Union general secretary keeps blaming GMB as union employees say she keeps exposing lack of understanding of union mechanics

A union in flames? TSSA staff appear to think so

Maryam Eslamdoust and the TSSA rail union she is running – into the ground in the eyes of many – continues to lash out at the GMB union for TSSA staff’s complete dissatisfaction with her management and her team – despite a unanimous motion of no-confidence passed at an ‘all-staff meeting’ last week.

Ms Eslamdoust was recommended to members, despite what appears to be a complete lack of relevant experience, by the TSSA executive after former general secretary Manuel Cortes was sacked over sexual harassment and bullying exposed in the Kennedy Report, and was supposedly going to clean up the union after the scandal. However, the union has been rocked by fresh allegations of abuse and deep resentment against the new general secretary for the treatment of staff, particularly women.

The staff, who are members of the GMB union – union employees are usually represented by a different union in case they need to enter a dispute with their employer – and recently voted overwhelmingly for strike action in response to the abuse they say they are experiencing, held the ‘all-staff meeting’ a week ago. The following motion was passed unanimously:

TSSA Staff Motion of No Confidence in the GS, AGS, and President

Following the recent all-staff meeting on Thursday 11 April, where the AGS announced that the Trainee Organiser’s contracts would not be extended without any prior notice to the Trainee Organisers themselves, the TSSA staff unreservedly condemn this as a further example of an unacceptable and grotesque management style that has no place in a respectful and civilised
workplace.

The further revelation by the AGS [assistant general secretary] that a significant sum of HS2 compensation monies has not yet been invested, losing us around £25,000 per month in interest at a conservative estimate, gives the TSSA staff considerable concern that the union is not being managed effectively to ensure its long-term survival as an independent trade union.

The TSSA staff reconfirms our commitment to the policy of remaining an independent union, and believes that with the right management, sufficient resources, meaningful progress on culture change, and an environment in which staff feel valued and respected, this remains a realistic prospect.

However, the many contradictions between stated objectives and the decisions being taken, whether in respect of resourcing priorities, progressing culture change, or managing the union’s finances, only leads us to conclude this is far from being the case.

The TSSA staff therefore instructs the GMB staff reps to convey the decision of this meeting that the staff have no confidence in the GS [general secretary], AGS, and President of the union.

The TSSA executive member for Scotland also resigned last week, saying he could no longer work with Eslamdoust or the executive supporting her.

Ms Eslamdoust attacked Skwawkbox during the general secretary election for scrutinising her and her supporters’ campaign claims that she had ‘high level trade union experience’. She also recently wrote a bizarre article for the Guardian in which she accused the GMB union of attempting to bully her so it could take over the TSSA and distract from its own renewed sexual harassment scandal, and tried to blame others for her failure to take meaningful action to implement the Kennedy Report’s recommendations, outraging staff members who have pointed out that their dispute pre-dates the new GMB revelations.

However, when asked for comment the union doubled down on its blaming of the GMB, compounding the impression of a lack of understanding or recognition that the issues are with the unhappiness of people working for the union and not with the management of the union they are instructing to coordinate the strike on their behalf. A spokesperson told Skwawkbox:

We would encourage GMB to start talking with TSSA to focus on resolving the workplace issues they say they have. It is genuinely extraordinary that GMB are so blatantly seeking to interfere in (and misrepresent) the internal administration of a sister union. TSSA EC took the decision that the last tranche of HS2 compensation would be reserved for strategic objectives to grow and strengthen our union. That is what is happening.

TSSA staff have said that their approaches to the union’s management have been ignored or rebuffed and that Eslamdoust and her team even opened talks with ACAS without bothering to inform them. The union’s latest comment will do little or nothing to change the publicly-expressed view of staff, reps and members, including a former TSSA assistant general secretary, that Ms Eslamdoust has ‘lost the plot’.

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How the case developed that ended with uni lecturer James Wilson’s hard-fought win in court after smears put him and his family in danger – and saw LAAS director Newbon commit suicide

Last week, university lecturer James Wilson won £30,000 in damages from two defendants, James Mendelsohn and Edward Cantor, who had contributed to a smear against Wilson by a third ‘antisemitism campaigner’, Peter Newbon, that put the lives of Wilson and his family at risk. Newbon, a director of the right-wing pressure group ‘Labour against Antisemitism’ (LAAS), was a defendant in the case but died by suicide, after a row with his wife, before the case was concluded. The judgement in the Wilson case revealed that Newbon had ‘concealed’ the case from his wife

The case never involved much-loved Jewish author Michael Rosen. However, Newbon’s fellow ‘campaigners’ have tried hard to associate Newbon’s death with Rosen because Rosen dared to complain about the antisemitic doctoring of his famous children’s book, Bear Hunt, in a social media post by Newbon used to attack former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The coroner presiding at the inquest into Newbon’s death made no such connection, nor even mentioned Rosen throughout the proceedings, but this has not stopped the trolls’ efforts.

