Graham says Unite won’t tolerate bad bosses. Does she include herself?

Graham’s ‘union-busting’ record against Unite staff and the union’s destruction of evidence in complaints against her husband have outraged staff and labour movement activists

Sharon Graham has responded to a vote by Unite conference delegates to suspend the membership of deputy ‘Labour’ leader Angela Rayner by saying that Unite “will call out bad employers regardless of the colour of their rosette”. Rayner’s aides said she had already left the union seven months ago.

The suspension was not decided by Graham and her management squad, but by a grassroots move from the conference floor – a day after Graham’s allies engaged in ‘shameless manoeuvres’ to successfully prevent delegates from voting on grassroots motions on Palestine by forcing a vote instead on a loophole-riddled ‘statement’ concocted by her cronies on the union’s executive council instead.

And Graham’s statement about bad employers raises the question whether she intends to call out and suspend herself, given her admitted and alleged record as boss of the Unite union. During her tenure – which goes to a member ballot again next year and for which she already appears to be electioneering – she has been constantly surrounded by allegations of abuse and anti-union behaviour and one explosive admission.

Bargaining and Dispute Support Unit (BDSU) staff have been in dispute with the union and her husband Jack Clarke over alleged bullying and abuse by Clarke and his allies – far from the first such allegations against Clarke – and have accused Graham and her management team of employing intimidation, suspension and anti-union tactics against the staff in the dispute, outraging Unite’s National Industrial Sector Committee (NISC) for the print and graphics centre and the leaders of two unions representing Unite staff and officers.

So bad has this alleged conduct been that more than 90% of Unite staff working at the union’s Holborn HQ 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 and the influential Officers National Committee (ONC) has accused Graham of using Murdoch-esque anti-union tactics against workers and against Unite officers trying to unionise and take collective action.

Graham’s rule of 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. And in an astonishing admission exclusively obtained and revealed by Skwawkbox, lawyers acting for Graham admitted that evidence, including recordings – gathered by women accusing her husband Jack Clarke of misogyny, bullying and abuse – had been destroyed.

Skwawkbox had earlier revealed that Graham that allegedly attempted to have the evidence destroyed in the complaints against her husband, who now runs the BDSU that she created when she became general secretary, office despite a final warning from the union for his behaviour.

Graham has also faced allegations 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 and that her allies tricked Abellio truck drivers 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’ and attacking anti-genocide campaigners, while members’ elected representatives have not been allowed to see the union’s accounts for well over two years.

The move by conference delegates to suspend Rayner – and the leader of Birmingham council – over Labour’s war on the city’s bin workers and their wages is right and welcome. Graham’s decision to attach herself to the suspension by attacking Labour’s ‘bad employers’ raises the question whether she is going to suspend herself.

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