It seems a tradition of the Labour movement that we debate rules early, and the CEC presented a number of changes to the Congress, which were debated together with those rules changes proposed by branches.
Below I have summarised the interesting CEC proposals all of which were carried.
These changes have extended the reasons for expulsion to actions taken by members of staff or ex-staff, which caused me to look at such reasons, but any employee who, “has brought or may bring, the Union into serious disrepute, or has harmed or may harm the Union” is subject to being expelled. The new rules also make it clear, that should a member resign from membership while being investigated for a disciplinary breach, the “charge” remains live and may be pursued should the member seek to rejoin. There’s probably an interesting story behind why this was proposed, but no-one would talk to me.
While writing about this specific rule change, I considered some of the current grounds for disciplinary action which include,
- made or in any way been associated with abusive, defamatory, or scurrilous written or oral comments made about the union, any of our officials or committees;
- alone or together with any other members or people, breached any of the union’s policies;
- acted against the best interests of the GMB
- encouraged or taken part in the activities of, or communicated with, any organisation or group whose policies or aims are racist or promote racist beliefs;
There are a number of GMB MPs who might do well to read these rules, specifically the rule committing members to supporting GMB policy.
There was a rule change about mergers and takeovers which, I believe has the effect of excluding incoming members’ longevity of service as counting towards eligibility for election to office. I can’t imagine a good reason as to why they would do this but it may be related to disputes with Community and the NEU.
The CEC rule changes removed the right of the National Equalities Conference to table motions to Congress, and established the senior management team under rule.
They left the exclusion of the need for candidates for the office of the General Secretary to be vetted as qualified by the CEC in place.
A move proposed by a Branch to increase the size of Congress fell, GMB Regions currently send one delegate per 1500 members, it was proposed to reduce this to 1000. The visible argument against is cost, less visible is the fact that smaller meetings are more manageable by the leadership, the advantages would be that the delegates would be more representative.
Branch rule amendments included RA302 which added the National Equalities Conference and the Retired Membership Association to the list of bodies that can table motions to Congress; this was moved by the National Secretary of the Retired Members Association and was carried, thus negating the CEC rule amanedment which removed this power from the National Equalities Conference. This led to a point of order since it should probably have fallen on the passing of the CEC paper and rules amendments, but the SOC ruled that since Congress had voted, they couldn’t unvote it though an SOC or CEC ruling.(How democratic! 😇)
RA303 proposed the addition of two retired members to the CEC. On reflection, I think this is a mistake, there are enough retired members on the CEC as it stands, I need to check the new rules, or the decisions of Congress but I think this fell.
Image Credit, by me, this is cropped and unusally I ask to respect all rights reserved (c), I will post the original to flickr at some point under a more permissive licence.
This blog article is best read with [some of], the following documents, the final agenda document, GMB’s Congress page which contains all the documents and the video index is available as a playlist or as individual videos at the GMB’s youtube channel. This article has been back dated to about the time of occurrence.