For readers unfamiliar with the Wilson vs Mendelsohn et al case, below is a timeline showing the chronology of the smears and the subsequent legal victory:

• Nineteen months before August 2020: a confrontation takes place at Wilson’s children’s school with ‘Mrs A’. The trial judge has ruled that Wilson was blameless, but A posts a picture and libellous claim to Facebook
• August 2020: Wilson disputes with Newbon on Twitter about the so-called ‘IHRA definition’ of antisemitism – a definition that has been heavily criticised, not least because it doesn’t define, is used to suppress criticism of Israel and enables false accusations of antisemitism – by Jewish legal experts in the UK and even by its original author, Kenneth Stern
• August 2020: in a manoeuvre typical of so-called ‘antisemitism campaigners’, Newbon resorts quickly to ad hominem personal attacks and responds with libellous  claim that Wilson is a ‘freak who takes photos of kids’
• August 2020 onwards: Wilson tries to negotiate with Newbon to remove the libel and warns that he will sue if it is not taken down
• Around August 2020: Newbon’s university employers warn Newbon that he is in breach of the university’s social media code
• November 2020 Newbon gets into dispute with another person on social media – and receives a second warning from university
• Around the same time, Newbon also becomes involved with the so-called ‘University Antisemitism Map’ which targets academics who criticise Israel or dispute the right-wing claim of ‘Labour antisemitism’, labelling them antisemitic and identifying their place of work so collaborators can target their employment. Newbon contacts one institution with an allegation about an employee – the employee is exonerated by institution
• May 2021: Newbon posts a doctored screenshot of a famous ‘tweet’ that originally showed Jeremy Corbyn reading ‘Bear Hunt’ to a group of children. The book held by Corbyn has been photoshopped to make it appear that Corbyn is reading from a notorious antisemitic text, ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’. The image is accompanied by a parody of the words from the Bear Hunt book
• May 2021: numerous Twitter users object and write to Newbon’s university, whose name is displayed on his Twitter profile. Rosen is informed of the tweet and comments publicly that the doctoring was an antisemitic thing to do. The university says it will take action
• May 2021: As revealed during the subsequent Wilson case, Newbon prepares an apology to be issued to Rosen, then withdraws the apology and starts legal proceedings, presumably having been advised by lawyers that he has a case against Rosen
• December 2021: Newbon escalates by issuing a ‘Particulars of Claim’, the formal opening of a libel case, in which he accepts that Rosen is ‘in’ the tweet but claims Rosen is not the target, as the target is Corbyn who is reading Rosen’s book to children in the image. Rosen prepares defence
• January 2022: Newbon ends his own life after a row with his wife
• January 2022 onwards: Rosen is blamed for Newbon’s death by various parties either by implication or actual accusations. In articles at the time, another case (ie Wilson’s) is mentioned,  but not by name. Some people note that Newbon was running two cases at the same time, defending against Wilson, claiming against Rosen
• March 2022: Wilson and Newbon’s wife settle Newbon’s involvement in Wilson’s case against Newbon, Mendelsohn and Cantor
• February 2023: a High Court judge rejects an attempt by Mendelsohn and Cantor to have the case against them thrown out. The pair had attempted to claim that Wilson could and should have minimised the damage they did to him by backing out earlier from the online conversation in which he was smeared. The judge described the attempt as ‘not very attractive’
• April 2023: The inquest into Newbon’s death takes place. The coroner makes no mention of either the Wilson or Rosen legal cases. The coroner does mentioned that Newbon had a ‘disagreement’ with his wife and that he left the house in a ‘fragile state’. 
• December 2023: the Wilson v Mendelsohn, Newbon (deceased) and Cantor case leads to a four-day trial.
• April 2024: the judge’s findings are published. The judge finds against Cantor and Mendelsohn, dismissing the claims of a string of their witnesses and awarding a total of £30,000 in damages to James Wilson. In the judgment narrative, the late Newbon is described as a bully

The case, which involved the disclosure by Newbon’s widow of his personal communications, also revealed interesting aspects of his conduct toward Michael Rosen and the behaviour of the trolls who have tried to exploit his death to attack Rosen. Analysis to follow.

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There is no natural law stating that bullies have to dominate our lives.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th March 2024

The researchers claim to be surprised by their findings, but is it really so remarkable? A large and impressive study of children’s progress into adulthood found that those who display bullying and aggressive behaviour at school are more likely to prosper at work. They land better jobs and earn more. The association of senior positions with bullying and dominance behaviour will doubtless come as a shock to many.

This is not to suggest that all people with good jobs or who run organisations are bullies. Far from it. It’s not hard to think of good people in powerful positions. What this tells us is that we don’t need aggressive people to organise our lives for us. Neither good leadership, nor organisational success, nor innovation, insight or foresight, require a dominance mindset. In fact, all can be inhibited by someone throwing their weight around.

