The scottish parliament 'dispute'

there were no 'redundancies', the staff simply didn't want to work for sheridan because they were still in the SSP. Thus, they overblew the budget of the remaining party members.

I'm curious to know as well actually, way out here in Canada it takes a while for news of this stuff to get to us.

Are the workers + MSPs still members?

So Sheridan wouldn't have taken them? Cause that was never said, and the information that I from NUJ members claimed that the 'workers' didn't want to work under Sheridan, thus 'redundancy'.

I pretty much agree with everything you've said - though I have objections to any members of parl being in the union whether or not their staff are. For me that was the crucial reason why the MSP "co-op" should be barred. I am happy that decisions as to whether or not someone is or is not an employer is left to a GMB/job branch as I think it can be very complicated in many cases.

I don't think we can judge that because someone is a lefty activist, they shouldn't join - thats like saying "sorry, your politics are just too good". I agree with the dangers of just signing up leftists, however I see it as natural that we'll initially recruit our "natural constituency".

Union staff in my experience have been some of the FWs most hard working and keen on organising, rather than seeing it as a club for red card romantics. Maybe thats diff in North America?

I think that a general strategy of recruiting broadly unless and until there's a shop that should be focused on instead. Signing up wobs into the GMB but with a focus that they should then be, with support from the GMB, organising in their own workplace. I think thats a btter tactic than organising from the outside.

For instance in Glasgow we threw a wide net, picked up several who work/study at the university. Then a dispute came about, from which we are at GMB level supporting the dispute, and organising within the university as part of that struggle. We have a job branch and ongoing solidarity work which is going really well. We've massively increased IWW profile through that and GMB meetings have had a really practical, workplace focus because of that.

Also its meant increased optimism and confidence which is vital in such a tiny (for now!) union. That translates into militancy and increased organising in other workplaces as we can talk concretely about what we are doing for members in dispute, not just theoretically or historically.

Union staff have been really good at knowing how to campaign, organise etc. They're also well up on their employment law which can be really useful and make us seem more practical and less talky. I'm not advocating that we have an open policy to everyone paid by a union, but that we don't assume that because we have a critique of their employers, union staff should be barred joining.

Well it sounds to me like the MSP's are no longer in the Scottish Parliament so I would imagine they aren't in any job shop any more. Didn't that party loose all it's seats last election? If the members in question want to stay in the IWW now I see no problem with it really, I mean many of us have all sorts of political affiliations.

By and large I would say that's true, and as long as their loyalty is to rank and file initiative and direct action (even when it violates the contract) I would say they can be a huge asset to the union. But that's a little different than your flagship shop being the staff of a left wing political party, kinda shooting fish in a barrel ain't it? All your other points about building skills and raising the profile of the organisation I would say are valid too, and I also agree that FW Leckie is getting involved in a healthcare workers campaign is a very positive thing indeed. I don't mean to shit on you cats, and believe me I understand why you feel that way, criticism on libcom can be tough, and criticism from inside the wobs often tougher. I really hope you folks do move forward with more organising.

What I'm getting at is we need to be somewhat strategic about what and where we are organising and work on targetting certain places, places that aren't already full of socialists, anarchists or whatever. It may come as a surprise to you but when someone from an anarchist bookstore a couple towns over talked about getting a shop card with the IWW to me I told them they could do so if they wanted to but it wasn't a huge priority as an organising strategy. I told these folks they should organise in their other shops and talk to their coworkers at their bread and butter jobs instead, after all who are the anarchists going to use their union to fight? I also told them that we don't want the IWW in Alberta''s principle public face as an organised workplace presence to be somewhere with no boss to actually fight. Now I have tonnes of respect for the activists in question but it seems that often the first reaction of any IWW group is to run off an sign up every lefty in town.

There are more pressing concerns than this pish. We have a number of workplace struggles and campaigns ongoing. We have the struggle of our workers at the GU job branch, and we have our own internal organisational stuff to sort out now that some of the branches are growing very rapidly (Clydeside's membership has more than doubled since January - there's 49 of us), and beyond that, in Clydeside we must follow follow the lead of Leicester and establish an industrial organising committee to make good the gains we've made in the education sector.

Why now that there are no SSP MSPs left, and hence no staff, should we fuck about discussing this pish so that Oliver, "Nick says everyone should join the SSP", and others can bitch ill-informedly when the BIROC itself if growing considerably (there's about 250-300 of us).

Currently the rules of the union are as follows - if there are any questions as to the membership of individuals if they're a member of a political party, an official or an elected representative, or a union staffer etc then the branch must decide as a whole whether they can join and their decision must be refered to the General Executive Board for discussion there. The GEB could feasibly decide not to charter a new job branch or issue membership etc. On this occasion they didn't refuse as the MSPs were not directly employing the staff under the contracts that existed. The greens operated the same system. When the Sheridan split broke the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body helped Sheridan and Byrne to bypass their contract and that was when the flaw in the 'co-op' rationalisation was made clear. It hadn't been clear until this time that the MSPs could do this. Now whether you think that's naive or not is beside the point. Edmonton Wobbly's criticism is far more salient than all the pish that has surrounded this incident on libcom - the SSP job branch didn't organise, and so when the election came and wiped them out they no longer exist. What gives?

