Winning re-instatement for a suspended worker

I work for a local council in a children's social services department of 60 people, half of whom are Unison members, and I'm a shop steward.

Basically this member of staff, Sally, was punched by a racist, who she pushed, but then police arrested her. After keeping her up all night she accepted a caution (without a solicitor) in order to get out of jail and attend an important interview the next morning. She told the police where she worked.

When she got back to work, the police had contacted our bosses, and as a caution forbids you from doing some parts of her job, she was suspended (on full pay) pending "investigation."

She was appealing the caution, which should be rescinded, but this might take a year, by which time we realised she'll probably be sacked.

What the council can do under their procedures is relocate staff to places they can work, which is what they should do, but they denied this and said she'd have to be suspended – as they intended to get rid of her. Previously, before we'd got organised (although the union was still present, but inactive), staff had been suspended, told they were forbidden from contacting their colleagues, and quietly sacked.

Sally wanted to keep working, not be at home, demoralised and waiting to get fired. So we emailed management and HR asking for redeployment and kept getting fobbed off. There was no way they were going to have her back unless we fought for it. If she was still working, she'd be much less likely to be sacked, as she could potentially work in the other, less sensitive dept until her appeal is over.

So we called a shop meeting of the dept (we always invite all staff, including temps, other union members, and non-members, some of whom came), and argued that we should all boycott her work, starting within one week, if she wasn't redeployed. This was voted for unanimously – in a team that had never taken or threatened industrial action before.

Exactly one week later, when the boycott was due to start we received an email saying she'd been found a place. Me and the other steward went round and called everybody out for an impromptu meeting where we announced this, and there was much cheering and applause.

She is now happily back working elsewhere.

Now we have shown we can defend individual workers, I think people have much more confidence that we can defy the bosses and win – everyone was very atomised and felt powerless before. We'll see what happens from here… I'll post updates.

One thing was that it seemed easier being in the union for this. It was all organised by stewards, but it would've been registered as an official dispute if things had escalated into action. This would have legally protected anyone taking part in the boycott from victimisation. This seems to be useful, even though I am against unions in general. I don't know what other people think of this?

On another note, the realities of the boycott would have been very hard to impose, since it would've fallen entirely on 2 union members who were actually weakest in their resolve, and didn't want to harm our clients by not doing work. So it's good we didn't have to go through with it. We did come up with some ideas of how to still provide service without letting our managers hit their targets, but can't go into detail here.

Our bosses were clearly keen to avoid open conflict with us, which is understandable because it would create huge tensions and difficulties from then on, especially with the "friendly" "collaborative" image public sector work has.

A few random key lessons:
- your employer does not care about you, your career or your life
- direct action gets the goods!
- involve all workers, not just union members and permanent staff
- some employers are very reluctant to enter into open dispute with their staff. Use this.
- don't accept a police caution
- don't tell police where you work

Definately good to hear of successes, congrats.

Shop meeting, it was just a union meeting, so we have permission to use meeting rooms and facilities on site. We can get paid time to attend these meetings too, but in this case it was too short notice, so we held it during lunch.

"We" is referring to me and usually one of two other stewards who were also involved.

Oh. I see. Thanks. Irrelevant to our workplace on both counts, though. (No union presence there and no collective lunch break).

It's very impractical in my workplace, being as it is divided into shifts, etc. The most effective tactic these days is the move around and talk to people routine, which isn't as dramatic, but has given us, for example, that staff meeting pay.

Hmmm, she's being called in for a meeting with management about a trumped up thing, saying she didn't tell them in time about the arrest in time - which is balls.

I have a feeling they may have waited till they thought things died down, and now they'll try to sack her.

I think we should do some gesture to show we'll stick up for her still. button said back in the day public sector workers would stop work during colleagues' disciplinaries. We may not be able to do that... but maybe we could say all walk with her into the managers' office? Or do something more official like say we'll ballot for industrial action if she's disciplined. I think the former is more likely to happen... have to see if my colleagues'll be up for it though, it would be very confrontational... Anyone got any other ideas in case that doesn't work out?

madashell: we have the accounts and workplace-activity tags: http://libcom.org/tags/accounts http://libcom.org/tags/workplace-activity

They're not linked from anywhere at the moment though, and could do with tidying up a bit. Good idea to have a block in Organise for something like that though.