An off colour remark...

 

Here's yet another extract from my memoirs, which you can purchase inexpensively at https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/an-obscure-footnote-in-trade-union-history.

This concerns a staff conference held by Lambeth Council on the Southbank in 2001;

After Heather Rabbatts moved on from being Lambeth’s Chief Executive she was temporarily replaced by Director of Education, Heather du Quesnay, prior to the appointment of her permanent replacement, Faith Boardman, who had previously been in charge of the Child Support Agency.

Ms Boardman arrived making a strong play for support from the trade unions by emphasising to us her pro-workforce credentials. Within weeks of her arrival we had, for example, established a series of joint working parties to come up with proposals (such as a a staff handbook) - that were intended (substantively) to involve the trade unions in collectively agreeing a “relaunch” of organisational culture and (procedurally) to model joint working to managers as the way they would operate from now on.

In Lambeth UNISON we never advocated “partnership” because that invariably involves trade unions adopting a subaltern position in relation to management and helping achieve managerial objectives. Over the years however we often adopted practices which might have looked to the casual observer a lot like partnership, the difference being that we never played second fiddle.

Another part of Faith Boardman’s plans at the start of her tenure was the organisation of the first (and as it turned out last) staff conference for the whole Council workforce, which took place in two sessions, morning and afternoon, at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. We had union recruitment stalls at the event and were willing it to go well.

However, at the morning session, after a fairly lengthy speech, in which the new Chief Executive stressed her commitment to equality of opportunity and moved on to opine that the Council needed an Assistant Chief Executive and that she knew who it should be - she pointed out one of the Directors on the stage with her (who happened to be a white man).

Questions were then invited from the floor, and, having stuck my hand up, I was called to ask the first. I asked Faith Boardman if she could see the contradiction between expressing support for equality of opportunity and then identifying a white man to be her Assistant Chief Executive without any competition.

Flustered, the Chief Executive, in her reply, used the word “coloured” when she must (I hoped) have intended to say “Black”. The ripple of shock, anger and surprise which went through the (majority Black) audience was palpable - and when the next question, asked by our Black Workers Group Convenor, was prefaced with the remark that she asked it “as a proud Black African woman” the spontaneous outburst of applause was deafening.

Although she did not repeat this appalling faux pas at the afternoon session (and did not appoint any Assistant Chief Executive without a recruitment process) Faith Boardman never fully recovered from that morning during her remaining years in Lambeth.

Nor did the Council ever again bring its whole workforce together in one place on the same day. Which was a shame because it was a great union recruitment opportunity.