UNISONActive has risen from the grave!

As a retired person suffering from fatigue as a result of advanced cancer, cancer medication and lymphoedema, I watch rather more television than I should.

I particularly enjoy Hammer horror films. I always like the way in which Dracula can be brought back to life with the blood of a virgin or some other plot device which enables him to entertain us through yet another film.

I was therefore very pleased to discover the resurrection of the UNISONActive blog, which once described the author of the blog you are now reading as “UNISON’s answer to screaming Lord Sutch”.

UNISONActive was initiated in anticipation of the 2010 general secretary election in order to provide a vehicle for online comment supportive of the then General Secretary and critical of various left-wing elements within the trade union. In those days, items were often posted on the blog anonymously in a failed attempt to conceal the fact that posts ostensibly written by lay activists were in fact being penned by paid staff.

UNISONActive was very much the upmarket end of support for the union leadership at that time, distinguishing itself from the most scurrilous muckraking blogs which appeared elsewhere. As well as content which was partisan within UNISON there would be other, more general trade union content and an attempt to have a professional presentation. Not every contribution was anonymous and sometimes leading UNISON activists would put their name to useful and interesting contributions to debate.

The UNISONActive Blog was very quiet at the time of the 2015 general secretary election (with just one post), reflecting the fact that some of the best supporters of the victorious candidate in 2010 were sitting out that later contest. Shortly thereafter new posts stopped appearing on the Blog and the sands of time covered it as surely as if it had been the tomb of some ancient pharaoh.

Now however something stirs in the depths. The Blog has come back to life and has a new purpose - to criticise and attack the left-wing majority on the UNISON NEC. A post published yesterday in the name of an individual member of the NEC is a fine example of what is to be expected from the resurrected UNISONActive Blog.

On the one hand, the author makes sound points that need to be considered in a debate about how to win members to support industrial action in the context of the current antiunion legislation. She goes on to make observations which could have been, and indeed often were, made at any point in about the last 20 years;

“What we need is an organising agenda that is inclusive of the whole of the leadership including those with different affiliations or none and in partnership with the General Secretary and staff. There is such excellent work done by staff to further UNISON’s policies agreed at NDC and huge amounts of knowledge and expertise amongst both staff and lay members.”

In 14 years of membership of the NEC and its development and organisation committee, I did my very best to be part of an inclusive approach to the organising agenda but was consistently frozen out because I was not seen as supportive of the “powers that be”. I could have - and indeed did - say something very similar to the preceding paragraph many times over those years for all the good that it would've done - or did do - me.

Having made some reasonable and some platitudinous comments, the author of the post over at UNISONActive then goes on to comment “more in sorrow than in anger” about the conduct of the new leadership of the NEC.

The most pernicious and dishonest component in the litany of attacks being made against the elected leadership of our trade union is the unfounded allegation of bullying and harassment of staff. This is nonsense. If any individual member of staff considers themselves to have been harassed they may have recourse to appendix 2 of the UNISON rulebook which sets out a dedicated procedure to deal with just such cases.

What is happening in UNISON is a cultural change away from the culture in which lay members saw their role as somewhere between cheerleaders and proud parents looking on at the wonderful work of the paid officials of the trade union and never voicing criticism of our “world-class negotiators”. 

I remember, for example, when UNISON invested considerable resources in trying to recruit staff working on the 2012 Olympics and completely failed. I simply pointed out that this has been a complete failure and the response to my doing so had been as if I had farted in church. It was seen as positively rude to suggest that the officials had got something wrong.

Even when officers had failed on a gargantuan scale, as when we lost £1 million to Care Connect Learning and another million in the hopeless “Three Companies Project”, it was like getting blood from a stone to try to hold anyone to account and reports which came out long after the event were hardly effective in so doing.

Now it appears that the UNISON NEC is trying hard to develop a culture in which senior paid officials are held accountable by elected lay activists as should be the case. This alters the balance of power within the trade union and those who feel threatened by this will allege bullying. 

I myself faced criticism and investigation because of comments made on this blog in the past. Those who could characterise occasionally intemperate comments on a little read blog as bullying of UNISON staff will no doubt go much farther when confronted with a lay leadership asserting its proper authority in accordance with the rules.

Supporters of democracy within UNISON must be prepared for many more serious criticisms and acts of sabotage as they try to turn the trade union into the union we voted for in 1992 and which our members deserve in 2022.