Secret postal ballots

Scan page 9

interfering in the present NUR election.

He isn't even thinking about Moss Evans going against TGWU Biennial Delegate Meeting decisions on incomes policy in interviews with the Financial Times, or David Basnett asking the Labour Party NEC not to support the water workers with no regard for the wishes or welfare of his struggling :members.

He certainly isn't thinking of unions like the EETPU where the rules state that "whenever industrial action is authorised; the settlement of the dispute shall be in the hands of the Executive Council and the terms of settlement shall be binding on all members of the union. The Executive Council may at any time, in its discretion, direct members to return to work 11715) direct violation where the executive, in of the democratic wishes of their members employed at Laurence Scott, tried to terminate their strike and eventually succeeded in breaking it.

Norman Tebbit dreams at bout a magical fairy tale world where al I union leaders are called Frank and Terr Frank and Terry believe in sor nething called 'business unionism'. Y‹ ou join their union to get better wages a nd conditions but you don't have to do al nything yourself. That's the key point.

Frank and Terry and their si dekicks Gavin and Eric do it for you. TI hey are professional business operătives I. Their job is smooth-talking the employ ers and bringing home the bacon. Leav re it to them. Don't interfere. You can'td lo that! . Frank and Terry's operation is 3 like a fruit machine: You nut in vour 1 lOp and So it is in the interests of Frank and Terry and Norman to keep the workers isolated and split up, looking after number one, keeping their noses clean, thinking of themselves and, of course, the wife and kids. So Frank's ideal member is Joe Public who lives in a box, drives his own little car, and sits at home watching telly instead of attending union meetings.

But there's a serpent in Frank's paradise. Because Joe doesn't attend his union meetings, the troublemakers who do, start trying to change union policy, start trying to involve people like Joe, and worst of all start organising to get rid of Frank!

This is where, thank God, the secret postal ballot comes in.

What we have to do is get Joe's vote, while keeping him uninvolved and sitting at home, with the six-pack of lager and "Match of the Day" :

We'll send him a ballot paper through the post. Joe can still manage to pick up a hiro can't he? . Unions are not fruit machines, they are organisations which, in the end, because they are conflict organisations, fighting machines, depend on the involvement and activity of their members, the ability to mobilise them in combat with the bosses.

There is a warning here for the franks and Terrys. If you transform your members into passive punters who simply push their automatic cash cards into the union slot you will in the end lose the power to relate to, let alone to mobilise the members and the employers will deal with them straight over your head.

So this is the real point about the postal ballot. Criticisms are often made of the system in terms of the cost, in terms of the ease with which ballot papers go astray, opening the vote to manipulation, and in terms of the fact that whilst the introduction of postal ballots leads to a big increase in the vote, time leads to a reduction to a level not much, above that produced by the previous system. measures.

"To describe ballots as secret ballots where the Post Office merely acts as carrier is infant gullibility at best, or wicked deception at worst" opines Eric Hammond in the Observer. ''The criteria of our union, the EETPU, require that an independent authority, namely the Electoral Reform Society, handles the ballot from the printing stage to the final count"

Not merely do some of our biggest unions already use Tebbit's system, but leaders of our movement are prepared to abdicate responsibility and invite outsiders to control our affairs, which as Tebbit would agree, we are incapable of controlling ourselves.

The EETPU and the AUEW, in other words, concede large parts of Tebbit's argument.

And it is only by arguing against these positions that we can be in a position to argue convincingly against Tebbit.

So we cannot simply close ranks. We 'cannot simply defend the status quo." "

Scan page 10

Sandiny te Smashing the Loboor Party Health workers at Labour Party conference: Tebbit wants to break links between unions orgalilet The other side of Tebbit's business union ideal is a union which is involved only in economic issues and which accepts a non-partisan political stance. The members should leave the professional trade unionists to get on with the job, and the professional trade unionists should let the professional politicians get on with theirs.

Tebbit's ideal would be the US system where trade unions support individual politicians or parties on this issue, another on that. As a first step he would wish to introduce a greater fluidity into the system, developing the rumbles from APEX and EETPU about disaffiliation from Labour, building on the fact that poll results show that in the past 20 years trade unionists' support for Labour has slowly but steadily declined. in 1964 73% of trade unionists voted Labour but by 1979 this had fallen to 51 % .

And that is where Conservative trade unionists come in. First established by Tory Central Office in 1945, this organisation had become moribund by the 1960s.

At the time of the last election there were almost three hundred separate branches at constituency level. and today there are 370 - an increase of 30% - concentrated in industrial areas, with full-time officers in Scotland, the North West and Yorkshire.

And once again, Tebbit's case is based on distortion and innuendo. Despite his argument that many union members are compelled to pay the political levy against their will, there are under a dozen complaints to the Certification Officer every year.

When Robert Carr, the architect of the "Tebbit's ideal would be the US system" then the Labour Party's already ailing finances would suffer a tremendous setback.

The present contracting-out system has existed since 1946, when Labour restored the initial system established by the 1913 Trade Union Act and replaced with contracting-in by the Tories in 1927.

Before 1927 only 78,000 members of Britain's 32 biggest unions contracted out of the levy. Within a year a million did. By 1943 3.3 million workers were contracting out.

There is a class war going on. And just as members should not be entitled to opt out of their union contributions which pay for the essential armaments which protect all workers, so they should not be allowed to opt out of contributing to labour's more extensive fortifications, their political arm. • Such an argument is, of course, dependent on the fullest rights and democracy within the Labour Party.

But if "it is wrong in principle that a decision to contribute to a political fund should result from inertia or apathy • JOHN HARRIS rather than from a deliberate and positive choice" , what about the gaffer's un/ contribution to the Tory Party?

Union members, we are blithely told, must be given greater access to the accounts of unions on political funding. The Conservative Party does not even publish a central list of who funds it. Labour Research investigates the accounts of the top 2,000 companies but has no means of telling how many small companies also donate.

But if you are a shareholder of a company donating to the Tories, don't you go along with it from inertia or apathy?

If a Michael Ivens of Aims of Industry argues they can go along to the AGM and vote against the proposals what is to stop anti-Labour trade unionists from going along to Rules Revision although they already have a remedy that shareholders don't.

All they have to do is fill in a form stating that they do not want to pay. and the Labour Party munzon mate MT OO mia: