After weeks of indefinite strike action, 57% of the Criminal Bar Association’s members who voted on the government’s pay deal decided to accept a 15% increase in legal aid fees. It may sound generous but, as one barrister who voted against tells me, “in light of a previous 28% pay cut and rising inflation, it’s insufficient in my view”, which is why the demand was a 25% hike.
As the bestselling author who operates under the pseudonym The Secret Barrister puts it, “it is not going to bring back the 25% of criminal barristers who have left, nor is it going to persuade the juniors earning £12,000 a year to stick around”. There have been concessions, secured solely entirely by strike action – such as a backdated increase in payments, previously dismissed by the Ministry of Justice as legally impossible – but there is no confidence in the independence of a new pay review body. A return to strike action in the future is all but inevitable.
That the barristers’ struggle has not yet secured its ultimate goals is disappointing, but there is hope. According to figures by Unite – the country’s biggest private sector trade union – 221 industrial disputes have been resolved in the favour of workers since August 2021: a win rate of 81%. In August, the union won hundreds of Heinz workers a pay increase worth 11%, plus three more days off at Christmas. When British Airways took three days of holiday pay away from its 2,000 engineers, it underestimated their capacity to fight back: the threat of strike action forced them into retreat. That came not long after the airline was forced to give thousands of the airline’s staff – from cabin crew to baggage handlers – an average 13% pay rise.
Labour may have been founded as the political wing of the trade union movement, but its own record is patchy, to say the least. Earlier this year, I reported from Coventry on a strike by bin-lorry drivers: a Labour council refused to give them the requested pay rise, telling me point blank that the demand was impossible to satisfy. Yet after six months of strike action, the strikers secured a 12.9% pay hike and Christmas bonuses, putting thousands of pounds in their pockets. Other unions have chalked up victories to boast about, too: engineering workers at British Gypsum overwhelmingly voted for strike action when the company reneged on an existing pay deal, forcing the company into swift retreat; while striking bin workers in Adur and Worthing won a pay increase of up to 20.7% back in the spring.
It is true that some workers are better placed than others to secure concessions from bosses. London Underground workers have the capacity to cause the kind of disruption that, say, factory employees don’t. But the breadth of workers’ victories shows that, regardless of the sector, triumph against even the most recalcitrant bosses is possible.
These gains embolden others to follow their lead, something the Tories are fully aware of. After the Conservative government was taken down by the miners’ strikes of the 1970s, the party swiftly planned revenge. The Ridley Plan – devised before their return to government in 1979 – schemed to provoke another showdown with the miners, but this time with stockpiling and importing of coal, to ensure they could be routed. That defeat of the miners in the mid-1980s – combined with other defeats of unions, most notably the printworkers at Wapping – was intended to offer a salutary lesson: don’t bother striking, because you will be defeated, and be hounded by the media and pay a terrible price to boot.
Combined with some of the most restrictive anti-union laws in the western world, strike action has plummeted to record lows. We have all suffered the consequences: the longest squeeze in workers’ wages in modern history, one significantly worse than other comparable countries. No wonder, then, households are increasingly saddled with large debts.
Liz Truss’s government intends to tighten the legal vice on the unions still further, and for unsurprising reasons: many of the rich bosses who bankroll the party know that strike action is effective, and wish to permanently neuter workers’ ability to improve their lot. If successful, British society will be further condemned to stagnation and falling living standards. So while the barristers did not secure all they fought for – and the rail workers led by Mick Lynch have still not yet won either – we should remember why bosses fear the strike: because it works.
The old slogan of the union movement – “an injury to one is an injury to us all” – is powerful because it is true. When workers are defeated in one sector, that emboldens other bosses to resist claims from their own employees; likewise, when union members triumph, others are encouraged to stage a similar fightback. Whether they’re barristers, Heinz workers or cabin crew, they’re not just striking for themselves, they really are fighting for us all.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
