THE militant union behind the six-week Birmingham bin strike has balloted members on industrial action 2,040 times in just two years, The Sun on Sunday can reveal.
Unite asked workers to vote on launching strikes or other work-wrecking measures more than ever before in 2022 and 2023, official accounts show.
GettyUnite leader Sharon Graham at last year’s Labour Party Conference in Liverpool[/caption]
PAUnion pickets outside St Thomas’ hospital in London in a strike over pay in 2023[/caption]
Birmingham bin strikes saw rubbish piled up in the streetsgetty
And our statistics reveal the number of ballots held soared by nearly 300 per cent since hard-left leader Sharon Graham took over in 2021.
They include “farcical” votes where only one worker was even eligible to strike.
Former Tory minister Sir Alec Shelbrooke said: “The people this inconveniences most are the ones who need to use essential public services and, more often than not, they are working people.”
Paperwork filed by the union last week revealed it had sought to bring chaos to hundreds of workplaces across the UK by triggering industrial action such as strikes, overtime bans or work-to-rule campaigns.
The accounts reveal Unite asked staff to vote on action 1,066 times in 2023. It is the equivalent of more than four votes every working day in a 250-day business year.
Raised eyebrows
Workers voted to strike, or take action short of a strike, on 25 occasions, wrecking 557 days of work across a range of industries.
It included 352 days of walkouts, including a high-profile strike in Warrington, Cheshire, which dragged on for three months.
During the action, Unite said a nationally agreed pay rise for refuse workers was not enough and continued to tell members to shirk work.
Walkouts took place in four stints between October and December 2023, leaving “health hazard” bins overflowing in the streets.
A similar rubbish collection action in Selby, North Yorkshire, was also backed by Ms Graham, who still won’t reveal her own salary nearly four years after taking the top job.
While the figures for 2024 have yet to be released, in 2022, the first full year of her leadership, the union held 974 ballots and also voted for action 25 times.
It resulted in 522 days being lost to industrial action.
Over both years, the union held 108 votes where ten or fewer members were actually eligible to vote on whether action should be taken.
And bizarrely, the figure includes 38 industrial action ballots where only one member was entitled to cast a vote.
Of the votes where only one person could participate, six ended with moves for industrial action, while six voted against.
Unite has been taken over by ideologues and there appears to be undue influence from the Socialist Party
Labour insider
In 26 cases, the single person entitled to vote chose not to — meaning none was cast.
It compares with just 269 total votes held across the whole union in 2021, when Ms Graham took over from former chief Len McCluskey, and 113 votes in 2020.
It means there has been an 843 per cent surge in strike balloting in only four years. Ms Graham’s repeated calls for strikes have also raised eyebrows from inside the Government, as the union still refuses to publish its financial returns.
One senior Labour insider said: “Unite has been taken over by ideologues and there appears to be undue influence from the Socialist Party. When are they actually going to say what the state of the union finances are?
AlamyUnite’s leaders have been accused of prolonging the Birmingham bin strikes[/caption]
ITVA 2023 walkout by bus drivers working for Go North East resulted in a five-week dispute over pay[/caption]
DHL baggage handlers and ground staff at Gatwick Airport threatened to strike in 2023 until they were given a pay rise
“Thousands of members deserve to know. They are hiding the union’s true financial state. What have they got to hide?”
The scale of balloting among the union’s 1.2million members has sparked fear that union chiefs are attempting to “strong-arm” employees into as much strike action as possible.
Tory MP Mr Shelbrooke added: “The idea that Unite would back a one-person strike is farcical. These types of votes are verging on vexatious.
“Strikes hit people who need the bus, who need their bins collected, who have to take time off work to look after their kids if their teachers are off.
“They lose pay while union leaders call for industrial action four times every working day.
“These figures show there is clearly a focus within Unite on trying to strike more and more, because otherwise their members wouldn’t be being asked so much more often than a few years ago. This reflects very badly on the union’s leadership.”
The accounts for the last three years are only “partial”, meaning there is no mention of Ms Graham’s pay deal or how much the union is now donating to the Labour Party.
Unite and some others seem to be in the grip of people for whom disruption, disputes and revolution are their priority
Source
In 2020, Unite gave £2.8million to the Labour Party, including donations to hard-left leadership candidates Rebecca Long-Bailey and Richard Burgon, who were standing against Sir Keir Starmer.
Unite’s leaders have already been accused of prolonging the Birmingham bin strikes by going over the heads of its regional leaders to negotiate directly with the city’s council and Local Government Secretary Angela Rayner.
A source told the BBC: “Unions traditionally have been about the art of the deal on behalf of their members.
“Instead, Unite and some others seem to be in the grip of people for whom disruption, disputes and revolution are their priority.”
Unite and Ms Graham have backed multiple lengthy strikes by workers in different industries.
Campaigns that won her endorsement included a 2023 walkout by bus drivers working for Go North East, who had a five-week dispute over pay. They eventually accepted an 11.2 per cent pay rise by just seven votes.
The leader of Gateshead Council, Martin Gannon, said at the time that workers’ lives “have been devastated” by the strike, which wreaked havoc on the busy network around Newcastle.
Ms Graham said: “Go North East workers should be congratulated on their victory for better pay.”
‘Lives devastated’
She also backed 600 DHL baggage handlers and ground staff at Gatwick Airport who threatened to strike in 2023 until they were given a 15 per cent pay rise.
Unite has only filed partial accounts for each year since 2021 because of multiple probes into the union’s handling of its Birmingham hotel and conference centre construction.
The union spent £112million on the project — called Aloft — which has since been valued at only £29million.
It has become the centre of a Serious Fraud Office investigation, with Unite itself identifying a “missing” £14million sum which was left unaccounted for in the project’s budget.
In 2022, South Wales Police searched the union’s London head office as part of a separate bribery, money-laundering and fraud investigation.
A Unite spokesman said: “Unite has over a million members across the UK and makes no apologies for defending and protecting the jobs, pay and conditions of workers.
“That is what a trade union does. Since Sharon Graham was elected general secretary, over 200,000 Unite members have been involved in thousands of successful disputes, which have put over half a billion pounds in our members’ pockets.”
Asked about the delay in filing accounts, he added Ms Graham had promised to do “everything in her power to clean up Unite”.
IT’S TIME TO TAKE BACK CONTROL
By Lord Austin, Former Labour MP
I WAS a member of Unite and its predecessors for over 30 years.
I signed up on my first day at work in Birmingham and was proud to join an organisation whose members built British industry and made Birmingham the workplace of the world.
Moderate union leaders played a constructive role standing up for working people and strengthening the economy.
So it is shocking to see how many times Unite’s trigger-happy leaders have asked workers to vote on strikes recently. And it was a disgrace to see piles of rubbish attracting rats on the city’s streets.
Council leaders have made a fair and reasonable offer, so fair play to Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner for standing up for residents and telling Unite to accept the deal.
They need to stand firm or will see the hard-left call similar strikes at councils elsewhere.
Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham has already said strikes could be rolled out across the country “if other councils decide to make low-paid workers pay for bad decisions that they did not make”.
But look at the things it is worrying about these days. Almost one in ten of the motions for its forthcoming policy conference is about Israel and Palestine.
It looks like it is more bothered about the conflict in the Middle East than the chaos in the West Midlands.
It’s high time ordinary members took back control of the union and played a constructive role in getting our economy on track.
And it’s about time they got off the picket lines and back to work in Birmingham to clean up the city’s streets, too.
Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