Whether in game theory or the study of other species, you quickly discover how the dominance behaviour of a few can harm society as a whole. For example, a study of cichlid fish found that dominant males have “lower signal-to-noise ratios” (sound and fury, signifying nothing) and counter-productive impacts on group performance. Anything sound familiar?

A win for bullies is a loss for everyone else: their success is a zero-sum game. Or negative-sum: the first study I mentioned also found that school bullies are more likely to abuse alcohol, smoke, break the law and suffer mental health problems in later life. But the bullies’ triumph is also an outcome of the dominant narrative of our times: for the past 45 years, neoliberalism has characterised human life as a struggle that some must win and others must lose. Only through competition, in this quasi-Calvinist religion, can we discern who the worthy and unworthy might be. The competition, of course, is always rigged. The point of neoliberalism is to provide justifications for an unequal and coercive society, a society where bullies rule.

It’s a perfect circle: neoliberalism generates inequality; and inequality, as another paper shows, is strongly associated with bullying at school. With greater disparities in income and status, stress rises, competition sharpens, and the urge to dominate intensifies. The pathology feeds itself.

The researchers who conducted the first study suggest, having discovered that bullies prosper, that we should “help to channel this characteristic in children in a more positive way”. To my mind, this is the wrong conclusion. Instead, we should seek to build societies in which aggression and dominance are not rewarded. It would be better for schools to focus on dissuasion and counselling.

But at every stage of our lives we are forced into destructive competition. Not only are children pressed repeatedly into winnowing contests, but so are schools. In England for instance, with its Sats tests and brutal Ofsted regime, these contests damage the wellbeing of children and teachers. As always, the competition is organised to enable the wealthy and powerful to win. But, as Charles Spencer explains in his memoir of life at boarding school, winning is also losing: parents who send their children to private schools pay to create a dominant outer persona, but the child in the shell might be twisted into knots of fear and flight and anger.

This counter-education is reinforced in later life by a thousand self-help books, websites and videos. For example, a popular site and programme called The Power Moves, run by the social scientist Lucio Buffalmano, teaches you “10 ways to be more dominant”. These include exerting social pressure, claiming territory, “aggress, assert and punish” and face-slapping. You can also learn eight ways to dominate women, an essential lesson because, apparently, “women sleep with men who make them submit”. The techniques Buffalmano promotes include “hold her face if she refuses to kiss you”, “jokingly push her into a horizontal position”, “jokingly drag her towards the bed” and “penetrate her mind with ‘Daddy Dominance’”.

Buffalmano claims he wants “to advance humanity by empowering good men to advance, lead and win”. The more likely result is to increase the pool of utter jerks. We should learn instead to be thoughtful, prosocial, kind: to resist dominance, whoever exercises it.

Obvious bullying in the workplace is no longer generally tolerated. But I suspect that in many cases the apparent improvement is a result of bullies learning to mask their impulses, while they continue to control and manipulate without stepping over the HR line.

But overt bullying is resurgent in politics. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orbán, Milei and others do little to disguise their crude dominance behaviours. When Trump stalked round the back of Hillary Clinton during their presidential debate and when he disgracefully mocked a journalist’s disability, we could see the child he was – and the child he remains. Our political systems – centralised, hierarchical – are ripe for exploitation by bullies. As in the school playgrounds of old, the worst people end up on top.

The same dynamics operate at the global level. Governments assure their people they’re engaged in a “global race”: if we fall behind, another nation will overtake us. This story of zero-sum competition justifies any and every abuse. It was used by European nations to rationalise their empire-building and elective wars. It was soon accompanied by a self-serving myth: that the dominance race will be won by the “dominant race”. As Charles Darwin put it: “The civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” By subtler means, with subtler justifications, the rich nations still play the same game: their wealth is to a large extent dependent on extraction from other countries.

But while the one-sided race between nations continues, we collectively race towards the precipice of environmental collapse. If ever there were a need for cooperation and collaboration, it is now. But competition reigns, a competition all of us are destined to lose.

In short, we should stop celebrating coercive and controlling behaviour. At every stage of education and career progression, and in politics, economics and international relations, we should seek to replace a competitive ethos with a cooperative one.

This is the amazing thing about human beings, as opposed to cichlid fish: it doesn’t have to be like this. We can control our own behaviour, and envision and build better forms of organisation. Through deliberative, participatory democracy, both in politics and in the workplace, we can create systems that work for everyone. There is no natural law that states that playground bullies should continue exacting tribute for the rest of their lives.

www.monbiot.com

Mel Stride recently suggested that the culture around mental health has gone too far, with too many people using it as an excuse not to work.

