User:Veganline: Difference between revisions
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I'm a shopkeeper in London who was forced out of a job for being HIV+ and then discovered that my union wouldn't back me till the last minute, when their nearly free lawyer did more harm than good. |
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He tried to take-on the case on condition both sides were prepared to settle, but the other side realised he was hoplessly out of date on his law and not prepared to read any detailed documents, so they didn't settle. |
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Neither lawyer nor union official would criticise the company I had worked for or do any work on the case. When I went to the entryists' club - it's called a branch - to complain I saw in the minutes that an ex-colleague from the same firm had been along the month before to make the same complaint, and been fobbed off in the same way. I discovered over time that the going rate for legal insurance from the company my employer used was £15 a year. My union subscription was £12 a month, plus unpaid or employer-paid work from volunteer reps among my colleagues. |
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Experience has taught me a new interest in Trades Unions - both to support them and to criticise them. I cannot say my experience is orginal research. Most of what I have discovered is public knowledge in accounts, laws, rule-books and the rest. For example the voting system at the T&G is not secret, but not of interest to many people either until they fall foul of the organisation. It seems designed to help activists from other causes, such as the Labour Party of the Morning Star newspaper, rather than members in trouble at work. |
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The only thing I want to do on Wikipedia in the next year or so is to spread the factual knowledge about UK unions held at the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trades_Union_Certification_Officer Certication Office]] a little more widely. For example to clear-up the contradiction between Unite-T&G public accounts which state a budget for lawyers, and the private accounts stating that lawyers pay the union for referral fees. Both might be true at once but I'd like to know more. |
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My editing style is to state facts first and ask questions later; any offence to those who prefer citations first and 100% accurate spell checking is unintentional. Sometimes, the motive is simply to act quickly under other pressures of time. Also, my writing style is not like american academic writing; it is less formal, and may read as being over confident. Again, any offense is unintentional. |
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[[User:Veganline|Veganline]] 14:01, 23 July 2007 (UTC) |
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