This paper was presented by Amicus member David Beaumont to the ‘Global Trade Unions” conference organised by
Cornell University in New York in February 2006
ICTs, Union Transparency, Activism and Bargaining Power: Lessons from the Frontline
David Beaumont
Paper for panel on
Global Unionism in the ‘Information Age’: Information Communication Technologies and Effective Bargaining
(Panel Chairs: John Hogan and Peter Nolan)
International Conference on Global Companies - Global Unions, Global Research - Global Campaigns
New York, New York, February 2006
1 Introduction
In this paper I want to share some of my experiences as a trade union activist from the UK. I have for a number of years used the internet and web publishing to broadcast the activities of my trade union and the behaviour of the leaderships. In this task I have sought to impose transparency on the key post-holders at the centre of the union and thereby subject them to greater accountability. The interventions that I have worked upon, in particular www.rogerlyons.com, www.msfweb.com and www.amicus.cc, have generated substantial criticism from the leaders of my union and even led to a failed attempt to expel me. However, as I hope to demonstrate below, cyber activism does have a very real effect on the governance of my union, while more broadly the academic attention generated as a result of my work indicates that the internet and world wide web offer a potential new lease of life for the realisation of union democracy (Ainsworth, Hardy and Harley,2005; Badigannavar, 2002; Carter and Cooper, 2002; Diamond and Freeman, 2002; Hogan and Greene, 2000 and 2002). It is only through the broadening of participation that unions, including my own, can mobilise members behind the task of enforcing the will and interests of workers, and to become more effective at bargaining within the work and society.
2 Rogerlyons.com and Amicus.cc
Firstly then the web sites. I set up and edit the website www.amicus.cc and before that www.msfweb.com (LYONSweb) and www.rogerlyons.com. Amicus.cc is easily the most popular independent website about the UK’s second biggest union (claimed 1.3 million members). The site attracts 1,000 to 2,000 visitors a week, depending on current material, with a peak of 825 unique page views in one day (10th December 2003). Our stats show the site is very popular with union employees as well as staff from other major UK unions especially TGWU and GMB. We also get many visits from the rest of the world. Amicus.cc’s byline is ‘What’s really going on in our union’; it aims to publish anti-corruption information, to improve the democracy in the union and to make it accountable to members. Amicus.cc has been indirectly responsible for the removal of the General Secretary Roger Lyons and directly responsible for the removal of the Head of Finance (a good thing) and the suspension of the Head of Purchasing along with the chair and the editor of the leading Left grouping in the union (not a good thing but the union’s retaliation).
The predecessor site rogerlyons.com was the first of its kind, an independent anti-corruption or ‘dissident’ union website. Rogerlyons.com campaigned to reveal and remove corruption in the union and helped to get motions passed by lay members at the union’s conference, regional councils and branch meetings.
The sites are run by me with regular assistance from active members on the Left of amicus. For my pains I have been expelled from the union and re-instated, and recently the union began (but has now withdrawn) trade mark litigation against me. I am also an active member of my union, chair of my local branch and ex-treasurer of the union’s London region and have been elected delegate to each of the union’s annual conferences except where I was suspended or expelled. I am currently a delegate to the 2007 policy conference.
3 Format and Theme
This document consists of a personal history of my activities in my trade union and the anti-corruption or ‘dissident’ websites I have made - rogerlyons.com, lyonsweb/MSFweb and the current site, www.amicus.cc .
That is the structure but I hope it will, along the way, illustrate an underlying theme of mine - that the state of many unions in the UK is at the moment fundamentally (but not necessarily obviously) perverted and corrupt.
That there have been examples of actual monetary corruption in my union is without doubt, I have quoted the union’s own auditors report that Nelson Mendes, the head of finance of the MSF union (predecessor to Amicus) was stealing tens of thousands of pounds from us in bogus expense claims.
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/cofullstory.html
There is widespread evidence of other monetary corruption by others, sadly not enough to defend me against an individual defamation case should I mention them. There is public domain evidence of ballot rigging http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,722811,00.html
This sort of corruption though is just the manifestation of a more serious sickness. Modern unions, or at least my union Amicus and its predecessors (MSF/AEEU/GPMU/UNIFI/TASS/ASTMS) are perverted from their correct role, namely to advance the interests of their members. You can see this in many ways: For example in our unions last published accounts, we spent almost as much money on our General Secretary’s housing allowance (£44,572 or $80,000 ) as the total amount we spent on disputes for that year (£48,000). http://www.certoffice.org/links/pdf/772T_2004.pdf
I should add the housing allowance is paid in addition to the General Secretary’s £117,411 ($208,000) salary (including car and pension payments). We have 1.3 million members, we may be good at negotiating without resort to strike action but even so you’d think a union would spend a bit more than $0.00006 per member on disputes benefits in a year, especially when they’re spending nearly $300,000 on just one member, the General Secretary.
