Industrial Action

version

Well-known member
Sharon Graham sounds brilliant.


Since taking over eight months ago, Graham has led 52,000 members into more than 300 disputes. Of those that have been resolved, Unite has won three out of four. In the past few months alone, workers at Gatwick have scored a 21% pay rise, those at Devonport dockyard in Plymouth have won 13%, and employees at the BMW Mini plant in Oxford have accepted a 21% rise over the next three years. She has pioneered a strategy called leverage. When battling multinationals, she will call in forensic accountants (Unite has just hired its own) and other analysts to go through every detail of the company, its owners and shareholders and their various advisers.

Documents are produced over many weeks that stretch to many hundreds of pages. Then a “dirt dossier” is put together, and Graham and her team start pushing on contractors, clients and foreign governments considering giving business to her corporate opponents. It has proved to be a devastatingly successful strategy. She has warned City analysts that Unite’s response to British Airways’ fire and rehire policy will damage its business, and has lobbied the Norwegian government against awarding a contract to a bus company. And time and again, she has won.

Many academics and commentators look on modern financialised businesses and produce a literature of despair. I have made my own contributions to that particular bookshelf. But Graham is the first person I have met who has looked at how the modern corporation is globalised, outsourced and often dependent on states, and turned those very factors against it.
 

version

Well-known member
... one core principle of Graham’s politics: she isn’t fussed about Labour. Despite the rumours, Unite will remain affiliated to the party, but outside election time Graham wants the majority of its £20m political fund to be spent on community organising. The hole this could blow in Starmer’s campaigning budgets is potentially huge: one Labour veteran estimates it adds somewhere in the region of £6-10m over an election cycle.

In his recent memoir, McCluskey devoted hundreds of pages to Ed and Jeremy and Keir, with one solitary chapter on the outlook for trade unionism. Graham, on the other hand describes her members as “disappointed” with Starmer, and has privately told the Labour leader that he acts as if he is “embarrassed of the trade union movement”.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Starmer doesn't work for the labour party he works for the Establishment. he's Pure Evil.
 

sufi

lala
what a star (y) (y) (y)
he also took down kay burley and richard pilchard alan partridge on my twitter feed, right good stuff

on twitter they are saying look how the politicians should behave if
a. they would stop fretting about their public image/media relationship
b. they knew what they were talking about even slightly
c, they had courage in their convictions or any convictions at all apart from for lawbreaking

so let's not hold our breath
 

luka

Well-known member
He can be a bit crass but I love him (I have to say that or I'll get it in the neck from Sandra.)
 

luka

Well-known member
She thinks the world of him. She's always trying to get him to call me dad, but I say, give him time Sandra, give him time.
 
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