johninnit

From the Beeb:

A strike by British Airways cabin crew planned for Christmas has been declared illegal in a High Court ruling. The court agreed with BA that the cabin crew’s union, Unite, had not correctly balloted its members on the strike action. BA complained that staff in the process of leaving the company had been balloted, breaching industrial relations law.

Isn’t this a technicality? The union need under law to get a majority of those voting within a bargaining unit, and they did – with a huge 90% voting on an equally impressive 80% turnout. Even if some voting were ineligible to strike, the turnout was so high that removing the suggested up to 1000 votes would surely still clearly carry the ballot – especially as you’d have to reduce the size of the overall bargaining unit by those who weren’t eligible (thus lowering the threshold even further for the ballot).

I bought a suit a couple of years back for a conference in the States. I’d arrived and unpacked, only to find my suit had been hanging unused for so long at home that moths had been right through it. Bit of a panic, but I was cheered up tremendously by finding a UNITE union made logo tucked into the inside pocket of my new Hart Marx whistle.

Well, it seems I’m in good company, as that 136 year old US gents’ outfitter has an even more notable client than me – a certain Barack Obama. Unfortunately both the POTUS and I could now be in danger of losing our sartorial shine, as the firm are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, with a bailed-out bank trying to deny Hart Marx the second chance they themselves received. (more…)

I’m not a Unite Amicus member, so haven’t been following the current General Secretary election particularly closely, but I was interested to notice today that it seems to be the first union election where all the candidates have properly interactive online tools to promote their campaigns (last year’s NUJ DGS election nearly got there, but given it’s the new media union you’d expect them to).

This is interesting though, as it means all the candidates are potentially opening themselves (or at least their campaigns) up to comments and contact direct from members. (more…)

Congratulations to the drivers (though not the management by the sounds of it) of Eddie Stobart’s haulage firm. The Edinburgh Evening news reports that they refused extra payments of £500 each for a special assignment, when they found out that it was to strike-break against the UNITE-T&G distribution members at Tesco in Livingstone, Scotland.

UNITE-T&G’s Tony Trench said: “We think that this is an appalling way to do business – throwing large sums of money to get people to strike-break instead of sitting down and negotiating with us in an orderly fashion. We are humbly grateful to these guys who have turned down such large sums of money to support their comrades.”

Eddie Stobart always used to demand the highest standards of conduct from his drivers, wanting them to be ‘knights of the road’, to help him build a brand as industry leaders (and collect a huge fan club of strange people who like to count lorries along the way). It looks like they’ve passed the conduct test with flying colours, though maybe not in quite the way he intended.

All together now… “I want to be an Eddie Stobart driver…”

PS – Indisputedly the most useless bit of trivia I know (after ringing Stobarts’ unneccessarily helpful customer services for a bet 15 years ago) is the reason Stobart’s lorries display a small Italian flag on their side. Apparently, their main contract was an Irish run when they were a small firm, and they wanted to put an Irish flag on the side, but didn’t have any orange paint, so they used red, and stuck to the wrong colour ever since out of quirky tradition. There – now don’t go saying there’s no exclusives on this site…

Sneak preview – Ooh! Isn’t that pretty? Very modern, but with the fluttering red flag / flames of protest merged in there too. Simple enough to resize small on the web or blow up large on a banner – only weakness might be small on black like it is in this snap.

The branding consultants have done them proud. I like – lots! Good luck to T&G & Amicus at the merger announcement later on today.

So Unite it is then – Christine Buckley has the scoop in the Times that it’s the least worst name for the new union. I didn’t think it was even one of the front runners for the name, but I think it fits the bill pretty well.

You may think ‘what’s in a name?’, but I reckon it’s pretty crucial to get right if the union is going to reach out beyond it’s traditional membership – something which is pretty much the last big hope for the growth of the UK union movement.

The name needs to work well on an aspirational basis – all the millions of professional and clerical people in new economy jobs, who are looking for a union, even if they don’t know it or know the first thing about unions (natural recruiting territory for Amicus).

But it also needs to be an immediate and clear statement that it is here to help people sort out workplace problems together, to fit well with the work started by the T&G, aiming at the other big non-union sector of vulnerable workers – the low pay, low conditions jobs that have traditionally slipped through the union net.

Unite seems to be a name that could work well in communications to both groups – fingers crossed now that the visual identity for it comes out in the same way, rather than leaning too much to one side, and risking alienating the other group.

It’s a bit similar to Unity mebbe, and there may be confusions on their planned international focus if they take up joint working with UNITE-HERE in the States. There’s a potential gift to mickey-takers with the name ‘Untie’, but it’s an old joke after it was done so effectively to United Airlines.

Least worst or not, I think you couldn’t have got better with a whole union of focus groups – good luck to them in making it fit the new organisation.