Socialist bosses attack Scottish Wobblies
Submitted on Mon, 12/11/2006 - 3:52am
IWW Staff Report - Industrial Worker, January 2007
As Christmas approaches, 11 workers at the Scottish Parliament face broken contracts and unemployment in the new year, courtesy of the self-proclaimed champions of the Scottish working class, MSPs Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne.
They are both Members of Scottish Parliament, Sheridan being the only candidate for the Scottish Socialist Party elected when the parliament was founded in 1999, and Byrne one of five more who joined him after the second election in 2003.
Their party has been torn by a bitter dispute, centred around Sheridan's leadership, and a legal action he took against the News of the World when the paper made allegations about his private life. The rancour ended in Sheridan and Byrne's resignation from the SSP to found a new party called Solidarity.
The IWW of course takes no side between these groups, and their members are entitled to align themselves as they choose. However, in the course of this fight, Sheridan and Byrne decided to jettison their obligations to their parliamentary workers.
The SSP group of six MSP's originally employed 13 workers, promising them work until the next election in 2007 on wages paid from their pooled parliamentary allowances. Sheridan and Byrne have now withdrawn their support from this fund, and though two workers have switched employment to the new group, there is not enough money left to pay the remaining 11 for the rest of their contracts.
They are therefore placed in an impossible position: forced to choose between having their employment transferred to the new group against their will, and losing their jobs over a political split they did not precipitate. Meanwhile, Sheridan and Byrne now fund their parliamentary work with money taken straight from the pockets of the workers they themselves employed.
Five of the affected workers are members of the Industrial Workers of the World, while others are members of the National Union of Journalists. Both unions are pressing Sheridan and Byrne to honor their commitments to these workers, but thus far they have refused. This is the second battle in as many years to defend the Scottish
Parliament workers. They previously faced down a parliamentary decision to dock their wages in retaliation for the SSP parliamentarians having waged a brief silent demonstration on the parliament floor.
The IWW Scottish Parliament Job Branch is demanding of all six MSP's in the employing group retention of all remaining 10 FTE jobs until the May 2007 Scottish Parliament elections, No redundancies, No pay cuts, and acknowledgment of and adherence to the contractual obligations toward all staff employed by the original employers' group.
Regular updates and an email protest ready for dispatch are at www.iww.org.uk.