Sharon Graham SLAMS Keir Starmer's 'Unrecognisable' Deal

Right, so Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite the Union has for quite some time been giving Keir Starmer the benefit of the doubt time after time when it comes to her unions support for his party, for the party of course that was built by the trade union movement, for ordinary working class people and therefore if they aren’t at the heart of Labour policy, trade unions, should be giving them a wide berth. Sharon likes to draw red lines for Starmer when he pushes her limits, or appears to, though those red lines appear to shift faster than Starmer ever seems to and so we come to what was ostensibly Labour’s last actual pitch for working class people, which was Labour’s New Deal for Workers. Well the red lines were drawn again and for the last week she’s been quite critical of the draft plans she’s seen, yet yesterday, all of a sudden, she seems to think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. So what exactly has changed then Sharon? Other than you yet again, being seen to be too close to the Starmer regime?
Right, so Sharon Graham, General Secretary of the Unite Union, my union, everyone should be in a trade union, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t criticise or hold them to account and Graham for me has been a disappointment from the get go and she’s racked up quite the resume of reasons for that.
For example, when independent film Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie was out last year, famously banned from Glastonbury, but workarounds were found, the whole thing is now available on YouTube if you haven’t already, Graham banned it from all Unite properties, on the basis it was antisemitic, despite nothing of the kind being true, the film combats racism, combats the racism inherent in false accusations, and on one occasion when a screening was due to happen in Bristol, a book-signing by investigative journalist Asa Winstanley and his excellent book Weaponising Antisemitism was also cancelled and banned. The film and book were both heavily criticised by the Israel Lobby, they were in no small part responsible it seems for Glastonbury pulling the screening of the film, so all in all it smacks of colluding with the Lobby there, and certainly being onside with Starmer when it comes to fighting antisemitism.
Then there was the time she tried to cancel the annual pro Palestine fringe event at Labour Conference, placing the official responsible for it under investigation as a result, Then there was the time she decided to ban Unite officials and Unite livery from being shown at pro Palestine protests and demos. One of her team, for it is not just she, allegedly threatened a soon to be retired regional official with the loss of their pension bonus if they didn’t cool their support for Gaza, that was March just gone. She’s also resisting being subpoenaed right now in an employment tribunal case in Ireland, accused of being a bad employer, with a guy who was returning to his post following a battle with cancer, and not just any guy, but the top official for Unite in the whole of Ireland, Brendan Ogle, on the grounds of his treatment and what has been said about him by union officials. Not only is she resisting giving evidence in this tribunal, despite literally being one of the accsued, she’s employed some of the most expensive lawyers on the planet to defend her, rather than the law firm the union retains services of in Ireland, which are good enough for anyone else in the union, but not for her it seems and the cost to members, is allegedly somewhere in the region of 150K euros a day.
On top of that, she has been accused by the Unite national officers group of showing contempt for union staffs collective agreements, taking an anti-trade union stance and attempting to use legal action to intimidate staff with grievances and at least one Union branch has passed a vote of no confidence in her in Brighton, which passed unopposed, citing their reasons as being betrayals on anti-racism, Palestine, harassment and dignity at work.
As for Starmer, she has consistently been seen as being too close to him and despite comments to hold him to account and to not take Unite money for granted, she has carried on funding his regime, even inviting him to Unite Conference to speak, and allegedly telling delegates there to either sit down and shut up if they attended his speech and if they couldn’t do that, then to go elsewhere.
But let’s get to the here and now. Starmer’s Labour in customary style has looked at it’s one remaining reasonable policy position on workers rights and a deal for workers under a Labour government and have been watering it down.
His new version of the deal states that there will be consultation with businesses rather than workers and the unions. This has led to Labour coming to a position of no longer seeking to ban zero hours contracts, but instead right to a contract reflecting the most recent work patterns of a worker. You can see how a business might be able to abuse that, for example to keep someone on a zero hour contract, they might only give them work every other week. That’s ridiculous, but that appears to be how it would work. Probabationary period were supposed to be being done away with as well but that now isn’t happening, fundamentally, whilst we wait for the full paper to come out, it has changed completely and on the 8th May, just 1 week ago to the day at time of writing, Unite published an article calling it unrecognisable, which in customary Sharon Graham style, was her attacking Labour retreating on the matter:
‘It looks like all the warnings Unite made earlier about the dangers of Labour rowing back on its pledges for the New Deal for Workers have been proved right. This new Labour document on the New Deal, issued to the unions on Monday, is a row back on a row back. It is totally unrecognisable from the original proposals produced with the unions. Unrecognisable. Workers will see through this and mark this retreat after retreat as a betrayal.