Our previous General Secretary once famously gave himself a pay rise where the increase was actually more than an average member’s entire salary. A plot of General Secretary Lyons’ pay against the union membership figures for the period illustrates this point well.
There are other manifestations of the perversion. Easily the most common communication our members receive from the union actually comes from the commercial companies to whom we have sold our mailing lists – brochures offering discounts on holidays, cheap loans, car breakdown services, lotteries, or – ones which I seem to get a lot of – life insurance and funeral plans.
To me the worst aspect of the sad state of the union is the reckless disregard for, and often attempted stifling of the union’s democratic structure. Branch funds have been centralised (i.e. taken away). Union paid officers do not attend or encourage branch meetings any more.
Union conferences, which once used to be the ‘supreme governing body’ of our union, are reduced in duration, made biennial, and delegate numbers cut. They have been officially converted to the ‘supreme policy making body’ of the union and even then the Executive refuses to implement their policies and the rule changes it doesn’t like (lately ‘election of full time officials’
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#ftoelection ).
The Executive, supposedly democratic, is actually an outcome of armchair ballots of uninformed members reading near identical statements, with a turnout of, at best, 15%. At their latest meeting (February) the Executive are discussing their own motion to extend their terms of office from 3 to 5 years without a bothersome election. Executive members are now forbidden to report back to their own sectors on how they voted at meetings.
It often seems that the union is run for the benefit of its senior paid officials. Partly as a reaction to members campaigning for the election of all officials, the officers have attempted to set up a political grouping (ATU Network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATU_Network ) to organise the active members. This is on top of the union’s press releases and magazines promoting the senior officials’ views to members on such things as ‘how we need a new building program for nuclear power stations’. When some officials dissent, the corporate structure of the union is deployed against them. Their emails are bugged http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#indust
and three of them including the Head of Purchasing have been suspended
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/amicusthree1.pdf
for allegedly leaking documents to me
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#day17
I have also recently seen this in another union where I am assisting members of their executive to submit a complaint to the trade Union Certification Officer. In this case the union’s employees, assisted by the General Secretary, have refused to disclose documents to the union’s executive on grounds of commercial confidentiality. The executive is meant to be the governing body!
When things are this bad, merging with other unions (Amicus intends to become, by merger, the biggest union in the UK with 2.6 million members next year) is unlikely to be a solution. Major changes in attitude, constitution and expenditure patterns are required. Amicus could be so much better if it concentrated on organising members and encouraging them to participate in the union instead of ‘servicing’ them.
4 In the Union
After I graduated in sociology, the UK economic recession that characterised Margaret Thatcher’s premiership had seriously reduced the demand for labour. Consequently I retrained in Information Technology and started as a software programmer, where I first joined a ‘white collar’ union, ASTMS, led by a charismatic and I later learned corrupt leader, Clive Jenkins. At about this time I also left the Labour party, over their leader Neil Kinnocks refusal to support a nurses’ strike. If the leader of the Labour party wouldn’t support nurses then what group of workers would he support? I never re-joined any political party, channelling my limited political activity into my trade union instead. Not however before leaving ASTMS in disgust at their lack of organised support for the National Union of Miners strike. A communist friend recommended the union TASS and I joined them instead. Shortly afterwards TASS and ASTMS merged, to form MSF (Manufacturing Science Finance). For me this was an early lesson in the drawbacks of union amalgamations. My current union, Amicus, is an amalgamation of MSF, AEEU an engineering union, GPMU a print union and UNIFI a banking union. It is due next year to merge again with the GMB general unions and TGWU transport union, to become easily the biggest union in the UK with 2.6 million members, many actually real (MSF was famous for massively overstating its membership figures).
My first post in the lay structure of MSF was as secretary of my local branch. I had been receiving the odd hand posted invitation from them for a while, often they omitted the time of the meeting but I think this one had it on and looked particularly desperate. It was. On turning up I was immediately pressed to become secretary of the branch. Apparently this was the first quorate meeting for some time, and for some time after. Most of my duties involved buying stamps and envelopes and sending out mailings and invitations to 500 or so members. In the days before self adhesive stamps there were tricks and tips to this job – it was impossible to lick 500 stamps so I developed the sock method, wiping stamps over a wetted sock. At the time, and especially looking back, it is amazing how incompetent and unorganised the union was when it came to the lay structure. Our branch attendance was poor, not least because many of the addresses I was posting invitations to were hundreds of miles from our location. We had members in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall. The union had allocated them to our local branch because the head office of their employer was local to us! I never established whether this practice was due to incompetence or was a deliberate design to strangle the lay structure. At the least it was gross recklessness. We got the branch active again thanks to the attendance of a fulltime employee of the union at our meetings. However he eventually retired and it then became painfully apparent that he was doing it voluntarily - we have never seen a union employee since. I’m sad to say the current local branch structure of Amicus is much the same, after a brief revival and improvement in the membership department’s record keeping, we are now being financially strangled, almost all branch funds having been appropriated to the centre. I don’t know if people are aware how centralised unions are in the UK are or indeed if this is only the case in the unions I’ve been in. It seems the full time senior union officials regard local democracy and vitality as a danger at worst and an irritation at best, they certainly make every effort to bury it. They seem to think the union is for their benefit and members are just a nuisance.
