Struggling Against Surveillance
& Blacklisting
FROM about 2005, the Bury Unite Commercial Branch became involved in a
dispute with Bury Council when the T&G shop-steward at Bradley Fold Waste
Disposal Depot, Joe Cleary, was sacked on the pretext of accepting a bribe for
the removal of some trade waste: Bury
Council at that time, used a security officer to use a hand-held cam-corder to
film a working team of Bury bin-men under the RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act). The bribe which the sacked
bin-men team were alleged to have accepted from an Asian shopkeeper was a
bottle of Strawberry Volvic.
In the end Bury MBC
spent a large sum on legal costs fighting to dismiss the men and finally
ended-up settling by paying a five-figure sum to Mr. Cleary. The Bury branch of what is now Unite backed
Joe Cleary throughout his fight with the Council, as did the Unite union officer
Kathy Rutherford.
I well remember
talking to Kevin Coyne, the then North West regional officer of what is now
Unite, and he encouraged me to continue our branch's struggle against
surveillance. He did say something of
interest at the time when I told him that Bury Council was under Conservative
control, he said 'Oh, that's good for
us!' as it doesn't reflect badly on the Labour Party.
Does party politics
influence trade union activism at the top?
Are full time trade union functionaries less likely to oppose if a local
Council is ruled by a Labour majority?
Whatever the case this
predilection for party politics didn't impact upon the moral integrity and
ethics of the Bury Unite Branch. After a
militant shop steward such as Joe Cleary was dismissed using the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act, the Bury Unite branch put in a series of Freedom of
Information requests to Bury MBC and critical reports followed in the Bury
Times written by the journalist Dave Thomson, and another report in the
Mail
on Sunday. Because of all the
bad publicity arising from the Joe Cleary case it appears that Bury MBC is no
longer using this type of crude covert surveillance.
Because of this
traumatic history of involvement in covert surveillance with Bury MBC, Bury
Unite Commercial Branch has since taken to supporting the Manchester
electricians in their own campaign against the covert surveillance with regard
to the blacklist in the British building trade. Bury Unite branch has done this through its
affiliation to Tameside Trade Union Council.
Our latest involvement as a branch has been through the secretary's
joint-authorship of the book 'Boys on the Blacklist', and now the motion on ethical procurement
presented to the North West Local Authority Regional Industrial Sector
Committee (Risc) on the 5th,
March 2015.
Unfortunately, for
some reason that has yet to be fully explained, the North West Local Authority Risc,
under the distinguished chairmanship of Sidney Graves and Deputy Chair Nick
Parnell, failed to be able to move the motion.
An investigation into what happened has now been set-up by the North
West Finance & General Purpose Committee.
It seems that in the
real world that ethics and politics are not very comfortable companions.
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