State of the Unions

national | miscellaneous | news report Saturday April 26, 2003 23:55 by dataflow

Whatever happened to the strength in unity motto? By Eamonn McCann The ATGWU and the security workers at Aldergrove airport.

METROPOLITAN Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens may have another Northern Ireland problem on his hands when Gordon McNeill and Madan Gupta hit town tomorrow at the head of a delegation demanding an inquiry into deeply-felt, long-standing grievances.

McNeill and Gupta, shop-stewards with the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union, represented security workers at Aldergrove airport. They and 20 other ATGWU workers were sacked last year for union activity.

They complain that their union, far from leading a fight for their reinstatement, has deserted them. They say that the delegation will sit-in at the ATGWU's Transport House headquarters tomorrow and refuse to move until union boss Bill Morris comes up with answers.

"If the police cart us out, we'll walk back in. We'll keep on until we're either allowed to stay or taken off to jail," says Gordon McNeill. "We believe we owe it to the whole trade union movement to see this thing through. If unions can treat members the way we've been treated, there are many who'll ask what's the point being in a union at all?"

The workers had been employed by International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS), a company set up in 1982 by former members of the Israeli security services which now controls security at 30 airports in Europe and more than 50 in north America.

Early last year, the Aldergrove workers put in for a rise in their pay-rate of £5.30 an hour for round-the-clock shifts.

The company, they say, flatly refused to negotiate. Veteran ATGWU official Ben Kearney remarked at the time that in 30 years negotiating with employers he had never met such "hard-faced and obdurate" people across a table.

In a postal ballot in April last year, the workers voted 97% for strike action to force ICTS to make an offer.

The first in a planned series of one-day stoppages came on May 14. The reaction of the company was to sack 23 of the workers, including McNeill, Gupta and two other union representatives. There was no union representative among the workers retained. The dispute became a fight for the reinstatement of the 23.

Seeing the sackings as a direct attack on the union's right and ability to represent its members, the men assumed the ATGWU would breathe fire and brimstone on their behalf.

But it speedily became clear that some within the ATGWU saw the sacked members as an embarrassment which they wished would go away. The attitude of the union to them in practice, say the workers, was summed up in the advice of one union official: "There's plenty of other wee jobs around if you only look."

Whatever the reason for this jolting attitude (there are some colourful theories in circulation), the result is that the Aldergrove workers are out of a job because of union-sanctioned activity and the union is refusing to do anything about it.

Gordon McNeill is right. This negates any notion of trade unions as organisations representative of their members and accountable to them. It contradicts the most basic principles and the very purpose of trade unions.

It is commonly suggested that the reason the unions don't punch to their potential in the North is that politics here are constructed around the idea of community and not of class.

This is true as far as it goes. But another reason is the tendency of unions to pull their punches when their members are taking a beating.

All who believe that the trade union movement has a valuable role to play in our society should be backing McNeill and Gupta in their demand that the ATWGU explain its role in this affair, and, that done, set about putting manners on ICTS and getting the sacked workers their jobs back.

The union leaders in London might best facilitate this process by agreeing tomorrow to establish the inquiry the Aldergrove workers are asking for.