Another example of how badly branches were served is Tushar. Tushar turned up at our poorly attended MSF branch meeting because his employer was attempting to re-locate him abroad. He thought that was a breach of his employment contract. Our branch is not equipped to provide that advice, we can only offer our own experience, and encouragement. However at that time, unlike now, our union paid official would attend our branch meetings. Also he was a very respected and experienced official; I would say the best I have come across. His advice though was that Tushar was unlikely to win at an Employment Tribunal.
Tushar sought his own legal advice, which came in the form of a free legal advice line through his credit card supplier. That advice said he had a good case, so we at the branch tried to get the union to take up his case.
Despite our best efforts and despite having a good officer, the legal department in the union failed miserably to respond in any positive way. Tushar eventually paid for his own legal advice and subsequently won his case. Incredibly, despite this awful treatment he is now an active member of our branch, but there have been many people who turned up with similar problems who we never see again and I’m not surprised. The union legal department however is not at all reticent or under funded to sue me and my website for ‘trademark infringement’.
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#tma
Anyway I persevered with my branch and attended the monthly London Regional Council meetings in MSF, predecessor to Amicus. These were ½ day meetings of lay members who would run training programs, construct policy and lobby the National Executive. They were well attended and lively, with the Right wing (New Labour and Liberal Party members) in a distinct but active minority for most of the period.
Unfortunately it seemed to be a matter of principle for the Right wing National Executive, some of whose lay members were almost earning a living just on their loss of earnings expense claims
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/rogerlyons/necexpenses.htm (excludes accommodation, travel, entertaining and sustenance),
to automatically reject any motion put to them by London region. I eventually came to be elected treasurer of London Region, in charge of a substantial account of between £100,000 and £200,000.
Matters between the National Executive, controlled and led by General Secretary Roger Lyons, and London Regional Council came to a head in 1999 over a political issue. Ken Livingston was running for the newly created job of Mayor of London. He had previously been a Left wing and very popular head of the Greater London Council, so he should have been the natural choice of the Labour Party for mayor. However Tony Blair had other ideas and began to machinate to ensure that Ken wouldn’t receive the Labour Party’s nomination. This required the dis-enfranchising of all the MSF members in London because they would almost all have voted for him in any ballot. Tony Blair achieved this by the clever device of retrospectively changing the due date for our region’s subscriptions to the Labour party so that it fell before the date that we had actually paid it that year. The Labour Party then declared that all our members were ineligible to take part in the internal Labour party nomination election! Tony Blair was ably assisted in this by the General Secretary at the time, Roger Lyons. Members of the Regional Council, including an ex-General Secretary of the Labour Party Jim Mortimer, began a private legal action to challenge this ballot fixing.
Roger Lyons response was to suspend the three key officers of London Region, the president, the secretary and the treasurer, me, from our posts. When our highly effective but suspended president topped the poll to become a member of the National Executive, Roger Lyons extended our suspensions to cover all posts in order to stop her taking her seat.
5 Website Phase 1 – ‘Newspaper clippings’
My suspension freed up some of my time, and also opened my eyes even more to the corrupt practices in the union. Also about this time, in May 2000, General Secretary Lyons got into trouble in the press. Marcia Solomon, the secretary to the Head of Finance of the union, had blown the whistle on her boss’s and on Lyons’ expense claims. Lyons was claiming expenses worth 20% of his salary
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4037052,00.html
, from a 20p bun http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4021210,00.html
, his briefcase, his home radio through to sustenance claims when he met the Prime Minister Tony Blair. There were also much more serious allegations of secret bank accounts in the name of non existent branches, which he always denied and for which the claimed evidence was eventually lost. Marcia gave the claimed evidence to an Assistant General Secretary, Chowcat who told the president. Marcia was then sacked and most of the information came out at her Employment Tribunal. However the claimed evidence on Lyons got lost in the post after being sent by Marcia to Chowcat. Chowcat left the union with a massive payoff of nearly £1/2 million. ($900,000). http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/jimchow.html
I won’t go into more detail about that here but I do recommend you to read this excellent summary press article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4037052,00.html
I can say that Lyons managed to survive but the Head of Finance left the union and it was established by the auditors that he been stealing tens of thousands of pounds from the union in false expense claims - travel and sustenance for meetings that never happened.
