On 29 March, ANDY FORD spoke to Ray Goodspeed of Left Horizons about his bid to be elected to the Executive Committee of UNITE for one of the three Health Section posts.
Andy explains in more detail why he is standing and what he sees as the way forward for the union – based on greater democracy and the full participation and involvement of members. He also talks about the relationship between Unite and the Labour Party and the need to use the enormous resources of the union to lead the fightback inside and outside the party against Starmer and his clique.
The video of the interview can be seen by clicking on the image below and on our Left Horizons YouTube channel – just click on the link.
Andy works for the Manchester Blood Centre and has been a union rep for over thirty years. He is not a member of either of the main slates in the election. Instead, he stands for the formation of a properly democratic broad left based on rank-and-file lay members.
The vote opened on 23 March and closes on 27 April. We urge all health sector workers in Unite to vote for him.
We publish his statement below, and you can see more from his campaign on his blog https://andrewford4echealth.blog
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The Unite executive elections are on. I have decided to stand for election in the Health section to try and get more resources for the grassroots of our union – the workplace reps and the branches. Without us there in no union.
- Every Unite region should run a regular school for all the reps in the NHS so we can help each other solve our own problems. Instead of waiting for an over-worked full time officer to do it for us.
- Every functioning branch should be able to send a delegate to Policy Conference and Sector Conference instead of the present convoluted election process.
- Every region should have at least one member of staff devoted to building branches in all sectors and helping people when their branch accounts need setting up or unblocking.
- The union structures should be opened up to every member. The present structures block many out of participating. Have confidence in the members. They know what they want from a union.
- the way we work now leads to the full time officers doing silly amounts of individual case work, that would sit best with lay reps and branches; but we don’t have enough and we don’t take serious steps to improve matters.
- As for the Labour Party: we should go all out to get rid of Keir Starmer and his inept clique. I have never known a politician so despised. Rightly despised. We need to get together with the other unions and get rid, get shut, and return the Labour Party to a working class party under working class control. Then we will get some sense!
On NHS issues – what I was trying to sday is that we have many, many issues in the NHS, but the model bequeathed to us from the previous regime simly does not work, The idea was that if a member has a problem at work, a full-time officer turns up and fixes it!
But…there just are not enough full time officers, and there never will be. I worked for the union for a couple of years and I was shocked at how much time the Officers spent on individual case work, It is about 50%. I raised it with McCluskey and he went back down memory lane : “Well your branches should be doing those cases” he said. Because the last time he was a rep was the late 1970s, and when he was a Regional Officer was the 1980s. Not being personal, but the experience of being a senior officer is completely different to ours as reps. In fact a very good hard-working officer came up to me after that meeting and said “There are no effing branches” (in her sector).
If we were to rebuild our grass roots structures then we as reps could help each other. A union is suppose to be self-organisation of workers. All Unite needs to do is to fund a quarterly meeting of ALL the reps in Health in a region. They come together ashd split up into the trdes and occupations, discuss their issues, and then report back to the whole group. In the afternoon you could organise a plenary session on campaigning, legal cases or an aspect terms and conditions. Unbelievably, since we formed Unite, those sort of meetings have been denied – to save travel expenses!
If we get the model right, the issues can be solved.
You couldn’t make it up. To put saving £500 of travel expenses over being industrially effective!
And then senior officers wonder why the union struggles to engage members…?