an organisation where the job is elected,
or marching down the street in protest at something. It is to
discourage daft people from taking money that should be used
for sacked employees' lawyers, for getting control of company
pensions, and for encouraging more workplace democracy over the
years. These are the things that might get more support if there
were decent voting systems in trades unions. At the moment it's
ridiculous. Everything is ridiculous but less than 10% turnout
for area manager elections, six people voting themselves into
office on a show of six hands, and "Star Turn" donations
to the Morning Star overdraft are very ridiculous, as
is the 66p per member per year left for employment lawyers according to an interview with the
TGWU legal director.
-
The union branch news, below, takes a few seconds to load as
a pdf - please wait a while if you want to have a look and check
that what I've written about sponsored banners and payments to
the Morning Star is true. Although I didn't say that the branch
banner was definately sponsored by a dodgy lawyer called Edwards
Duthie - just that they sponsored a very similar one for another
branch. The one shown here is entered as a cost in the branch
accounts.
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