“This new document is turning what was a real new deal for workers into a charter for bad bosses. Labour don’t want a law against fire and rehire and they are effectively ripping up the promise of legislation on a new deal for workers in its first 100 days. Instead, we have codes of conduct and pledges of consultation with big business. Likewise, the proposal to legislate against zero hours contracts is watered down to almost nothing.
“In truth this new document is not worthy of discussion. All unions must now demand that Labour changes course and puts the original New Deal for Workers back on the table.’
Strong words. She can talk the talk and has carried on attacking this since on social media too. The following day, she put out a tweet quoting a Big Issue article also slamming Labour’s watering down of workers rights, saying:
‘This new Labour Party document on the New Deal, issued to the unions on Monday, is a row back on a row back. It is totally unrecognisable from the original proposals produced with the unions. Unrecognisable.’
She really doesn’t seem to like it at all does she? Has she finally seen the light? Well something certainly happened, because by yesterday in an LBC interview with Fraser Knight, she came out with this:
So she hasn’t seen the words on the page, so, she’s been told stuff by Keir Starmer or his team and taken his word for it? You consider Keir Starmer’s word worth something then do you Sharon? Wow, that’s quite something. OK she wants to see it in print, but actually from what you say in that clip, you don’t appear to have actually been promised anything new over what you were kicking off over before, moving things forward isn’t the same as reassurance and correction, but that’s quite the change in tune coming from her compared to just a week ago. The New Deal is being put forward by Labour and it will be a very, very good thing for workers she also said, but you’ve just implied you’ve got nothing on paper yet so how can you be so sure? It got worse from there though. Knight asked her about those two things Starmer had watered down, zero hours contracts being banned and fire and rehire and all she could say, is that they’ll go back to the NPF document and use that as a guideline. That refers back to the National Policy Forum document, the big annual policy making conference that includes the trade unions with Labour and that turned into such a circus last year, several union reps walked out of it. That’s the guideline is it? That’s the framework? That’s the touchstone as you put it? Oooh little bit cringe now. Got worse when you also said you’ve got to keep holding Labour’s feet to the fire, singe Keith’s toes if he goes too Tory you’d imagine, because from my perspective as a lay member of the union, you’ve never done anything of the sort and this isn’t doing that either. Every time you seem to meet with Starmer, or his team, no matter how vocal you might have gotten through social media or other union channels, you seem totally placated again afterwards, yet Starmer never changes and so far even on this, nothing has actually changed that can pointed to in a solid form. You’ve been given spoken reassurance it appears and lapped it up, to the point you are now saying to camera this could be a very good thing for workers, that what you’ve been told could be good for workers and good for business when in my experience, that’s is rarely ever the case. It strikes me that Starmer has seen you coming and knows exactly what to tell you each and every time. We do need to see the writing on the page, we need to know if you actually have got something meaningful out of Starmer on workers rights, or whether as I strongly suspect, nothing has changed and you’ve sadly made the mistake of believing what Starmer told you. How many more times must that happen before you actually pull union funding?
Do you know what makes this commentary from Graham all the more ridiculous sounding now though? That her change in stance towards Labour’s watering down of their New Deal for Workers came following the week that Starmer literally welcomed a hard right trade union basher like Natalie Elphicke into the parliamentary party. Unions should be packing up and abandoning Labour for welcoming Tory MPs in, even more of them, with more allegedly waiting to defect too, not standing there and saying he’s doing a good job in effect.
Sharon Graham felt the need to gloss over the NPF documentation, what came out of the National Policy Forum and called it the touchstone, she wanted to skip over it very quickly, didn’t want to bore you. Well it’s not boring and what went down last July in that meeting should very much be better known about, Unions went ape at Labour and you’re holding it up as the foundation for what comes next? Find out all about what happened there and union reactions in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.