£1million each offer.Its in the correspondence? I thought this was denied by the strikers?
DennisR made the point that the £1 million each was a 'union rouse'. It seems clear in the correspondence that this was put to the union.
This is simply my personal opinion. I imagine there will be a fuller reply from the organisation:
And i would still stick by what i said above. It remains a 'union rouse' to cover up what actually went on in this dispute.
The same letter says that the strikers were not intending to seek this amount. The strikers have repeated this again and again and again.
Looks like one of the results of leaving the defense of your members to solicitors. And one that suits the legalistic approach of union bureaucrats. They thing is they cannot get away from the actual reality no matter how many 'press releases' in an attempt to legitimise their actions they continue to send out.
I would not have followed the solicitors 'advise' in certain respects (who is clearly trying to force the situation in the only way s/he knows with the legal threat) - but, given the union leaders are still at this point refusing to negotiate or even meet with the strikers themselves it is a bit rich to then take one solicitors legal letter as the crux of 'the case' the bureaucrats are replying to.
That original press release remains indefencible. It would be interesting to see if they would reply to the point made by the striker's themselves that you pointed to later (re the gagging order 'deal')
Strange that this is the only correspondance they have put up for viewing - given five years of correspondance; george's repeated attempts to deal with them face to face and, in particular, the union leadership's claim to be giving the 'simply the truth' in this brief press release.
i'm not convinced there is such a wide gap between the old union leadership and the new when they resort to this as representing the 'truth' - its far from it. Its embarrassing they ever let this get as far as it did. They continued to provoke - for a period of years - what the Morris leadership started and from what folk I can see here continue to use similar smear tactics. They act like solicitors with 'legal cases' themselves rather than workers leaders with moral and political backbones. It stinks of a very traditional (and very 'british' i think...) 'left bureaucrats' view of their 'role' in disputes as the clever negotiators, trying to sweep the somewhat dirtier reality under the carpet.
If they were so clever some of their own members would not have been forced to resort to the tactics they did. Those 'clever negotiators' could have clearly distanced themselves from the previous Morris leaderships role - instead they compounded the problem and then play on the out of context (and somewhat desperate imo...) actions of the legal beagle left holding the legal aspects of the dispute in their hands. Of course they could have gone to the strikers themselves at any point. Their only aim is to silence the strikers - even now
If your concern is that those union leaders should be defending their members money from 'unreasonable' demands (thats the angle they are trying to point across themselves of course...) - then I can only go back to the entire history of the dispute and say there were a lot better ways of defending that cash open to them and they were given every opportunity - the obvious one being going to those those members - supporting their legal case (given it was all they were left with) and righting the wrongs of the previous leadership.
The union and its own expensive legal teams could also spend a bit more time defending workers rights - its members - rather than trying to cover its 'leaders' arses- just a thought
