Collective Statement from the IWGB's Executive Committee members, calling for an end to the harassment by ex-members James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam

We are members of the Executive Committee of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), representing each one of the union’s formally-constituted branches.

• Mengistu Jabir (UPHD branch Chair)
• Nader Awaad (UPHD branch Vice-Chair)
• Abdisatar Ahmed (UPHD branch Secretary)
• Wilson Ayala Romero (Cleaners and Facilities branch Chair)
• Jesus Jimenez (Cleaners and Facilities branch Secretary)
• Olga Sierra (Cleaners and Facilities branch Women and Non-binary Officer)
• Maritza Castillo Calle (Universities of London branch Chair)
• Abdul Bakhsh (Universities of London branch Vice-Chair)
• Ethan Bradley (Couriers and Logistics branch Secretary)
• Kevin Agwaze (Game Workers branch Chair)
• Jaime Cross (Game Workers branch Secretary)
• Aidan Harper (Charity Workers branch Chair)
• Hilal Yazan (Charity Workers branch Secretary)
• Michael Mcsherry (Cycling Instructors branch Chair)
• Laura Hancock (Yoga Teachers branch Chair)
• Pauline Graham (Foster Care Workers branch Secretary)
• Raphael Fakambi (Security Guards’ branch Chair)
• Henry Chango Lopez (General Secretary)
• Alex Marshall (President)
• Catherine Morrissey (Vice-President)
• Ed Wong (Co-BAME Officer)
• Emilse Ocampo (Co-BAME Officer)
• Fran Scaife (Women and Non-Binary Officer)
• Jamie Woodcock (Branch Support Officer)
• Arthur Salisbury (Treasurer)
  

We are a majority BAME, low-paid group of workers who have come together to campaign for better working rights through IWGB. We are writing this statement to call for an end to the campaign of harassment against us and other IWGB members and staff.

We are aware that James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, who used to lead UPHD, the private hire drivers branch of the IWGB, have set up a new trade union called the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU) and we want to make clear that we take no issue with ADCU, its members, or their campaigns. Furthermore, we congratulate James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam for taking on Uber in the courts, gaining a significant victory for ‘gig economy’ workers after many years of legal struggle. We are proud that our union supported that case during the years they were with IWGB.

James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam are, of course, entitled to set up a new union. We will continue to organise with the majority of UPHD members, who chose to remain with the IWGB. Having more than one union in this space is a positive thing and we encourage more initiatives to successfully help workers to organise in the ‘gig economy’ and more widely. We wish ADCU well – we simply want to move on in peace and be left alone.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has made this one of the most challenging years for unions and we want to dedicate our time and energy to fighting for IWGB’s members. Many of us are newly-elected officials trying to organise against the odds, sacrificing time with our families to do so. We do not want that time to be used having to defend ourselves against attacks from within the movement. This is detrimental to members of both organisations. None of us joined the union movement to engage in conflicts with other workers or other unions. However, James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam have been waging a campaign of harassment against the IWGB, as well as against many of us, our members, and our staff – individually – and it needs to stop.

We have been contacted and called upon for comment by many people who, despite not being directly involved, have been brought into it by James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam. People involved in our union activities, in our personal lives, and even in some cases our employers have been contacted and drawn into it.

This is part of a campaign of harassment which has escalated recently, making use of the publicity surrounding the case against Uber to harass people in IWGB more publicly, rather than focusing on the victory and benefiting members of ADCU. This is affecting our jobs, our home lives, and our members’ families. We therefore believe that now is the time to set the record straight and put this matter into the past.

Until James Farrar resigned and Yaseen Aslam was expelled from IWGB in 2020, they were both executive committee members of the IWGB as Chair and Secretary of the United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD) branch. Many of us were not members of the Executive Committee when the campaign of harassment from James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam began, and some of us were not even members of the IWGB at the same time they were, and yet we have all been targeted.

Problems with their behaviour towards others in the union predate their departure. Over a year ago, at the January 2020 Executive Committee meeting, a motion of no confidence in James Farrar, Yaseen Aslam and another official (an ally of theirs) was voted through by 14 votes to 2.

The motion was based on the following:

1. Dishonesty and lack of transparency on financial issues
2. Intimidation of Executive Committee members
3. Unacceptable behaviour towards staff (in the case of James Farrar)
4. Undermining union democracy
5. Acting in bad faith.

