Branch Committee member Marc Vallée is stepping down as Secretary to prioritise his work as branch Legal Rep. In his email sent to Branch Committee members on 3rd June 2010 he explains:
I have decided to resign as Branch Secretary.
In the first six months of the Branch’s life a great deal has been achieved. The highlights for me have been the Branch discussions on The Future for Photography with Martin Argles along with Kelvin Bruce and John Harris, the Ethics & Photojournalism meeting with Stuart Freedman and the hugely successful Hostile Reconnaissance rally – the only major civil liberties event of note during the general election campaign.
The positive outcome of the last six months is that the Branch has recruited new members each month and without doubt is becoming the voice of London photographers.
As all Branch officers know the time and energy we put into the Branch is voluntary. The best use of that limited time and energy for me is to focus on supporting members who have had a negative encounter with the state and to defend media freedoms as the Branch Legal Rep.
I will not step down as Secretary until the Branch has elected a new Secretary and I hope that will take place at the June Branch meeting.
Marc will stay on the branch committee as Legal Rep and there will be an election at the next branch meeting on the 29th of June for a new Secretary.
Branch Committee, Branch Secretary, Election, Legal Rep
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 1:33 pm by Jonathan Warren and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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It seems to me Marc’s “problem” is the problem of doing volunteer Union work as freelancers; we don’t have the facility to do work while on company time. According to a recent survey, 91% of photographers are self-employed. So, Marc’s impending resignation opens a very good opportunity to resolve or, at least, ameliorate, a situation that won’t be resolved simply by replacing one office holder with another.
There is another aspect of the current situation that we ought to address and that’s the quality of the London Photographers’ Branch leadership, especially its officers. This is a leadership that came out of the activity and militancy of defending rights of lens journalists to go about our work without state interception. But it wasn’t an abstract problem for the several people who finally became Branch officers. They consistently turned the problem of working without hindrance, into the NUJ. In other words, the Branch officers became central to building the Union through militant trade unionism.
It’s not Marc’s expressed difficulties between earning a living and doing trade union work. Perhaps his personal problems might be resolved by resigning, but the problem will remain for the Branch as a whole. We certainly could elect someone else, perhaps a trade union opportunist or careerist. That’s not the way to secure the future of a Union branch predicated on activism!
I think the way out of the very real and serious
contradiction of livelihood and volunteer Union work is to job-share. That may be obvious, though how to implement it will take a lot of consideration and discussion.
Perhaps the Branch Committee should organise a Branch meeting with one item on the agenda: “the future of the LPB and its leadership”, or something like that.
Yours,
Larry Herman