There were many and ongoing press articles about all this, many were available on the internet and I began to collate them, and email the links to people. My aim was to ensure they were made available to as many union members as possible, so they could see what was going on in the union. Soon I realised it would be better to collect them in one place and point members at them. I put them on the internet, this page
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/rogerlyons/msfpress.html
is probably the closest to the very first version of what was to become RogerLyons.com
I had already set up a website for other things, to sell my home (a boat). So I was aware how useful sites were to provide detailed information which people could browse at leisure, once they knew the site name. Choosing the name was remarkably easy in those days. I checked to see if RogerLyons.com was available and it was, so I registered it. Nowadays that is much more difficult; I discovered recently that Georgina Hirsch, the union’s senior legal advisor, a powerful but hardly famous figure, has arranged for the union to reserve:
georginahirsch.co.uk
georginahirsch.com
georginahirsch.net
georginahirsch.org
georginahirsch.org.uk
georginahirsch.me.uk
georginhirsch.info
(http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#hirsch)
6 Website Phase 2 ‘Blog’
The website grew as more and more press articles appeared, and as I added humorous touches, for example the drawing of Lyons as Homer Simpson based on his 20p bun purchase. The story switched from the corruption scandal to the amount of money Lyons spent trying to cover it up. Our estimates at the time were £700,000 ($1.2million) in legal fees and payments that had to be made to Marcia to settle her Employment Tribunal case. We only found out much later that the Assistant General Secretary Chowcat alone received £1/2 million.
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/jimchow.html
A lot of work went on behind the scenes on rogerlyons.com. Some was directly for the site but a lot was incidental but made excellent site material. The suspended secretary of London Region, the late Hugh MacGrillen, who used to run the only Left magazine in the union the ‘Campaign for a Democratic Union’, put a lot of work into this piece
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/rogerlyons/lyons.html with some help from Katie Hanson. It constitutes the definitive case against Lyons, what we knew of it. Hugh also wrote up humorous accounts of Marcia’s Employment tribunal case, primarily for email distribution, but they made excellent copy for the website too (http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/rogerlyons/marcia.htm)
For me the website represented the potential for something different to Hugh’s magazine. His magazine was almost entirely for the union’s conference; it was only produced for each day of conference and was designed to promote the Left motions to the conference delegates. My website initially had just as limited an audience, in fact more so. Hugh described it as ‘for the cognoscenti’. However it had the potential to a) reach many more members and b) serve as a permanent library of the corruption in the union which members could refer to and use to raise questions in the democratic structures.
The active life time of rogerlyons.com was actually quite short. It was an excellent vehicle for publicising the scandals of the General Secretary and apparently was very popular with ordinary union employees, who judging by the ones I talked to seemed to despise their boss with a vehemence that I have never seen before in any company or corporation. However the political stories and scandals needed their own site, and one day I was leaked a document which showed that the General Secretary had arranged for his name to be on every page of the new union website, ‘MSFweb’. http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/lyonssays.html
Lyons was notorious for having his picture on every other page of the union’s magazine, like some Third World president, so this was definitely in character. I looked at the HTML code behind the site and quickly realised that I could easily make a spoof of it. This became ‘LYONSweb, the website for lavish spending General Secretaries’. It changed names in time with the union to become ‘amicus.cc, what’s really going on in our union’ and lately, due to legal action by the union,
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#derekemail
‘amicus.cc, this is not the site of the trade union amicus’.
One significant coup for rogerlyons.com was the leaking to me of the email address to mail every employee of the union. This address was used by the union to broadcast internal messages to all its members. Despite being a technological ‘white collar’ union, MSF was notorious for its useless IT infrastructure. I was pleasantly astonished to discover that my carefully written spoof memo http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/rogerlyons/rogermemo.htm emailed to this address did indeed reach every employee.
By this time more than half the Regional Councils had passed motions for Lyons to either resign or face a new, independent inquiry. The Executive Council refused to print these motions in their minutes, let alone discuss them. Unsurprisingly the union’s magazine did not cover the matter at all. www.rogerlyons.com made available to the ordinary member documents they would otherwise never see.
The union’s annual conference, usually at the seaside, represented the pinnacle of democracy in the union. The Right undermined it as much as they could, aided by the weakened branch structure in the union. Their delegates would appear from branches that didn’t seem to exist or at least probably never met. Some Right wing delegates would spend a lot of time out of the hall, appearing only for crucial votes and disappearing en masse early on the final day. Some didn’t even turn up on the first day. Nonetheless it was a superb chance to discuss issues with fellow members. Towards the end of MSF I believe the conference was becoming a real problem for the leadership. The response from the centre was to scale back conference – cut the number of days and cut the number of delegates. And cut member expenses. MSF conference at the time was the ‘supreme governing body of the union’, something we would remind delegates of often, e.g. when the General Secretary would wheel out lawyers’ advice on stage to argue our suspensions could not be lifted. In the new merged union Amicus, the leadership were wise to this, conference is now only ‘the supreme policy making body’. Whereas in MSF the powerful post of Chair was elected by conference, with the Right and Left usually alternating, in Amicus the chair is now appointed by the National Executive.
