In the early summer of 2023, a baggage handler at Heathrow airport received a welcome job offer: a well-paid role with Unite, one of Britain’s most powerful unions. The job had one particular perk: he could also keep his existing full-time job as ground staff for a major airline.
It is claimed he has never stepped foot into Unite head office in central London, is unknown to his supposed colleagues and may not have carried out any work. He has been described as a “ghost worker”.
The baggage handler withdrew from running for election on Unite’s executive council, its governing body, around the same time he was offered the role. A whistleblower claims a phoney job may have been offered to him as an incentive to withdraw, thereby ensuring council members backing the existing union leadership were not at risk of being displaced.
This is how politics works. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t work this way is a naive fool. That the politic here is within a union doesn’t make it any different. They’re all vile insects scurrying to get at the slime mould.
Not much different from being offered a gong or even a peerage (another ghost job paying £315 a day) for donations given, services rendered or blind eyes being turned.
Did he also get free knickers for his wife?
Pip,
Wife? Don’t you mean person of indeterminate gender who may, or may not, have ovaries?
Firstly it isn’t the case with all politicians (albeit with a lot more since Wilson made just becoming an MP lucrative) and secondly it applies to a lot of big organisations whether or not they are *described* as being political – maybe you haven’t heard of “office politics”.
A few decades ago a friend of my father who was leader of the Conservative group on the local council received a visit from a representative of T. Dan Smith; he said that after hearing the offer he simply opened the front door (I strongly suspect that he accompanied by opening with some choice language because I doubt the guy would have understood the silent gesture). Some honest guys do take up politics.