GMB General Secretary Tim Roache: “The Labour Party is at a crossroads. I’m under no illusions that we’re living through dangerous political times – the like of which I haven’t seen during my three decades in our movement. It’s time for us to face up to reality.
“GMB balloted our members because this kind of decision shouldn’t be taken from up on high. We’re a democratic organisation here to serve our members’ interests. I was determined that our members would have their say. And they’ve had it.
“I’ll proudly campaign alongside Owen in the coming weeks and months to deliver on his pledges to end the public sector pay freeze, to support defence workers, to invest in health and industry, and to build an industrial strategy – these are bread and butter issues for the people I represent.
“But we can only tackle them if we’re in government. That’s the end game and I hope whatever the final result, the Labour Party will unite when all this is over. GMB members cannot afford for Labour to be talking to itself in a bubble for the next five years while the Tories run riot through our rights at work, our public services and our communities.”
GMB, the union for cleaners and security staff, will launch an industrial ballot of members working as cleaners at Nationwide’s headquarters in Swindon. The ballot will ask GMB members contracted by Carillion whether they’re prepared to take industrial action to fight cuts to working hours.
GMB regional organiser, Carole Vallelly (pictured), delivered a letter yesterday to Nationwide CEO, Joe Garner, and Head of Corporate Citizenship, Stephen Uden, which highlighted the incompatibility of Nationwide’s status as an ethical employer and their association with Carillion PLC.
The letter includes details of Carillion’s involvement in the unlawful practice of blacklisting as well as details from a damning BBC report on contractors working for Carillion in Qatar. The letter concludes “GMB believes that Nationwide’s claims to be an ethical employer do not survive examination of your relationship with the clearly unethical contractor, Carillion.”
Given the importance that Nationwide Building Society (NBS) invests in being an ethical business, as part of its brand proposition, GMB are surprised that NBS has no concerns about the association with Carillion.
GMB provided Nationwide Building Society with the statement that was submitted in open court earlier this year by a group of corporations, known as the Macfarlanes Defendants, and which included Carillion PLC. This statement concerns the terrible practice of “blacklisting”, where Carillion PLC admitted in court to having participated in the collection and dissemination of defamatory information about individuals on a systematic basis, and that these activities had consequences for certain workers “in terms of lost work opportunities or refusals of work and they had an impact on some workers’ personal lives”
This is an issue that is not only of historical interest, as the most senior Carillion HR manager, Liz Keates, is still employed by Carillion, and GMB has evidence that she is involved in the HR policies for Carillion employees at Nationwide House. Both the courts, and the House of Commons Scottish affairs select committee, have heard evidence of Liz Keates personal involvement in blacklisting activities.
GMB also drew to Nationwide’s attention the involvement of Carillion with employment practices in the construction of the World Cup stadia in Qatar, which according to a 2014 report from the BBC includes use of the “Kafala” system which is tantamount to bonded labour, and extremely poor health and safety.
The cuts to cleaners’ hours had been planned to go ahead earlier in the year but were cancelled following a series of protests outside Nationwide headquarters in Swindon, and notification to the employer of a strike ballot.
However, the trade union has now learned that Carillion intends to reintroduce the changes after renewal of the contract with Nationwide is signed on 1st October.
The cleaners currently work early shifts, but the proposed changes will see many staff work between 5 pm and 10:30 pm each weekday evening and some staff will also be required to work full dayshifts at the weekend.
Carole Vallelly, GMB Regional Organiser, said
“The relationship between these two companies is very convenient for Nationwide. On the one hand they can claim to be an ethical employer while keeping their lowest paid, lowest status, and most vulnerable workers at arm’s length on the other by employing them through known rogues and sharks like Carillion.
“GMB believes that nationwide are hypocrites: Their head of corporate citizenship, Stephen Uden, sits on the board of the Living Wage Foundation and earlier this year the company increased the hourly rate to £8.25. For our members however, it is not the hourly rate that matters, it’s the amount of money in their pay packet.
“The proposed shift changes will not only push some GMB members into genuine financial hardship, but the new evening hours will force many workers with children to leave their jobs altogether.
“GMB is not prepared to stand by, while Nationwide preens itself in smug self-satisfaction about what a good employer it is, while allowing Carillion to grind cleaners at Nationwide’s own headquarters into the ground.
