Exclusive: Graham using ‘Murdoch’ anti-union laws against us, says national officers’ group

Yet more allegations of anti-union manoeuvres against union boss and her cronies

Unite boss Sharon Graham is again embroiled in accusations of anti-union tactics against Unite workers.

The Officers’ National Committee (ONC) representing officers of the Unite union has written to all officers of the union with an update on its attempts to organise to fight its long-running with Graham and her management team – and the Murdoch-like anti-union measures it says she is using to sabotage those efforts and block the workplace recognition of Community, the union that represents officers working in Unite.

‘Hostile management’

The statement – emphases have been added by Skwawkbox – reads:

Statement to All Unite Officers

Colleagues,

Last Friday 17th January, the ONC along with our union Community took the decision to temporarily withdraw our statutory recognition claim with the CAC [Central Arbitration Committee, the government body with powers to affirm union workplace recognition] after the employer’s submission was tabled to challenge our request.

You will recall that when we went to ballot on this question, the ONC had agreed the terms of reference with Unite senior management under the auspices of ACAS. At the time it was clear to everyone that should a YES vote be secured for recognition with Community, then the ONC along with ACAS would conduct a further ballot to decide the ONC ‘s future role and to decide on the purpose of its fund.

The ONC has neither been a recognised union nor a pseudo staff association and as such we were not afforded the right to take industrial action as an independent trade union, nor can we provide external legal services to individual officers as these are denied to us by Unite.  For all the reasons stated in previous communications the officers by majority had felt it was time to seek that independent status and the protections it afforded to us against what has become a very hostile management structure.

The ONC were shocked on Friday to be told that the questions posed by Unite to the CAC and the challenges they were making could only mean that the Union had decided to use the anti-union “Murdoch” clause in the statutory legislation to fight against the ballot result of the officers and to stop us having single table bargaining with Community.

The “Murdoch” clause as it is known in the Statutory recognition provisions, was a surprise inclusion into the legislation in 2000.  This was to allow News International to prevent a recognised trade union from seeking collective bargaining by setting up an anti-union staff association.  This was a direct attack on trade unionism and followed the bitter print dispute at Wapping and Kinning Park, in which 5500 trade unionists from one of our legacy unions lost their jobs (40 years ago this very week).  Since 2000 the trade union movement have lobbied to remove this anti-union clause and for our management to now use it to stop the democratic ballot result of their own employees is shameful and a stain on our good name as a trade union.

On top of the attacks faced by our own GMB staff, who recently held a lawful picket at Head Office, our union are now taking further anti trade union actions against us, their Officers who have chosen to support Community recognition.

Should our employer, not step away from this decision, then they would be insisting under the legislation, that we derecognise the ONC first before we can seek recognition with Community.  We demonstrated in the ACAS ballot that we already had both membership and the majority of members voting YES to evidence that this was our wish, but our management have chosen to hide behind anti-union clauses and not respect both our ballot or their previous agreement with ACAS.

The ONC will this week be taking independent legal advice on our next steps and will advise Officers of the choices open to us all as soon as possible. This move most prominently used by News International and Boots Chemists now firmly puts us outside the trade union “family”. It will have repercussions for every Officer and member fighting for recognition and union rights. The Officers National Committee

A spokesperson for Unite’s management, after the now-habitual insult and smear against Skwawkbox, claimed that the issues outlined by the ONC are ‘totally untrue’:

This is totally untrue. Unite has already given a recognition agreement to Community and is waiting for it to be signed.

We also have a long-standing recognition agreement with the Unite Officers National Committee, which came over from our heritage unions and has its own constitution and sizable funds, owned and controlled by the Officers.

There is a process that can be used to disband the Officers National Committee, but this right is only for the Unite Officers and nobody else.

In a damning letter last April, the ONC took the ‘unprecedented’ step of writing directly to Unite’s elected executive to accuse Graham of breaching collective agreements and using the threat of legal action to silence and intimidate workers for raising a grievance against Graham and the union management – and to ‘crush’ collective and ‘dignity at work’ principles.

A month later, the entire elected ‘Finance and General Purpose Committee – one of the executive’s most important sub-committees – walked out in protest accusing Graham of ‘stifling democracy’ and ‘destroying the union’.

Graham and Unite are also in dispute with staff working under her husband Jack Clarke, who allege bullying and abuse by Clarke and others – not the first such allegations against Clarke, see below – that she and her management team are employing intimidation, suspension and anti-union tactics against the staff in the dispute. So egregious has this alleged conduct been that more than 90% of Unite staff working at the union’s Holborn HQ have voted for strike action. Three – some say four – of the five women who worked in Clarke’s department since Graham formed it and put him in charge of it have left it, with union sources saying that they also alleged bullying and abuse. The Unite union staff branch unanimously condemned Unite’s abuse of its staff.

Graham’s tenure at Unite has also been marked by a string of other serious allegations, which neither she nor the union has ever denied – of abuse, cover-up and failure to protect women:

• that she attempted to have evidence destroyed in bullying and misogyny complaints about her husband, whom she now employs in her office despite a final warning from the union for his behaviour – Graham’s lawyers recently confirmed that the evidence, including recordings, had been destroyed
• after her supporters failed in their bid to take control of the Unite executive despite ‘dark money’ spending on advertising, ineligible and racist members being allowed to stand and the alleged use of paid organisers in and following the exec election campaign, her faction has resorted to Starmerite tactics to try to discredit the executive members
• that her chief of staff 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
• that Abellio truck drivers were tricked into accepting a deficient pay deal after they originally voted to reject it

In addition, the union’s strike fund has collapsed by more than 90% under her tenure, she has been exposed behind the union’s decision to ban showings in Unite’s buildings of a film exposing racism, smears, rigging and abuse by the Labour right and has been accused of turning Unite into right-wing Labour leader Keir Starmer’s ‘poodle’, while members’ elected representatives have not been allowed to see the union’s accounts for two years.

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