Electronic voting has been introduced in such a way as to remove the atmosphere that existed before. As always with such things you never know if it was deliberate or just thoughtless. The annoying thing is that it could have been done differently. No longer are there calls for ‘tellers’ when a particularly biased Chair has wrongly assessed the vote. While that’s mostly a good thing and something we would see as a benefit of electronic voting, there are a couple of other things that would have been optional but have been discarded: Firstly before electronic voting, delegates wishing to speak would stand up, wave their arms or papers, even shout if the Chair was ignoring them. Therefore any bias by the Chair in failing to call certain speakers was evident. With electronic voting, would-be speakers press a button and their name, branch and God knows what other information about them appears exclusively on the Chairs computer screen. It is not displayed to the other delegates. Secondly when the vote is calculated only the bald percentage and final total is given. Whereas before you could see who had their arm up and which sections or regions voted which way, now it is all secret (except to the union leadership, probably). In Amicus no attempt or assurances were given about the electronic ballot system integrity, security and audit processes. No background information at all was provided, just a sheet telling you how to press a button.
The campaign against Lyons and his expense claims, and against our suspensions, came to a head at conference. By this time Lyons had suspended the three replacement lay officers we had elected in London region. Four of us went to conference despite being banned as delegates. We were refused entry even as visitors, with the union resorting on the first day to withdrawing all visitors tickets and replacing all but ours with ones in a new colour. The first item at conference then was a debate on whether conference, as the supreme governing body, would allow us in. We won the vote and we duly filed in to take our visitors seats. We also got an important motion through forbidding secret payoffs to ex-officials, like the £1/2 million to Chowcat. The leadership put a lot of effort into ruling out motions critical of the General Secretary. These motions were removed by the Right wing controlled standing orders committee. Conference repeatedly overruled the standing orders committee, but eventually the Right wing chair made a ruling against us, which required a 2/3rd majority to overturn. You cannot overestimate how much effort and attention the paid machinery of the union puts into conference arrangements, it is a scary time for them.
For conference I produced a T shirt with the Lyons/Homer caricature and web address on the front and a selection of his expense claims on the back, with dates and amounts, in the manner of a rock band’s tour dates. Several delegates managed to get to speak on the rostrum wearing these. Delegates were treated to the cartoon image while members of the executive, sitting behind the speaker, could read off the list of Lyons’ expenses.
Fortunately MSF provided good internet café facilities at conference, which proved an excellent way to spread knowledge of the site’s existence. Lyons obviously realised this, and one day in 2001, after a stand up row I had with Lyons in the café, I found the site had been banned. A big mistake. I drove home and produced a paper copy of the site which I handed out to delegates next morning, with the headline ‘Censored’.
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/censored1.html It increased the profile of the site no end. It also made me realise and appreciate how much extra work is involved in producing a paper version, which I never did again. The union re-instated the site the next day after protests and a Guardian newspaper article.
“Strange cyber goings-on at the Manufacturing, Science and Finance union's annual conference. Organisers took fright when they discovered members were using the conference's internet cafe to look up a website set up by MSF rebels which details the perceived failings of the union boss Roger Lyons - including the infamous 25p expense claim Lyons submitted on a union credit card for the purchase of a bun.
Censorship software was installed to prevent delegates from accessing the site - www.rogerlyons.com. Officials patrolled the cafe to stop delegates subverting the software, proving that unions like the MSF have shed their old image and embraced the internet. “
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4203174,00.html – (bottom)
Now however the current General Secretary of amicus has quietly banned the site at union conference again, as well as reducing the café from 10 screens to 4 and removing all chairs.
The reaction of General Secretary Roger Lyons to this website in his name was interesting. He regarded me as an anarchist (which I’m certainly not). His main concern seemed to be that he could not negotiate with me, and also I think he worried that the site’s readership might just keep growing. On the negotiation aspect, I recall being told by a leading communist member that Lyons had approached him to do a deal over the expulsions issue and over his expense claims. The communist’s robust response to Lyons was ‘lift the suspensions, then we can talk’. Nowhere near what Lyons wanted but he knew he could never even approach me for such a deal – a) I didn’t have that power over any group of members and b) I would just have told him to shove it. Actually I would have published his conversation and he knew it, just as I did my row with him in the conference internet café.
This then is what I call the ‘blog’ phase, although the term wasn’t known to me at the time. The website was very much a diary of events in the union, many of them personal to me, initially only because I was part of the London Regional Council suspended executive, and later because I was actually expelled for authoring the site. Most articles though were on matters of national interest in the union, with the General Secretary providing plenty of material. Almost all stories were from my own knowledge or from people I actually knew and met regularly. I occasionally added international stories, particularly on Iraq and the ‘war on terror’. As an aside on this I found it very difficult to pin down Left news sources, so once I had collated a few I set up a dedicated page of links to them called ‘Indy News’ http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/indynews.html . I find it invaluable and I haven’t yet seen a suitable replacement for it anywhere on the web.
