Already, less than a year in post and many at the Counts Louse are unhappy with the Reverend’s new Head of Paid Service, MIKE “I’M YOUR BITCH” JACKSON, the £165k a year replacement for the highly costly and abysmally useless, Anna “Big Wedge” Klonowski.
Indeed Lib Dem Anthony “Arthur” Negus is already demanding a “FUTURE DISCUSSION ON THE POST OF HEAD OF PAID SERVICE“. This comes after what Negus describes as the “politicising of replies to members’ questions at Full Council that cross the line.”
This is a reference to the Reverend Rees’s increasingly SAD AND BITCHY RESPONSES to any opposition councillor trying to hold him to account at their monthly q&a sessions. These catty political responses, it seems, are often PERSONALLY DRAFTED FOR THE REVEREND WITH GREAT PRIDE BY JACKSON who, despite being a neutral civil servant, appears to enjoy pleasuring the mayor in this way.
The big problem here is that unelected Jackson, having spent a year BITCHING AND SNIPING AT ELECTED COUNCILLORS opposing the Reverend, may find they will not want to work with him if they gain office next year.
Who could blame them? Meanwhile, Green councillor Clive “Shakin” Stevens has also been expressing his RESERVATIONS ABOUT JACKSON and especially the close relationship and strong male bond there appears to be between this objective and independent senior local government officer and the elected Mayor. “IT’S NOT POSSIBLE TO TRUST THIS ARRANGEMENT,” says Shaky darkly.
Shall we start organising Jackson’s leaving party for next May now as few are likely to be prepared to work with a former Mayor’s bitch? And why should they be?
What are the rotten comrades, the Trade Unions doing about it? Year upon year the Council engages ‘Consultants’ on eye watering financial packages to front Council ‘Vanity’ projects designed to deflect scrutiny of their failure to deliver meaningful services now. The outcome of the staff survey reveals a painful truth and that is that nothing has improved since Marvin Rees became Major, in real terms things have only got worse, moral is all but demolished, anxiety and stress at work has increased, disciplinary investigations are at an all time high, bullying is rife and no one is listening, no one is fighting for the workers, especially not the Trades Unions, they’ve created a comfortable arrangement with management that amounts to appeasement and compromise whilst their members are left floundering – words like useless and shameless spring to mind
HR is responsible for the attacks on the staff. The Labour Party, realising the risk to it electorally of the council declaring war on its workforce, is trying to keep it all under wraps. It is doing this by putting pressure on its colleagues in the unions to bring under control the barrack-room lawyers that are trying against all odds to fight back. To their credit many full-time officials told them to go do one, rightly fearing for their independence. Even Bristol TUC – that hotbed of youthful revolution – wouldn’t co-operate with their betters. In the end they had to do a deal at the South-West TUC. A comrade from Devon immediately texted me to let me know. That’s an awfully long way to go.
Instead of supporting HR, what they should’ve done is bring HR into line, but the spectre of 800 redundancies meant they wanted to do the dirty with the minimum of disorder. A weaponised HR was required. Now that the Labour Party has mostly balanced the books HR should’ve cooled it, but they didn’t. The blows struck by both the barrack-room lawyers, our black whistleblowers and the Bristolian have hit their mark and there is a lot of unfinished business.
It’s not just the above, some of our reps are not really competent; plus the union movement is slowly transforming itself into a political activist movement as opposed to a collective bargaining movement. So when the unions continually put out press releases about home care workers but completely refuse to organise or represent them, that is the reason why. So we do have activists who are willing and want to help but they are hopelessly outgunned by a highly-trained, highly motivated cadre of bastards. They soon give up. Our experienced people look the most crestfallen when an eager new rep they had high hopes for resigns.
Plus, Unison and Untie the Union are feuding at the regional level and this filters down. Activists from different unions naturally bunch together but this gets disrupted by bullshit bureacracy.
There is the ability and knowhow to turn this around for the unions but the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party overrule everything. Not for me, obviously, but it explains the sorry state we are in.
I would do you a list of all the things we have won in the last couple of years but I would obviously list some of my colleagues wins to act as a smokescreen, and that’s not very nice. But it is because of the hard-hitting we have been doing (us and the Bristolian and *cough* the Bristol Cable *chokes*) that has meant nobody can let it lie.
You may be able to get through to us. We are best in restructures, safety and equalities where we are hitting back. But try not to use one of the incompetent (even the nice, inadvertently incompetent) ones.
I’ve got a new article on the way, if you can contain your excitement.