Case Studies

Labour conference doubt over stewards

by Mark Rowe

The annual Labour Party conference is at risk of cancellation, a union has said, because the trade union movement is in conflict with the event contract security companies that might take the work.

The GMB trade union in mid-August warned that an unresolved row over security for the Labour conference (from September 25 to 28) threatens the Liverpool event. The union, the third largest affiliated to the Labour Party, said it had made repeated requests for the company to recognise GMB through a standard recognition agreement – to negotiate workers’ pay and conditions – but said that these had been refused. GMB said it was “intolerable” for the Labour Party to work with a service provider which continually refused to recognise trade unions.

The union demanded that Labour’s leadership urgently find an alternative as Showsec refused to agree to recognise GMB.

Roger Jenkins, GMB National Officer for the security industry: “This is by no means sorted. We have repeatedly asked Showsec to agree to sign up to a standard recognition agreement that recognises GMB to negotiate pay and conditions, seeing its workers treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. The clock is ticking fast ahead of next month’s conference and the company’s continued refusal to recognise GMB is intolerable. Those employed in the private security industry must be allowed the choice to be represented by GMB – an independent, professional and forward-looking trade union working to better terms and conditions. If Showsec continues to show such disregard for unions then it has proven itself totally unsuited to the task of providing security for this event – and the Labour Party leadership must immediately put an alternative in place to avoid the conference being scuppered.”

Mark Rowe writes:

This affair says more about Labour Party politics than it does about the state of unionism in security guarding and event stewarding in particular, or indeed how secure Labour’s conferences are or have been. Showsec in many ways is a model company in the highly-competitive event stewarding and security market; putting in the hours as part of the trade association the UKCMA; in training courses and standards for the sector; and above all in satisfying demanding customers; event organisers such as the British Grand Prix at Silverstone hardly being renowned for tolerating slack contractors. Showsec provided the stewarding for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester; presumably the Labour-led Manchester City Council did not mind Showsec then. Nor has Labour-led Leeds City Council minded Showsec, recently renewing a four-year contract with Showsec to provide security at events such as the German Christmas Market and the cycling Tour de Yorkshire. And ditto Labour-led Birmingham City Council, which likewise employs Showsec for stewarding at its events, such as its German Christmas Market. And Showsec has an office in Liverpool and has done work for Labour-led Liverpool City Council. The highly-Labour (52 of 54 seats at the 2015 local elections) Leicester City Council hired Showsec (which is based in Leicester) for the crowd management at Leicester City’s Premier League champions parade in 2016 and for the re-internment of King Richard III in 2015.

As Showsec reported recently, (summer) festival steward is among the most favoured jobs for the summer – specifically for young people – read students. As that implies, event stewarding is a seasonal job, just as there is a party political conference season in September – hardly an all-year job, making for a seasonal and casual workforce that has hardly lent itself to unionisation. Ditto door supervision, which some event stewards with SIA badges may work at besides.

Leaving aside whether recognising a particular union (what about others besides GMB that might claim to represent security workers?!) proves a security firm suited ‘to the task of providing security for this event’ in Roger Jenkins’ words, why does the dispute with one jeopardise the entire conference? Are there not other security companies around?! There are, except that not many can genuinely claim to have the size and experience to steward such a large event, with specific risks – not only from terrorism, but protesters or pranksters. The need for a smoothly-operating days-long event has prompted for years the cordoning of the conference area as a secure ‘bubble’, days in advance of the actual event – time-consuming and labour-intensive, and which ironically serves to keep out ordinary citizens; but that lack of accessibility, in the name of what the Nobel Prize-winning German author Heinrich Boell in one of his novels termed the ‘safety siege’ (Fuersorgerliche Belagerung), applies to all political parties and indeed the Houses of Parliament.

A company that can secure such conferences, and has done Labour’s and others, is G4S; however as the political commentary website Guido Fawkes pointed out, Labour won’t hire G4S, claiming human rights abuses against Palestinians in Israeli jails run by the contractor, part of the privatisation of state services such as managing asylum seekers and deportations that leaves some on the left uneasy. There is a genuine issue over accountability of private firms doing state work – if a police officer does something wrong to you, your complaint ultimately can go to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC); if a contract guard employed by the state does something you feel is wrong, who do you complain to? Although, again, some of these privatised contracts such as monitoring of tagged offenders originated with Labour administrations as much as Coalition or Conservative.

What is beyond argument is that some form of non-police stewarding or guarding force is necessary, as at the London 2012 Olympics; besides the police (and at London 2012 ultimately the Army) providing security that only they can provide – armed, and with the power of arrest – at the actual entrance it’s more cost-effective to have civilians rather than police checking bags and doing body searches, and patrolling corridors and aisles; and indeed (as again at London 2012) civilians may be better trained and minded to carry out such functions than police.

Assuming the official police layer of security in place, Labour’s alternative to hiring anyone is to do-it-yourself; except that readers with memories back to 2005 may recall the Walter Wolfgang affair when the elderly and hardly physically threatening Labour Party member and peace campaigner was ejected from the conference by what Mr Wolfgang later termed ‘heavies’ – Labour’s own stewards – for heckling from the conference floor, which prompted apologies from Labour’s then leader Tony Blair and others of the leadership.

At the time, the Wolfgang affair was seen as a small but telling example of Labour’s and indeed any major political party’s over-careful and smothering event management; which makes it all the stranger – and damaging to Labour’s reputation as a party that can manage its own business, let alone the country’s – that the stewarding contract has reached such a state that it’s a) unresolved with five weeks to go, which raises questions over whether the planning and rostering can be properly done in time, by anyone; and b) now being aired in public.

Picture by Mark Rowe; statue of Billy Fury, Liverpool city centre.

[For a comparison with the United States, on the scale of the security at a political conference; a statement by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on the Democratic National Convention – https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/07/29/statement-secretary-johnson-security-democratic-national-convention]

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