I included a feed from ‘Labourstart’, an excellent system but not without its teething troubles. Because of the way the feed was provided by Labourstart, if their site was down my site would just display the banner then hang. This did occur at some crucial times, e.g. once or twice after I had just published some particularly savage story about General Secretary Lyons, or just prior to the union’s annual conference. After some fruitless forensic investigation I adopted the simple expedient of providing a link from the banner to a copy of the site without the Labourstart feed. Therefore visitors faced with just a banner and a hung page could then click on the banner and reach the full site. I needed an alternative name to ‘index.html’ for this page and I settled on ‘fuckyoulabourstart.html’
7 Website Phase 3 ‘Wiki’
To an extent the website is still in the blog phase since I have rarely managed to persuade guest writers to contribute. However a new phase was beginning. The site had always been widely read by union staff, which is to be expected as they have the most extensive interest in the subject as well as background knowledge. As the internet grew many more active members also became regular visitors. I had had the odd contribution from members, most notable being the hilarious ‘Lyons in Wakefield’ article and accompanying photo of Lyons next to one of my T Shirts, written by Ann Morgan
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/rogerlyons/lyonsinwakefield.htm . This was written directly in response to my story
“Roger Lyons is coming to the Yorkshire and Humberside regional meeting on Saturday 18 November at 10:30 am. in Wakefield Town Hall opposite the Prison. The meeting is open all MSF members. Ask him to autograph your expense claim.”
The story contained a picture of Lyons, thus making him readily identifiable, and contained a link to Wakefield Town Hall, which if clicked brought up a detailed Ordinance Survey map, so that all those who might wish to go to the meeting could find the venue more easily.
The site was reaching many more people, averaging around 2,000 unique visits a week. Strangers were beginning to send me information for the site. It’s not accurate to describe this phase as a wikipedia phase, since clearly union members are not submitting and editing articles. Such a phase will not in my view possible due to the strict defamation laws in the UK and the unions patent willingness nay appetite to use them. Members have asked me to set up a forum before, but I have seen what happened to the fire-fighters and ASLEF? ones. What I can do though is to receive information, check it, remove defamatory material, and write it up as concisely and humorously as I can.
The website has always intended to be satirical, humorous, scandalous even. I take pride in it being described as a cross between Private Eye (the satirical magazine in the UK) and a Left wing version of he Daily Mail (a tabloid middle market UK newspaper). I have never wanted it to be stuffy like the Guardian newspaper can be. It is meant to be entertaining and to cover complex things simply or not at all. For example the union has recently passed a bizarre motion which retrospectively authorises all previous acts by the General Secretary or his nominees, where they instruct the trustees. I don’t believe the National Executive understood it and we on the Left don’t agree as to what effect it has. I wanted to publicise it but found myself unable to provide a short or simple explanation of it. It will remain on file until the union deploy it and I can expose what trickery they were up to concisely.
There is one thing the website has to be above all others, and that is accurate. The site would rapidly lose viewers if they did not believe the articles. For this reason I attach as much supporting material as I can, hyperlinks of course are ideal for this. If the viewer is likely to question something, rather than go into detail there and then I provide a link to the evidence or a fuller explanation. Of course the other big driver for accuracy is the ever present possibility of a defamation action. Having undertaken (and won) such an action myself recently I am very aware of how badly stacked the odds are against the defendant. And of how large the legal costs can be, with even a straight forward defamation case running up £1/4 million in costs in the UK. The downside of this is that the site cannot always say what it thinks or even knows, and also tends to over rely on links to third parties (although that is no protection of itself).
Easily the biggest example of the Wiki phase is the material sent to me about Assistant General Secretary Les Bayliss, what I have unoriginally called ‘Baylissgate’. I am restricted by defamation law in what I can say about Les Bayliss so I refer you to the source material for you to make up your own mind. It is however a matter of record that:
As head of finance he managed the distribution of £1/4 million a year of the union funds to just 3 charities.
His friend, ex employer and now convicted fraudster Steve Sampson was requesting and receiving a 10% ‘kick back’ from one of those charities.
Bayliss knew that his friend was demanding this ‘finders fee’.
Bayliss has now been relieved of his position as Head of Finance.
Bayliss is the founder of the Right wing political grouping in the union , ‘ATU Network’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATU_Network
The current General Secretary of the union, Derek Simpson, has used the leaking of the material as an excuse to try to purge three leading Left officials from the union. Currently Cathie Willis, head of purchasing, Jimmy Warne chair of the Left ‘Gazette’ group http://www.amicusunitygazette.org/ and Des Heemskerk editor of the Gazette group are all suspended from their union jobs. Simpson is in the week of this conference attempting to divide the Left gazette group up to provide a moderate grass roots organisation for the forthcoming Executive elections.
While removal of Bayliss is not the biggest scalp I’ve cut in the union (compared to my legal case against General Secretary Lyons which forced him to step down) it is the only one done entirely through the website and based on information provided entirely by other union members.
