Baked Bean Lasagne

 

Here's another extract from my memoirs, the full horror of which you can purchase for a nominal price at https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/an-obscure-footnote-in-trade-union-history.

By 1993 I had become branch secretary of NALGO in Lambeth and NALGO had become UNISON. Like the submerged 9/10 of an iceberg most of the work of a trade union branch secretary is individual casework about which you can't normally say anything. For this though, I'll make an exception;

Not all casework was as serious as that which arose in Housing in the autumn of 1993 - although all casework was (of course) serious for the individual union member(s) concerned.

As a Branch Secretary, I used to joke, that I did not have a monthly one to one meeting with a line manager (as most employees were supposed to) but instead with a baying mob. This was always a very unkind way to characterise my Branch Committee (and only very occasionally truthful) but in December 1993 I had to miss the monthly meeting at short notice to deal with a disciplinary hearing with which no one else was available to deal.

A recent recruit to the Union, who (as it turned out) had been transferred from working in the staff canteens to school catering, because of concerns about his culinary skills, faced a raft of serious - and less serious - charges. Of the charges I remember, there was a charge of making a mutton and vegetable pie without properly defrosting the mutton (which was presented - perhaps understandably - as a charge of gross misconduct).

I also recall that one of the lesser charges (presented as “other misconduct” rather than gross misconduct) was of making baked bean lasagne without any baked beans. To this day I find this charge perplexing since - it has always seemed to me - making baked bean lasagne ought really to have been a disciplinary matter in the first place.

Most seriously for me, the member who I arrived to represent, on a Tuesday morning in December 1993, faced a charge of gross misconduct for making biscuits for schoolchildren with twelve ounces of bicarbonate of soda in the recipe rather than twelve teaspoonfuls. According to the management, had any of the children been able to stomach more than the tiniest morsel of the disgusting product of this error, they would have become seriously ill.

The manager presenting the case against my member, being both diligent and determined to get rid of an employee who (anyone would have had to admit) might not have been best suited to a career in school catering, had frozen some of the offending biscuits and had them defrosted in time for the disciplinary hearing. When my initial attempts to have the hearing postponed to give me more time to prepare had been rebuffed by the disciplinary panel, the manager gleefully asked me if, before we moved to the presentation of their case, I would like to sample some of the biscuits.

Since (at that point) the instructions I had from the member I was representing was that there had been no mistake in the biscuit recipe, an argument which I wanted more time to explore before advancing it, this offer - which was as unappetising as it was unanticipated, concentrated my mind on revisiting the need for a postponement of the hearing, for which I successfully made a fresh request on new grounds. Once the postponement was confirmed, I made the obvious point that the biscuits (having been defrosted) ought not be refrozen and would have to be disposed of - so I never got to taste these delightful comestibles…

The UNISON member was not dismissed but transferred to other duties instead.