The task of the union is to organise workers, build solidarity, educate the class, and hand us a useful tool with which to prosecute the struggle, not fuck about in pointless ideological discussions about who should, or should not be allowed to become members. We can leave that to those anarcho-puritan ideologues who want to kill each other about who whispered the phrase "works councils" in public. When considering how we will get the great mass of ordinary people to know about us, and some of them to join us do you think most people will frankly give a fuck about this incident, or will they care about whether we can improve their pay and conditions in their workplace?

Yeah, I think I'm pretty satisfied by the answers by the BIROC folks on here. The most important thing is that a lesson was learnt, we picked up some skills from this campaign and we can move on. Anyways I'm satisfied, I hope your organising is going well and I'm glad to hear Clydeside is doing so well.

However.... let's not be naive, part of being active and publicising a lot of what you do- in victory or in defeat- is that lots of people close to you pay attention. I know a lot of folks find the criticism on libcom to be harsh, but we should be thick skinned about it. Nor should we naively think they are going to let us live this one down, we aren't on this forum because we all really love agreeing on things and it would be pretty useless as far as I'm concerned if there wasn't harsh and frank discussion. I honestly don't think much of what was said by anyone passed beyond the bounds of comradelieness and I think Jack in particular was pretty reasonable and deserves some answers.

Anyways thats all I got to say on this, keep up the good work across the pond.

Like EdWob and some others I thought it was best to not talk about this publicly till after the dispute was resoved.

I personally think that the IWW constitution's ban on paid officers of political parties includes officials elected to government. Others disagree. The constitution should be revised to clarify this issue, specifying whether or not government officials count as party officials of the parties to which they belong. I think it's obvous they do, but since some people in the union don't think this interpretation holds, a constitutional amendment should be proposed and voted on.

As you know there is a proposal on the table to ban shop stewards from the union being neatly dovetailed into this 'debate' (does anyone actually disagree here? The SSP dispute arose from a number of problems.). That is where my 'reaction' is coming from; exhasperation with the international union and with anarchist ideologues who seem to want to consistently 'draw' the wrong lessons. Such people have been waiting for an incident to 'draw' these lessons from for a while I think it's clear.

There are forces at work that want to turn the IWW into some even more pointless wee puritan sect.

As for the rules at the moment - that decisions get made by branches and refered to the GEB, why is that not good enough as a decision making structure?

Do we really not trust our fellow workers in the union or something?

For what it's worth I think it was risible that the two MSPs were members, but not because they were socialist MSPs, but because they were/are red card romantics who were/are not going to do any organising. Personally that is the main lesson to take from this ongoing saga. I have said it before, and I will say it again - I believe branches, job branches and GMBs should be forcibly dechartered by the executive for not organising with all due seriousness. We should demand that all branches send the GEB a strategy with assessable targets for recruitment , building power on the job, and then branches should be assessed by their own targets and strategies; if they are not prepared to submit to this we don't need them. That would have dealt with the SSP situation. It would also force a lot of the pointless branches we have at the moment to either get serious and get organising or to stop giving the union a bad reputation with serious people. I think it's a fucking disgrace that most of the comrades I rate in the UK would not yet be prepared to join the IWW as they see it as a complete waste of time compared with involvement in the mainstream labour movement. If we can't recruit serious anarchists how the fuck do we hope to recruit shop stewards and apolitical workers?

It's bizarre that the union is not growing extremely rapidly given the current climate in the UK, in the USA and in Canada. Part this is logistical issues, but mostly it's down to red card romantics and ideologues who like being part of some historical re-enactment society. Why the fuck else would there be proposals on the table to dismiss shop stewards from the ranks when it is clear to anyone who isn't completely nuts that such people are the very sort of folk recruitment strategies should be focussed on (I would say as the main organisational priority)?

Anyway that's just my personal thoughts, as currently I'm asbolutely exhasperated at this stuff. I also think it's nonsense to say that the SSP workers dispute was higher profile than, say, the Crichton campaign, which has seen more time and energy devoted to it, more column inches, has ran longer, and is more important to the union as a whole by a long shot. The problem has been that despite these other far more important activities the anarcho crowd has pricked their ears up more about the SSP workers dispute than the Crichton struggle, for a number of reasons. For me though that speaks volumes. I have fuckall interest in continually going over and over this stuff and frankly I'd rather forget about it and move on. I'd suggest others do likewise. If you want to help the union support things like the Crichton campaign or some of the brilliant organising work Leicester wobs are up to.

It's not really 'workers' people are objecting to, is it?

tut tut John.
http://libcom.org/forums/organise/solidarity-request-crichton-campus-glasgow-uni-phone-blockade

no news article though.

I'll start a new thread on this as a response in the next few days. Basically though I don't agree. Clydeside and leicester are growing very rapidly and not just among politicos and are doing lots of union activity. There is a great deal of scope for this frankly and it's just not being realised. There is very little real difference between an ordinary business union and the IWW going into a workplace and organising folk. The theory and practice will be very similar and there is as much scope for the IWW to grow in this way as there is for any other union.

Got off your high horse, you knew what I meant. Organising theory and practice in organising drives is likely to be little different. We're not talking about the structure or goals of the union, just seeding new workplaces here.