The Baylissgate material, and indeed the union bugging its employees emails
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#indust , are I would say of sufficient interest to run in our national newspapers. I managed to get a short piece in the Times but drew a blank with all my other newspaper contacts. The Guardian had been very helpful with rogerlyons.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/diary/story/0,3604,368056,00.html , once offering one of my custom T- shirts as a prize. They told me that there is now a ‘cartel’ of union press officers operating and if journalists publish stories they withhold important union stories from them. This fits with other information I had heard about our union’s press officer’s membership of another close grouping. This professional mechanism to repress information is effective to an extent, it doesn’t prevent the information becoming known, but it makes that less likely. Provided the mechanism operates reasonably quietly it can remain effective. However it will backfire if they push it to far and if the mechanism become apparent. Personally I think they are in a losing battle since there are so many more sources of information available nowadays. When members have to resort to these sources to find out what’s really going on these sources will gain reputation exponentially.
8 Website – Future
The prize has I suppose always been the union elections. One diversion I haven’t mentioned so far is another website of mine, twojobsjackson.com http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/twojobsjackson/index.html, launched back in 2002 . This site was aimed entirely at assisting Derek Simpson, our current General Secretary, to get elected. I didn’t devote a huge amount of time to it, mostly because very few of us on the Left thought Simpson could win, and also because of concerns at the time about libel proceedings by Sir Ken Jackson, the then General Secretary of the AEEU union. Simpson did win, by an extremely small margin of 400 votes, after some ballot papers were found ‘misplaced’ under a pile for Jackson. I documented the dirty election here
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/aeeuelection.html including claims of involvement by NATO and the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU)
http://www.labournet.net/ukunion/0207/pcs2.html and actual attempts by Jackson’s staff to rig the nominations http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4399477,00.html
My tactic, derived from the early days of rogerlyons.com, was to collate newspaper articles for members to read. It had some impact in the campaign I’m sure. It certainly allowed Simpson’s supporters to reference the national newspaper material and point members at it.
At this time I was on friendly terms with Simpson, and for his part he was on the Left. He sent me dozens of emails including a request for me to assist with his website:
'I could do with someone giving our site the overhaul it needs..'.
Fearing he would be disciplined for my help I wrote back to him:
‘If Jackson is anything like Lyons it will be best for you to keep some
distance from me and TJJ.com’
Three years later I have become Simpson’s most hated member. When he began legal proceeding for trade mark infringement against me and amicus.cc, backed by a baying executive, I published his supportive emails:
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/index.html#dscom
In an election all amicus.cc can do is publish information that members would not otherwise discover. In all elections so far the effect of this has been limited by the relatively small readership of the site. However the site statistics shows this is changing rapidly:
(unique visits per year - Nedstat)
But even with a bigger circulation, and on the assumption that members are swayed by the information, to change the union I am still relying on the Left to choose the Right candidates and then to hold them accountable. This weakness has been revealed by the election of Derek Simpson, who no longer feels himself accountable to the Left who campaigned for him. Sadly it also applies to many of the Left Executive candidates or at least those that managed to get past all the gerrymandering that officials arranged in that election
http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/indexsep04.html#gerry .
When I’ve voted in the elections for the national executive I’ve found them barely describable as democratic. The process involves 1.3 million members receiving in the post a 20 page document with a 1 page statement per candidate. Every candidate’s statement is different, but unless you are expert in reading the code phrases (e.g. ‘anti extremist’ or ‘against factions’ normally means Right wing) you would be hard pressed to separate them. Occasionally there may be specific separating issues like ‘election of full time officials’ but even with that most members wouldn’t know the arguments, couldn’t receive them from a one page statement and of course the final sting is that the candidate, once elected, has have dropped that policy.
It’s not surprising that turnout in these elections is so low, typically around 10-15%.
In theory the National Executive do control the union. Actually in practice the first thing General Secretary Simpson did was to relieve them of this power between meetings, and reduce the meetings to a day every two months.
Anyway the fear for the union leadership that they may be unseated by members receiving information outside the leaderships control is certainly present. For my part the battle has moved somewhat to the Left activists in the union, to make them aware what their selected candidates are doing and to encourage them to make them accountable. I’m comfortable with this as the web sites have always been grounded in the active Left. For the leadership’s part, their fear has prompted them to concentrate their efforts amongst the same activists.
Thus it was that at a national meeting of the Left last year I was dumbfounded to find some ‘Left’ activists from the North West region handing out a 4 page rant against me and against amicus.cc http://www.btinternet.com/~davidbeaumont/msf/nwrant.html
Nor was it an incidental handout, it was the only handout of the NW region.
Up until this point Simpson’s henchmen had wisely taken the line of not mentioning the site to limit the readership and hence any damage the site could do. This was also the meeting where activists had the chance to express their anger at Simpson’s move to suspend their chair and editor from their union jobs (to which Simpson had appointed them 3 years earlier). The NW activists were in a tiny minority. At the meeting it seemed just about everyone was aware of the site and almost all seemed to approve of it, with several members thanking me and giving donations. It was sad though for me to see the involvement in the attack of what I had thought an independent and respected trade union publication. In fact ‘Trade Union Review’ had written the attack for North West region. The editor of Trade Union Review, Jimmy Barnes, also single-handedly runs Trade Union CND (not connected to CND) which received sizeable union donations from Les Bayliss when Les was Head of Finance at Amicus. Jimmy maintains there is no connection whatsoever between him receiving monies via Bayliss for his TUCND organisation and his Trade Union Review attack on me for the Baylissgate revelations.
