Skwawkbox has reported at length on allegations that the transport union management of general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust has repeatedly used anti-democratic manoeuvres to bar candidates who defeated incumbents allied to Eslamdoust. The accusations have come amid fury and industrial action against Eslamdoust for her conduct toward TSSA staff and the GMB union that represents them in their workplace.

Elections for the positions of president and treasurer were re-run after TSSA suspended one of the winning candidates. The union long delayed announcing the winner of the new presidential election, with insiders claiming her ally’s rival had won.

When whistleblower and former assistant general secretary Steve Coe complained that Eslamdoust and her allies had “trashed” TSSA’s reputation, her allies kicked him out of the union and smeared him as a danger to women. Coe is now suing them for defamation.

The transport union extended the voting deadline in the presidential election amid reports that her ally was well behind. The union eventually admitted that rival Adam Wilson had won.

Head of transport union — a one-trick pony

Now, with the election of the union’s treasurer about to be re-run, the Eslamdoust regime has pulled out the same playbook. TSSA has suspended left candidate Paul Mangan only hours before nominations were due to close. The long run of alleged abuse and anti-democratic tampering was too much for members of TSSA’s Network Rail branch, considered the union’s most powerful.

The branch has tabled a vote on Thursday 22 January on a motion to call for Eslamdoust to be suspended and investigated over a long list of issues. Its full, grim wording, with links added where available, is below:

Since the election of Maryam Eslamdoust:

• Illegitimate closure of Women in Focus the TSSA self-organising group for women that was central in exposing the sexual harassment of the previous leadership
• Suspension in breach of process of three leading TSSA activists, one of whom remains suspended without a hearing for more than 20 months.
• Created dispute with TSSA staff resulting in two industrial action ballots strike and now continuous action short of strike action
• Created an intolerable environment for staff which has been demonstrated by GMB survey and horrendously high rates of sickness of the staff
• Denial of any democratic challenges that presided over a disastrous annual conference in 2024
• Withholding the election results for President and Treasurer in May 2025 on the basis of an investigation into the conduct of that election. An investigation that has never had an outcome and it remains unjustified why the vote has not been counted.
• Creating a trumped-up allegation against President candidate Duncan Bates that he was a train driver when he was not to exclude him from the President election and EC seat.
• Creating a further spurious allegation against Duncan Bates following his successful subsequent election onto the EC from which he remains suspended
• Refusal to hear any appeal from members or branches at TSSA Conference 2025 in breach of rules.
• Presided over the sabotage of TSSA conference 2025 leaving about half of the conference business unheard.
• Cancelling of the reconvened conference in November 2025 and providing no alternative dates
• Removed representative credentials from 4 London Underground Management representatives without a fair process and with no consideration of the impact for the representation of our members
• Refusal to respond to the vast majority of democratic challenges submitted by individual members, branches, divisional councils, representative groups or indeed union trustees.

With the denial of any form of democratic process or the ability for any candidate to be allowed to stand that may challenge the leadership control we have no option other than to publicly call for the investigation and suspension of the General Secretary

A senior TSSA Network Rail rep has also issued a statement on the union’s “denial of democracy” and attacks on staff and the “blameless” treasurer candidate:

Statement from a senior Network Rail rep re the denial of democracy at TSSA:

On Thursday the EC agreed to suspend Paul Mangan alongside other NR representatives.

This decision was made at an emergency EC meeting one day before closing of nominations for the role of Treasurer which was itself a rerun of the election where the vote has never been published.

The effect of this suspension was clearly designed to disallow Paul Mangan to again be the preferred candidate for Treasurer and to allow Mary Sithole to stand unopposed for the  for the role and not face a democratic vote. The communication of the suspension was communicated to Paul after 11:00 [just hours before] the imposed deadline for nominations.

The case against Paul Mangan is linked to a case in which Paul was entirely blameless, and all three Network Rail representatives have been cleared of any action by Network Rail’s own investigation in May 2025. TSSA considered the case at the time and concluded with the following which was communicated to all these representatives 6th May 2025 “no action will be taken by TSSA.”

The leadership has now dug up this historic complaint and described it to the EC as a contemporary whistleblower complaint as the vehicle to remove Paul Mangan from the election. The leadership does not care that this action also targets other Network Rail representatives or the effect that has on our ability to represent members.

As a direct consequence the suspensions we could be impacted from having full representation at National Principles consultation on the 19th. It could also disable our ability to hold our TSSA briefing to more than 10,000 Network Rail employees on Wednesday 21st.

This should not be unacceptable to us and has had a massive impact on these representatives.

I would propose we therefore:

• Do not recognise the legitimacy of the suspension on Paul Mangan, and other reps directly linked to this case.
• We continue to include these representatives with all invites and would welcome and encourage their attendance at any meeting and to continue to represent members
• We inform Network Rail of this position and will expect them to allow for these representatives to continue in their representative roles and to allow them to continue to attend consultation meetings and hearings.
• We call on the Executive Committee to meet with us to explain their actions.

TSSA staff and Network Rail members have already voted no confidence in Eslamdoust, who was levered into the position through the backing of figures close to her disgraced predecessor Manuel Cortes, despite a complete lack of relevant experience.

TSSA has not responded to media enquiries from Skwawkbox about these or other issues since June 2024.

Featured image via Socialist Worker

By Skwawkbox

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