06.02.1997

Union bureaucrats attacked

Last week Brian Higgins, branch secretary of Northampton Ucatt and national secretary of the Building Workers’ Group, spoke in Dundee to a meeting of activists, and at a public meeting in Edinburgh attended by 160 people. Other speakers were from Women of the Waterfront and the successful Glacier workers. Higgins is clearly a working class fighter and leader who has been a thorn in the sides of the building industry bosses, and has also caused severe headaches for the Ucatt trade union bureaucrats whose actions often ask us to question whose side they are on.

Due to blacklisting, he has not worked for many years, now he is under attack from a trade union official. Dominic Hehir has served a High Court writ and applied for an injunction against Brian for libel. The ‘crime’ he has committed is to criticise this union full timer’s actions over a dispute in Southwark council’s Direct Labour Organisation.

A letter to the Irish Post and the rank and file bulletin Building Worker have been cited as evidence. A campaign has been launched to defend Brian Higgins, focusing on pressurising the Ucatt leadership to instruct Hehir to drop this action and expel him from the union for bringing it into serious disrepute. It is unprincipled for a workers’ ‘leader’ to use the bosses’ court and legal threats to silence a member. It is an attack on the right of free speech and the right to express criticism of trade union officials.

The Dundee meeting gave solidarity and much needed support to Higgins’ campaign. Inevitably it went on to consider the wider implications of his case and the other examples of rank and file workers having to struggle against their own union leaderships as well as the anti-trade union legislation.

Unison members present referred to a case in Liverpool where their union was spending thousands of pounds of members’ money taking other members to court for ‘unofficial’ action. The lacklustre support from the Transport and General Workers Union leadership again illustrated a fundamental problem within trade union organisation: that the bureaucrats, instead of being the ‘servants’ of the membership become the ‘master’ of the union. The meeting agreed to support a conference to be held after the general election which will attempt to pull together rank and file workers across Britain around the theme of how to fight the trade union bureaucracies.

There is clearly a need for rank and file workers’ organisation across unions, similar to the National Minority Movement of the 1920s, to defeat the attacks of the Tories, Labour or trade union bureaucrats on workers.

Mary Ward