The activist attack was part of a two pronged attack by Simpson, and to me was a much more welcome attack than his other, namely legal action against the site. This legal action was funded by the bottomless supply of my and other members’ subscriptions. Unable to sue me for defamation over the Baylissgate affair, the union had initiated action for ‘trade mark infringement’. It turns out that the union has registered trade marks for almost everything you wouldn’t expect (or want) a trade union to be involved in:
Horological and chronometric instruments; clocks and watches; tie pins; items of jewellery; ornamental pins;Organisation, operation and supervision of loyalty and incentive schemes; credit card services; financial management and financing services. Will writing services; medical assistance; funeral assistance; pens and pencils, diaries, year wall planners, note pads, sticky notes, erasers, tape measures, staplers,rulers, desk tidies, mug mats (plastic and cardboard), folders (cardboard and ring binder), clipboards, Leather goods; wallets; briefcases; umbrellas; imitation leather goods; travelling bags; handbags; rucksacks; purses; Glassware, porcelain and earthenware; mugs, cups and crockery; decanters. Sacks and bags, Tea towels. Clothing; headgear; T-shirts; sweatshirts; ties; scarves; sweaters; caps; outerclothing; footwear. Games and playthings.
http://webdb4.patent.gov.uk/tm/number?detailsrequested=C&trademark=2282301
I believe I am protected against this action by law but as the union have now withdrawn it, my protection has not been tested in court yet.
As part of this attack it was revealed that the union had embarked on a more sinister activity – the union’s Director of Legal Services has, without any prior permission from the executive, appointed ‘enquiry agents’ to look into my private financial records:
I’m disgusted that the union thinks it can behave this way, acting as if it was a state or corporation to investigate its own members. It reveals how far the union has become detached from truly representing its members. I am submitting a complaint through my branch about it.
Such attacks betray the leadership’s fear of losing control of the information path to members. They had always been faced with national newspapers and their powerful proprietors communicating directly with members and waging campaigns at times of elections. However these media were easily distrusted by members on union matters and in any case the more national media involved themselves in detail, the more they would reveal about their proprietors’ interests rather than damage their target. Ironically this also applies to the union – the more they attack the website the more they embarrass and incriminate themselves. Trying to devolve the attacks to a ‘pet’ section of Left activists is an interesting development which I welcome, it will keep me on my toes.
To date the unions have been able to rely on massive votes of support in armchair ballots of members for key issues such as mergers. Typically 90% of members bothering to vote were in favour of any merger recommended to them. It’s already been demonstrated with the defeat of Sir Ken Jackson that these votes can be lost, but generally I don’t doubt that blind support will continue. Particularly when the merger issue is put to members this year. What is definitely at risk of websites like amicus.cc though is the election of Executive members. The leadership have already taken steps to mitigate this. As I write the executive have just passed a rule change to extend their term of office for an additional two years without election. At the activist end there have also been proposals to amend the Left Gazette organisations constitution, including a misguided motion on discipline that would mean that I could be expelled from the Left if my website did not support all the candidates they choose. That will be an interesting test for me, most on the Left would be the first to admit that some of the candidates they chose last time were big mistakes, not least their choice of General Secretary. I think I would have to just publish their records and let any readers decide for themselves.
References
Ainsworth, S., Hardy, S. and Harley, B. (2005), Online Consultation: E-Democracy and E-Resistance in the Case of the Development Gateway, Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1, 120-145 (2005)
Badigannavar, V (2002), Partnership, Organising Campaigns and Unions’ Use of the Internet, Chapter 6 of “FUTURE OF UNIONS IN MODERN BRITAIN” (Mid-Term Report on Leverhulme Trust-Funded Research Programme 2000 – 2002
Carter, B. and Cooper, R., The Organizing Model and the Management of Change. A Comparative Study of Unions in Australia and Britain. Relations Industrielles, Volume 57, numéro 4, Automne / Fall 2002
Diamond. W. and Freeman, R. (2002) 'Will unionism prosper in cyberspace? The promise of the internet for employee organisation', British Journal of industrial Relations, 40: 3, 569-596.
Hogan, J. and Greene, A-M. E-collectivism: On-line action and on-line mobilisation
Paper presented at APROS 2000 (Sydney, December 2000).
Hogan, J. and Greene, A. M. (2002), ‘E-collectivism: On-line action and on-line mobilisation’, in Holmes, L., Hosking, D.M. and Grieco, M. (eds) Organising in the information age: distributed technology, distributed leadership, distributed identity, distributed discourse. Aldershot, Ashgate.