Victimised Home Office duo applauded at conference

Victimised Home Office reps Mark Hammond and Sue Kendal received rapturous applause when they addressed their group conference on Tuesday morning.

The reps, both from Folkestone, were sacked after a strike last October involving UK border force worker and PCS believes they were singled-out because of their trade union activity.

They had been involved in a lengthy dispute in European Operations and actively campaigned to fight Home Office job cuts.

PCS launched a campaign in March against the job cuts and the sacking of Mark and Sue, its senior elected reps.

Mark, the group’s former president, who was dismissed while on certified sick leave and two days after a successful strike, told the group conference in Brighton: “I think we have been victimised on the basis of our trade union activities.”

Sue told delegates she had suffered from intimidation and bullying since becoming a rep in July 2009 - a decision that went down very badly with local management.

She also discovered that the decision to suspend her had been taken a month before it was implemented. The pair were dismissed for groundless allegations that they produced a magazine that poked fun at local managers.

Sue said: “We were effectively dismissed because we received an unsolicited email from a rep accused of publishing the magazine sent to our private addresses, but this episode gave the senior management the perfect opportunity to exact retribution on reps who had caused them problems.”

She said they raised a page-long grievance to management which was ignored. The appeals have finished and the next stage is the civil service appeal board and then an employment tribunal if they are not successful there.

Show no fear

Home Office group secretary Paul O’Connor told conference the sackings were simply acts of victimisation: “This was nothing to do with a newsletter or any lampooning. What we’re being asked to believe by the employer is that they were so shocked and offended by this publication.

“This is a hard-nosed employer intent on breaking the union. This is an exercise in victimisation of trade union officials which has happened right through the ages from the Tolpuddle Martyrs transported to Van Diemen's Land to miners in the 1980s being charged with such a heinous crime as trampling the winter barley.

“We have to show no fear in the face of intimidation tactics by the employer.”
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