‘Is our general secretary ok?’ Unite activist reacts to Graham’s ‘ME ME ME ME’ Christmas email

Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham’s bizarre Christmas email to members has raised eyebrows, prompting many to wonder if all is well with the union boss currently embroiled in an industrial dispute with staff who claim her husband is bullying them and that Unite is engaging in union-busting tactics against them. As Skwawkbox revealed last week, three out of five women working in BDSU under Graham’s husband Jack Clarke left the unit – and Graham’s lawyers, in a response to a Skwawkbox press enquiry, admitted that Unite has destroyed evidence presented against Clarke by staff, particularly women, working under him in his previous unit.

One activist who put his thoughts eloquently was Reuben Bard-Rosenberg, who has previously criticised Graham for the tactics deployed against the Bargaining and Disputes Support Unit (BDSU) workers during their strike action earlier this month over their bullying complaints and the union’s response of suspending all the workers in dispute while not suspending any of the management accused of the abuse.

In a Facebook post, Bard-Rosenberg responded to the ‘ME ME ME ME’ email by asking, ‘Is our general secretary ok?’:

Is our General Secretary OK?

This Christmas message from Sharon Graham is a bit bizarre. She’s correct that there has been corruption in Unite. But that paragraph threatening to smash all of her internal enemies is a strange thing to put in a Christmas message. It’s also a transparent attempt to conflate opposition [to] her corruption probes with the outcry over Unite suspending a bunch of its employees for taking industrial action over bullying.

You’d think a Christmas message would be the obvious moment to thank hardworking reps and activists who build the struggle in their own time. There’s a very very cursory “thank you for all you do” (literally), and then it’s “ME ME ME ME”, with two fat paragraphs about her heroically talking to government about the interests of members and then this self-serving nonsense about how she’s being vilified for doing good. You’d think the purpose of Christmas is to commemorate the Divine Birth of Sharon Graham and her crucifixion for speaking the truth.

No grassroots member reading this will get a sense that what they’ve done, or may do, matters, and that it is up to us to determine what we win. How is it that the Christmas message from by boss expresses greater mutuality, fellowship and interdependence than the message from the person leading my union.

What is odd is that even if we take it as a given that she will use her Christmas message to gain personal or fractional advantage, she does a very poor job of it. Like, it’s possible to write something that reads like a nice Christmas message and gets across that you’re awesome, and influences people to act in the way you want, and doesn’t make you look like a massive bellend. Surely she must have someone who works for her who can say “don’t send this email Sharon, I can rewrite it for you”. Seriously General Secretary…

Graham’s full message, as posted by Bard-Rosenberg, reads:

The final full paragraph is presented as an ‘update’, but contains no update, only a recap of old information. Union insiders believe the police investigation, despite the union’s creation of a different impression, has found no wrongdoing in the Birmingham conference centre project that Graham made a centrepiece of her election campaign, claiming she would ‘clean up’ alleged corruption.

As well as the strike action by workers against her husband and the admissions by her lawyers, Graham’s tenure has been marked by:

• allegations of ‘dark money’ spending on advertising, and fielding ineligible and racist candidates in executive elections
• the alleged use of paid organisers in and following the exec election campaign
• the use of Starmerite tactics to try to discredit the executive members, including misogyny and homophobia smears in an echo of the banners now up in Holborn
• allegations that her chief of staff – now the subject of legal action over alleged irregularities in her appointment – threatened a (now-retired) senior officer with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians against Israel’s genocide
• the collapse of Unite’s strike fund by more than 90%
• complaints that Abellio truck drivers were tricked into accepting a deficient pay deal after they originally voted to reject it
• horror among the union’s anti-genocide activists at her positions on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and her attacks on anti-genocide activists

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