Over the years there have been a very small number of people who have taken on senior positions within the IWGB who have then gone on to mistreat others. The IWGB takes bullying and abusive behaviour very seriously and we uphold the same values within our union. We hold employers to account for this kind of behaviour in the workplace every day. In each case, the common theme is that when the IWGB has moved to hold these people to account, they have become even more aggressive and abusive. James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam are an unfortunate example of this. Following the motion of no confidence, their behaviour worsened, and continues to date.

The IWGB has not made any public statement on these issues thus far, over a period of almost 18 months. We want to draw a line under this; we write this statement now, not to continue this conflict, but to clarify what has happened in order to try to prevent further unwarranted harassment of our members and staff, and to enable us all to move on. With this statement, we put forward what has happened for the benefit of those who have asked.

James Farrar, Yaseen Aslam and their allies have, between them, engaged in the following unacceptable behaviours against the union and individuals (both members and staff) within it. They have:

• Contacted our members’ employers and contacts with dishonest and defamatory statements about them
• Impersonated individuals online
• Filmed and photographed our members at work without their consent
• Shared individuals’ personal contact details online
• Made false allegations of racism, theft, and harassment on social media
• Persuaded others to contact our members about those false claims
• Threatened to contact grant funders to make such allegations, to disrupt funding streams for people’s jobs
• Attempted to harangue and intimidate new members of the union, whom they have never met
• Shouted, sworn at, and physically intimidated our members in person
• Retained confidential documents and data belonging to IWGB, and shared them with third parties
• Gate-crashed non-union online events in order to abuse individuals from IWGB and make baseless allegations against them in public
• Set up 15 new email addresses to harass our members by email, after the previous email addresses had been been blocked each time
• Threatened dozens of legal cases, including criminal proceedings, against the union, individuals within it and staff acting on instruction (including race discrimination claims against some of us who have never even met them)
• Demanded home addresses and phone numbers of current and former members of the executive committee
• Made spurious complaints about IWGB to the Certification Officer.

This list is not exhaustive.

In addition, anonymous complaints were also submitted to the Certification Officer, seeking to have the IWGB deregistered as a union on the basis that it does not represent ‘workers’ – because many of us are bogusly classed as independent contractors, or not classed as ‘working’ at all. These are the very cases we unionised to fight. Given that the complaints were made anonymously, it is important to say that we cannot know whether this gross attempt to undermine other working people was them or their allies. What is certain is that, had these complaints been successful, our members and thousands of other working people in the UK would have been denied the right of association in a trade union.

We believe that James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam have also set up a number of anonymous accounts in order to harass our people online, often making use of information that is not publicly available, but again this cannot be proven in most cases. One such account, @DrTradeUnion, was the UPHD Brighton account at the time when James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam were Chair and Secretary of the UPHD branch, and has been repurposed into an anti-IWGB account. Also, secret recordings of conversations they had with Executive Committee members were made and shared online without consent, again by anonymous social media accounts.

In the months leading up to  James Farrar’s and Yaseen Aslam’s departure from the union (and shortly thereafter), they did a number of things that we consider to be unlawful. Namely, they used over £800 of IWGB members’ money to pay lawyers to threaten legal proceedings against IWGB itself, took over £300 of members’ money in unauthorised payments, and tried to set up a company – of which James Farrar was the sole director – using the IWGB private hire branch’s name, logo, and social media accounts. This caused a great deal of confusion amongst our members and other drivers. The IWGB was forced to threaten/begin legal action to get this put right, securing the return of over £1000 to the branch.

James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam subsequently set up a new organisation with a different name and stopped using the IWGB’s social media accounts, but to date have not handed them back. The IWGB has been attempting to settle this last case amicably, but James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam have not engaged reasonably with the settlement process. We have now withdrawn the case unilaterally, in an attempt to stop the campaign of harassment against us and against the IWGB’s staff. Having done that, the IWGB has no current legal cases against James Farrar, Yaseen Aslam, their union, or any of their companies or associates.

In the light of the behaviours detailed in this statement, we feel it is no longer possible to stay quiet. What has developed has gone too far and is damaging for all involved, just as it is disruptive to the wider labour movement.

We call on James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam to end their campaign of harassment, bullying, and abuse of our members and staff. If they intend to pursue their legal actions against the IWGB, we call on them to at least behave professionally and courteously.

We reiterate that we do not currently have any legal cases against them. We are not running a campaign against them, nor are we harassing them, as has been alleged. We want ADCU and their members to succeed. We simply want to be left alone.

We do not intend to make any additional comment on this or be drawn into it any further. This is a waste of energy that would be better spent by both sides in fighting for our respective unions’ members.

The IWGB Executive Committee