The lead article in the February issue of Humberside Voice was devoted to the struggle now going on in Hull Co-op Society:
EHIND the recent and, in our
view, necessary blaze of publicity given to the move to unseat the President and Board of Directors of the Hull and East Riding Co-operative ‘ Society, there emerges a miserable story of the gradual erosion and destruction of the basic principles of the Co-operative movement. A petition to unseat the Board through the calling of a special general meeting of members now bears over sixty signatures, including those of Fred Hall, secretary of Hull City Labour Party, Councillor Mrs. Phyllis Clarke, Archie Gemmell and Jack Foord, former Labour candidate for North Hull, Jack Foord’s long experience with the Hull Co-op and its management illustrates something of what is wrong. Both as chairman of his local branch of the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union and then as delegate to the Area Council, he found an almost invariable difficulty existing between the union and the Society. Finally, he became a member of the National Executive of SAWU, and he reports: “I doubt whether any organisation, capitalist, nationalised or Co-operative, has ever figured so prominently in discussion by the national committee of any trade union, as did Hull Co-op.” He continues: “In an effort to end the trouble my union, with responsible senior members of the Co-op office staff, drafted a grading scheme which, at neglible cost to the Society would have produced reasonable order out of the chaos of the hit-ormiss system of salaries then prevailing. “J found months later that the then board of management knew nothing about this scheme that my union had submitted and, incredibly,