The Work and Pensions Secretary told the Telegraph last month that there was a "real risk that we are labelling the normal ups and downs of human life as medical conditions" which hold people back and increase benefits bills.

Stride added that there is a "danger that this has gone too far" and suggested that, as a culture, "we seem to have forgotten that work is good for mental health".

Some 2.8 million people are not working due to health issues in the UK and welfare spending is forecast to be £80.9 billion in 2023-2024. As of February, the UK had 932,000 vacancies, according to the Office for National Statistics, and despite falling by 26,000 from November 2023 to January 2024 – and for the 19th consecutive period – there were still 700,000 more people out of work than when the pandemic began. The UK has had no growth in more than a decade.

While Stride was happy to hit out at people claiming benefits, few questions have been asked about what the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has, and is, doing about it.

On its website, the department lists helping people to "move into work and supporting those already in work to progress, with the aim of increasing overall workforce participation" as one of its key responsibilities.

When I founded Recro, an employability and recruitment solutions consultancy and training company in 2009, getting 30% into work was considered an industry measure of success, and figures for the London Skills and Employment Board found that two-thirds of employers couldn’t hire people with the skills and competencies they required. So clearly, a lot of work needed to be done to upskill the unemployed into work.

The Treasury and DWP operate on 6% additionality. So, for every 100 jobseekers, they expect 24 to find themselves work. Job centres and providers, including national programmes such as 'Restart’ – the Government’s flagship back-to-work programme for Universal Credit claimants who have been out of employment for nine months or more – get an additional 6% into work. According to research by Politics Home last year, each job created through Restart costs £40,476.

In 2012, when I started delivering programmes in partnership with DWP, there was no mechanism in place to learn from successful programmes, replicate and scale.

We partnered with a number of London boroughs that had huge regeneration programmes with thousands of jobs attached and residents who needed jobs. DWP contract and partnership managers said Recro's was the most effective and successful programme they had seen, often getting 50% into work.

But these programmes were never repeated or scaled due to procurement procedures and attitudes, with job centre managers saying that "commercials (the procurement team in DWP) get nervous". The rationale never made sense to me and didn't appear to be challenged.

A parliamentary question by Shadow Employment Minister Seema Malhotra revealed in February 2021 that the department monitors performance at a district level but does not collate it nationally, so opportunities to learn have potentially been missed.

In 2016, DWP launched the DPS (Dynamic Purchasing System), a route to market for job centres to work with small and medium-sized enterprises to meet jobseekers needs going unmet. Despite its proven success, Recro did not consistently win contracts.

Transparency is the Answer

Last year, MP John Penrose led a campaign calling for greater transparency in the performance of all employment support programmes. This was backed by a cross-section of think tanks including the Fabian Society, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute, Spotlight on Corruption, and Transparency International UK.

At the time, Stride said it would be cost prohibitive to obtain the data, that they don’t need to gather it under the Cabinet Office playbook and the spend does not fall within the Government’s KPI data publication policy.

DPS2 (which replaced the Dynamic Purchasing System) follows a process where buyers buy blind. They are not allowed to know whether a programme they bought delivered what it said it would.

While the Secretary of State in his response believed that DWP doesn’t have the performance data and that districts (regional offices) do, the reality is they are told they can't use it by the DWP procurement team.

The National Audit Office has called for greater transparency for years, as has the Work and Pensions Committee, but DWP continues to resist.

Some of the reasons the procurement team provided me with for the way purchasing decisions are made is that it thinks it would be against procurement law and fair and open competition to measure performance.

What is Going On in Treasury?

The Treasury got £1 billion back from DWP unspent on Kickstart, the Government’s £2 billion flagship scheme to create new jobs for 16 to 24-year-olds at risk of long-tern unemployment which was launched in 2020.

It was described as “chaotic” by the Public Accounts Committee in 2022, as it only managed to help 168,000 people of the original 250,000 target. DWP, it wrote, “neglected to put in place basic management information that would be expected for a multi-billion-pound grant programme”.

Further to a meeting I had with Treasury in 2022 about problems with DWP, it contacted the department and received a stock response saying: “DWP are running supplier engagement sessions in the form of supplier surveys and supplier forums… If you have further comments or suggestions...”

Last year, the Treasury twice went to market asking other government departments to bid for funding to find out what works at getting people into work.

The late Lord Kerslake, when he was chief executive of the civil service and the National Audit Office, described a culture of denial and a culture of good news at DWP.

One in six young people is NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) – more than 850,000 – according to ONS data from December 2023. Millions are economically inactive, a huge number of people over 50 are looking for work, and more than 2.5 million can’t work due to ill health. So the news at DWP isn't good at all.

In January 2022, I wrote to Stride when he was chair of the Treasury Committee with a briefing paper on key issues at DWP, offering to explain what was actually going on there, what that costs the UK, and how to fix it. The offer still stands.

The Department for Work and Pensions declined to comment.