- By Faisal Islam
- business editor
18 minutes ago
A historic wave of industrial action has swept the UK in the last 12 months. As a new documentary series follows union leaders up close, the `’s business editor wonders if this surge in strikes is likely to continue.
“Listen, don’t argue with each other. Don’t argue with each other. It’s really important that everyone sticks together,” said Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, as tensions flared in the bus drivers’ picket line.
Abellio drivers at two south London depots were offered a 12% pay rise and a £500 bonus – leading to divided opinion among drivers who went on strike for 10 days without full pay.
A driver later says, “The union rep, they’re selling us… there’s a lot of traitors.”
Others say, “We screwed up” and “We’ve been lying here from the cold for two months dying.” They would eventually gain an 18% increase.
Settlements like this have been taking place in so-called shortage sectors such as driving buses, trucks and garbage trucks since the beginning of last year. Many of these settlements stayed under the radar, in very local disputes or even, as here, in individual depots.
The past year has seen hundreds of votes, hundreds of thousands on picket lines, dozens of negotiations, double-digit wage demands and bonuses, and major litigation between the government and public sector unions in industry and the public sector.
Just 15 months ago, No. 10 slapped the Governor of the Bank of England for saying people shouldn’t be asking for excessive pay rises. Four months earlier, the then Prime Minister celebrated the prospect of a high-wage Britain for all.
And this time last year, Mrs Graham, the general secretary of the largest union in the private sector, had never given a radio interview in that capacity. She and her colleagues are now household names after promising a “summer, fall, spring and winter of discontent.”
Featuring access to senior union leaders, the two-part documentary follows the inner workings of Unite, RMT and the RCN, and the GMB’s campaign to gain recognition at Amazon in Coventry.
Watch now on ` iPlayer (UK only). The first episode will be broadcast on ` Two on 25 May at 9pm, with the second a week later.
Part of Boris Johnson’s survival strategy was to grapple with the unions over wage demands and try to shift the blame onto the Labor Party.
But unions calculated that the old pattern of mutually hostile relations between organized labor and government had changed since the pandemic and amid the shared pain of a shared cost-of-living crisis. The last year not only raises questions about this relationship, but also whether there has been a change in the way the UK thinks about industrial relations.
Above all, voting restrictions are contained in the government’s anti-union laws. The documentary shows how unions have circumvented restrictions requiring absentee voting and high turnout thresholds.
The pattern over the past year has been for unions to break up national disputes into a series of much smaller local and sectoral disputes that are easier to win electoral mandates for. Actions are then coordinated across locations on the same day, giving the impression of massive national or regional work stoppages, as with bus drivers across London.
The other pattern is that of the private sector meeting high wage demands in areas with labor shortages.
picture description,
Bus drivers are on strike in south London
Unite has a department of forensic accountants who assess the earnings and available cash flow of the parent companies of the disputed employers, often foreign-owned. In this case, the Dutch state was the de facto owner (although it has since sold its stake), a fact the union regularly uses in online campaigns.
Experiences in the public sector have varied. There were no negotiations this time last year. The Pay Review Body process had recommended a pay rate of around 3% for all public services. This often happened before the double-digit rise in inflation that followed the Ukraine war.
Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss dealt intensively with the issue. This initially applied to the Sunak government as well, fearing the fiscal costs and inflationary potential of a significant increase in wage bills for civil servants.
The cameras were with the General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), Pat Cullen, ahead of the first strikes in its history.
The RCN itself had called for a 19% increase in the number of nurses. The government said at the time it could not deviate from the recommendation of the Pay Review Board and was not negotiating.
picture description,
Pat Cullen, General Secretary of the RCN, who called for a 19% pay rise for nurses
“There will never be a solution to this dispute,” Cullen later said. “The last meeting I had with the Secretary of State was accompanied by five men and it was not a pleasant meeting. It was quite an aggressive conversation.” Cullen said the nurses concluded they were being treated differently because “we’re 90 percent female.”
And she said a government minister told her in a meeting that they were surprised nurses had to live on their salaries: “And you know, ministers that came into the room told me they were shocked that the nursing staff could be the main breadwinner.” in the family. Because they think it’s a second salary we don’t depend on. They have completely lost touch.”
The Department of Health said it did not recognize the allegation and had “the utmost respect” for all staff.
Nurses at the RCN eventually rejected the deal recommended by their own union – a sign of how much public sector workers fear the squeeze on their real wages.
The film shows how caregivers have felt heartened by the large public outreach, especially since the pandemic.
That perception of support, even in less popular jobs than the NHS, has helped underpin double-digit salary claims. The tactic, successful in the private sector, of voting strikes first in order to gain bargaining power in wage disputes has also spread to the public sector.
Some union bosses also concede that the strikes may not have bothered the public as much at a time when more workers are able to work from home. While the total number of strikes has not been observed for a generation, the total number of days lost due to strikes is nowhere near the peaks of the 1970s.
Still, some in the union movement are trying to break new ground, such as Amazon’s GMB.
Outside the company’s warehouse in Coventry, Stuart Richards, a senior GMB organizer, is trying to recruit new members.
A leaked US Amazon executive training video cartoon in 2018 made it clear that “we do not believe that unions are in the best interests of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our employees” — the term for workers.
But staff who drive in have come under severe pressure from the cost of living crisis – they are said to have had to pawn a wedding ring – and some were willing to turn back near the entrance to their workplace and register for Richard’s campaign .
Finally, the GMB takes over more than half of the workers in Coventry, which the union estimates at 1,300, and delivers a letter demanding recognition of Amazon bosses – it’s the first site in the UK to do so a decade of trying.
So the real question is whether the current uptick in strike activity is purely a reaction to rampant inflation, or whether it may have longer-lasting repercussions.
picture description,
Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham
Full data are not yet available, but it is difficult to buck the pattern of unionized jobs, particularly in shortage occupations that receive double-digit payslips.
They have responded to existing strike restrictions by moving to immediate local voting even before negotiations began. On the other hand, insiders say that membership increases when there are wage disputes, but decreases when there are collective bargaining agreements. Union submarines are another expense during a cost-of-living crisis. Official figures will follow next year.
However, there are some concerns about the persistence and resilience of inflation. Even the Bank of England, which last year began warning against excessive pay rises, is now linking the message to concerns about corporate pricing and profits, a message similar to that promoted by some union leaders.
And the political economy of all of this does seem to be changing.
In the past year, it has proved difficult for the government to bash the unions. David Cameron’s union czar Lord Richard Balfe argues that Prime Ministers Johnson and Truss should have sued for peace with public sector workers much earlier. The opposition was confident enough to announce that if it came to power it would repeal the new “minimum service laws” as well as older voting restrictions.
The current wave of industrial action seems to be calming down, but it is not over yet. The government is trying to regulate pay settlements that it previously left to pay inspection bodies. It is possible that inflation will now fall on a sustained basis. But the shadow of this year’s industrial action could linger for some time.
Comments are closed.