NATIONAL GALLERY bosses threatened workers with legal action over picketing tactics, the Morning Star can reveal, as workers walked out for the forth time since the new year.

As Civil Service union PCS last night launched a “people’s inquiry” into the gallery’s hated privatisation plans, reps said a catalogue of intimidation and scare tactics were forcing politicians into silence.

The gallery’s aggressive tactics have included gagging staff from speaking out, forcing reps to cancel a strike over legal technicalities, the suspension of union rep Candy Udwin and calling police after activists put up posters at the front of the gallery.

Then two weeks ago workers reportedly received a letter from the gallery’s lawyers complaining about PCS’s picketing tactics, the use of megaphones on demonstrations and chants and speeches made by union reps.

A gallery spokeswoman yesterday refused to deny the letter had threatened legal action over these issues.
The letter even quoted particular words used by PCS cultural sector president Clara Paillard, a lead negotiator in the dispute (seen talking to teh police, left).

It said workers had “intimidated” security staff, including gallery security chief Andrew Baxter, a former counter-terrorism co-ordinator with the Metropolitan Police.

Ms Paillard said: “Is this man intimidated with a few fake paintings and swing music on a PA system?

“Isn’t it worrying that so little can intimidate the security staff at the National Gallery, who are supposed to be protecting paintings worth millions of pounds?

“What sort of world are we living in where everything is twisted round? It’s our members who are being intimidated by a board of millionaires.”

The union’s inquiry will investigate claims of bullying and harassment at the gallery alongside the failure to pay the London living wage, a “crisis of management” alternatives to outsourcing.

“We’re launching it because management’s intimidating tactics are even working on the politicians, who are currently avoiding taking sides,” Ms Paillard told the Star.

Another union source close to the gallery said: “We’d really like Chris Bryant and Harriet Harman to say they’d scrap the privatisation, but even if they said they’d review it, it would be huge progress.

“A select committee could run the inquiry instead of us.”

Shadow arts minister Chris Bryant was denied an invitation to the inquiry launch. He did not respond to a request for comment.