GMB believes that every worker is entitled to dignity. Nationwide seems happy to pay lip service to being ethical, but is seemingly quite prepared to throw that out the window if there are financial savings to be made at the expense of their cleaners. GMB calls for Carillion to enter immediate talks, and to make an unequivocal and written assurance that the proposed shift changes have been withdrawn. ”
At this year’s Durham Miners’ Gala. GMB General Secretary, Tim Roache.
“If we had had any of the other three candidates last year, we would have continued to lose all the millions of voters we have lost over the years.
[Jeremy Corbyn] offers us an alternative, He offers us proud trade unionism. He offers us one movement. He offers us the link between the trade union and the Labour Party, and the political influence that that gives us. So, let’s back him, let’s get behind him, let’s give workers that united voice that we need”.
So vote in GMB’s consultative ballot on who the union should support, let’s follow Tim’s advice and vote for Corbyn.
This is well worth watching. Of particular historical interest is that around 50 seconds in, Max Mosley appears and is seen to lay into an anti-fascist protester, and then seemingly hits a policeman.
By now it could not be clearer. Rather than usher in a more progressive Britain, freed from the shackles of that nasty, undemocratic EU in Brussels, Brexit has merely served to give licence to racism and unleashed precisely the carnival of reaction that many feared and warned that it would.
This story carried in The Independent makes sober reading. It reveals a spike in racially and religiously motivated hate crimes in the wake of the EU referendum, involving
Gangs prowling the streets demanding passers-by prove they can speak English
Swastikas in Armagh, Sheffield, Plymouth, Leicester, London and Glasgow.
Assaults, arson attacks and dog excrement being thrown at doors or shoved through letter boxes.
Toddlers being racially abused alongside their mothers, with children involved as either victims or perpetrators in 14 per cent of incidents.
A man in Glasgow ripping off a girl’s headscarf and telling her “Trash like you better start obeying the white man.”
Comparisons with 1930s Nazi Germany and a crowd striding through a London street chanting: “First we’ll get the Poles out, then the gays!”
With the collapse of the centre ground as a consequence of the economic crisis and austerity, it is the far right rather than the left that is winning the battle of ideas, emphatically illustrated by Brexit – a political campaign driven by the ugly politics of anti immigration and underpinned by xenophobia, racism, and the reaffirmation of a white supremacist British identity in reaction to multiculturalism.
Those on the left who campaigned for and supported Brexit did so having imbibed and surrendered to the far right on the issue of immigration and the free movement of labour, which is a symptom of the free movement of capital and the gross inequality between states that is a by-product of neoliberalism.
The worse illiterate is the political illiterate, Brecht reminds us, and this political illiteracy has never been more in evidence than when it comes to the pro-Brexit left. Providing progressive and left cover for white supremacy counts as many things, but socialism is most assuredly not one of them.
British society does not and never has had a problem with immigration. Instead it has had a longstanding problem with the maldistribution of wealth and resources, and a cultural problem with racism, reflective of the apotheosis of its colonial past and the cultural values incubated thereby.
Rather than a victory for the left, Brexit has revealed the willingness of its left-supporting adherents to throw migrants and minorities under the bus in order to appease the most base, tribal, and regressive instincts of a working class which in large swathes of the country has been persuaded that migrants and minorities rather than Thatcherism and the inequality it has entrenched is responsible for their plight.
After The Big Vote
Intellectual Begins To Decompose
You sit minding that cup
as if it contained, post-Brexit,
the last frothy coffee in all of Brighton.
You’ve the look of
a pretend Elvis Costello,
or the rejected fourth member
of Bananarama.
Your claim to notoriety
that one of the Sex Pistols
once failed to cross the road
to avoid you. Your opinions
what it said in all
yesterday’s editorials.
Your new secret hate
the ghastly Adidas tracksuits of Gateshead,
the sweatpants of Merthyr Tydfil,
for daring to go against your wishes.
Your sneer is a threatened Doberman
with the charming personality removed.
Scientists are currently trying
to bottle your lime-green bile
and make it available on the NHS
as a homeopathic remedy for psychotic
former Guardian columnists.
Your words are the gusts that come out
immediately before
a terrible bowel movement.
Even in the face of bitten
finger nails, the broken hinge
on the upstairs window, and my own
sack load of mistakes,
