The strength of the trade union movement, the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, cannot be fully understood by looking at curves on a graph that show membership. Instead, there are “jumps,” “leaps” and “explosions” in activity. For him, these unpredictable peaks and sudden moments of upsurge are produced by “accumulations of inflammable material which only ignite periodically, as it were under compression”.
Britain is experiencing a moment of ignition right now. Welcome to what many have already dubbed “hot strike summer”.
Clearly, what’s happening to our pay packets is a big part of the story. If you take inflation into account, wages are set to shrink by £1,750 over the next two years. The only group of workers whose wages are rising in line with prices are those earning more than £170,000 a year.
But that’s not all. For the first time since records began, a shrinking of the labour force has meant there are more job vacancies than there are unemployed people. Struggling to attract individuals into unfilled roles, some employers have sought to impose compulsory overtime on their existing staff – this has been one of the disputed matters in the Caterpillar strike in northern Ireland.
Then there’s the pandemic. While it disrupted and reorganised our patterns of work, Covid-19 was also laying the foundations for today’s unforeseen uptick in workers’ self-confidence. Pandemic fights over fire and rehire tactics and the reopening of schools provided workers with an opportunity to flex their muscles and build their collective confidence. A key point of leverage in many of the disputes we’re seeing now – the Communication Workers Union action against Royal Mail and the BT Group, RMT action against Network Rail, or the number of actions by outsourced hospital cleaners and porters – is the idea of the “key worker”. In the face of excessive hours, the stresses of pandemic work and rapidly eroding workplace conditions, those deemed “essential” were repeatedly told they deserved better. But, as the CWU’s deputy general secretary Terry Pullinger recently stated: “We don’t get what we deserve. We get what we negotiate.”
Industrial action is now at its highest level in five years, although the average of recent decades is low in historical terms. The RMT’s industrial action in June was the biggest on the rail network for more than 30 years. The CWU secured a 97.6% vote on a 77% turnout for strike action against the Royal Mail, making it the biggest mandate for strike action since the implementation of the 2016 Trade Union Act. In the 10 months since her election as Unite general secretary, Sharon Graham has overseen 63,000 Unite members entering disputes. If workers are made to “pay the price for inflation”, she has warned there could be hundreds more disputes.
At present, industrial action is largely concentrated in the public sector. This is due in part to a discrepancy in the average pay growth, which in the current year sits at 7.2% for the private sector and only 1.5% in the public sector. It’s also down to a discrepancy in membership: the most recent data shows that, while 51.9% of public sector employees belonged to a trade union, only 12.9% of private sector employees did. But it has the effect of giving the strikes an explicitly political dimension, since public sector pay is ultimately determined by elected representatives. Add to this the way unions have been introducing analysis and ideas into the public discourse that the Labour party has largely shied away from – think of the demands on profit restraint to tackle inflation, instead of suppressing wages – and you can see why even relatively small strike actions can have an outsized influence.
But those excited about the current moment should be cautious. Where the strike wave exists in the private sector, it hasn’t made much headway beyond the formerly nationalised industries – for instance, British Airways or the railways. And, as feelings of injustice swell into ones of militancy, it’s far from clear that trade unions are up to the task of realising them. In June, as the RMT defiantly took strike action in response to Network Rail’s 2% pay increase, the supermarket workers’ union, Usdaw, saw having negotiated a 2% pay increase for Morrisons workers as a victory. When the pay deal – which one unionist called the “highest basic pay rate in the supermarket sector” – was put to a ballot of Morrisons Usdaw members, they voted to reject it.
What we’re faced with now, in the words of US labour scholar Kim Moody, is “opportunities, not certainties”. While this year’s conflicts so far are impressive and significant, they are also defensive: the fight is largely to prevent conditions getting worse still, even if the rhetoric is more ambitious. The surprise arrival of economic circumstances that are amenable to worker power – high inflation, a tight labour market and supply chain interruptions – can also bring the risk of complacency. There is much that’s promising in the increased willingness of both the rank and file and leaders to act, but circumstances, which are liable to fluctuate, do not guarantee success.
As Hobsbawm noted, there’s a difference between the accumulation of inflammable materials and their ignition. But when workers see each other fighting back, sparks can begin to leap.
• Polly Smythe is labour movement correspondent at Novara Media
