The Transport Salaried Staffs' Association (TSSA) has suspended all five senior members of staff named in a report into sexual harassment, including former general secretary Manuel Cortes.
The union said its executive committee (EC) was made aware on Wednesday (8 February), following the publication of the report by Baroness Kennedy KC, that Mr Cortes was still in its employment. ‘This was not previously known to the EC.’
As recommended by Baroness Kennedy, the union’s president and treasurer stood down on the day the report was published. They have been replaced by interim postholders.
Mystery payoff: Manuel Cortes
The report, which the TSSA commissioned last year, found that ‘there has been sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying within the TSSA and that the leadership and culture has enabled these behaviours through wilful blindness, power hoarding and poor practices’.
Baroness Kennedy said she had uncovered ‘a series of appalling incidents, alongside leadership and management failings in the TSSA [which] included inappropriate and sexual touching, sexual assault, coercive and manipulative behaviour, violent and disrespectful language, humiliation and denigration of members of staff, reps and members of the Executive Committee’.
She added: ‘Some of this behaviour was actually witnessed – or heard – directly by me. I was disappointed by behaviour I witnessed in the EC and by some of the language used by senior staff when I spoke with them.’
She wrote that she had ‘also heard evidence of failings in due process, natural justice and governance’, which she found ‘all the more shocking for the obvious lack of common sense or oversight that seems to have infiltrated the organisation’s senior decision making’.
She added: ‘My impression is of a concentration of absolute power in a very small number of hands, with little or no scrutiny.’
Baroness Kennedy also noted that she had been informed that when Mr Cortes retired last autumn, ‘he was paid a sum of money, about which I have requested information but which, at the point of writing, I have not received’.
She said that she was told that this sum of money was ‘agreed by the lawyer, the Assistant General Secretary and the President’ although the President said he played no part in deciding the amount, but that ‘this matter was not discussed with the rest of the EC’.
She wrote: ‘If ever there was an example of an area where an EC should be able to give their views, I would say this is one. It is members’ subs that form the union’s funds and the EC come from the membership. I cannot believe that EC members would not have wanted to participate in this debate (and perhaps to challenge the idea of paying someone a sum on their departure when they have retired with an inquiry into conduct ongoing).’
Baroness Kennedy added: ‘I was also told that this retirement was mandated by another union that was in talks with the TSSA regarding a potential merger.’
Last month, in joint statement the GMB and TSSA unions disclosed that the TSSA had contacted the GMB to seek a suitable merger partner and it had been agreed to begin talks ‘on bringing TSSA into the GMB family’.
The TSSA said that its EC had accepted the recommendations in the report in full and would take steps to put in a place an administration to lead the union, ‘with the aim of implementing widespread cultural change’.
It added that it ‘wishes to apologise unreservedly to all of those who have been bullied, harassed or affected, and is committed to understanding what has happened to them, and to take all appropriate steps in response’.
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