“Class struggle,” proclaims Mick Lynch, the leader of the RMT union. The Daily Mail relishes his “prehistoric rhetoric”, gleeful at what it hopes will turn into another culture war. Class struggle may sound old-fashioned, but when the entire public sector is about to experience a significant real terms pay cut after years of freezes and pay stagnation, what are trade unions supposed to do? Over the past 12 years, they have failed to ensure their members’ pay has kept up with inflation. They can hardly be expected to lie down under this monster assault on living standards.
The rail unions are staging one of the largest strikes in 30 years. But this is only the vanguard. Other public sector unions will soon follow, representing teachers, NHS staff, postal workers, council staff, care workers, legal aid lawyers and more. Rail workers are relatively well paid, because they have a strong and cohesive union. The average pay of those on strike is £33,000: that includes cleaners at one end of the spectrum and mechanics and engineers at the other. Well-paid drivers belong to another union, Aslef, which is not on strike, but the government includes their pay to inflate the average they claim that railway workers receive. The lesson from rail unions is that if union membership were higher throughout British businesses we would not have this low-pay economy of agency workers and zero-hours contracts, where growing numbers of workers need tax credits to top up miserable wages. Today, union membership is half what it was in the 1970s.
It’s the workers now heading to strikes who kept the country going through the pandemic, risking their health before Britain had vaccines. These are the people we effusively clapped from our doorsteps in the early days of Covid-19. But if sympathy and gratitude don’t move ministers, they should beware the permanent damage these deep pay cuts will cause the public sector. Official figures show private-sector pay grew 8% in the three months to April compared with 1.5% in the public sector. Swathes of public staff are highly skilled. Almost twice as many public-sector employees work in highly skilled jobs as those in the private sector. How long will these people remain in their roles if their pay remains low and understaffing in the NHS, teaching, care and other sectors makes work unbearably stressful? Once they leave, experience says they won’t be back. In the “great retirement”, older staff gave up early because of exhaustion. If the government succeeds in grinding down public pay, the crisis in one service after another will be irreparable.
Last October at the Tory party conference, Boris Johnson pledged, “we are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration”. Yet here he is, grinding pay even further down. Keir Starmer has called for the government to join the rail negotiations. But Simon Clarke, the Treasury chief secretary, has disingenuously claimed that adding a third party to the talks would “only confuse things”. No, it would clarify things.
In the all-but state-controlled rail sector, the Treasury sets the proportion of subsidy borne by the taxpayer. As pay disputes mount across the public sector, the Treasury may hold staff to ransom with moral blackmail, pledging to deduct any extra pay for clinicians, teachers or bin collectors from the shrinking budgets of the NHS, schools and councils. Yet it can afford to prevent the public sector falling behind. A pay rise to match inflation would cost an extra £10bn. The Treasury is set to pocket £27bn more this year in revenue than previously expected. Rampant inflation is caused by global fuel prices, certainly not by domestic pay, so fears of a wage-price spiral are grossly exaggerated. Even so, Clarke continues to hammer out the blunt and unjust message that workers can’t expect pay rises to match inflation. On some other planet, Treasury ministers might point to the pay of FTSE 350 chief executives, which has taken off again into the stratosphere.
But the battle lines are drawn by the rightwing papers, which have effectively become the press office of the Tory party. Allister Heath of the Telegraph writes that “Britain is in ruins thanks to the failed dogmas of our perennial leftist elite”, while the Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh blames “Marxist union mobs” who are determined to “plunge the UK into chaos”. Yet this is already the government of unprecedented chaos. Look around at everything falling apart after 12 years of aggressive and needless austerity. Look at the havoc wrought by its impossible Brexit. Queues everywhere tell the story, from the Passport Office, the DVLA and airports to the long waits for GPs and even longer waits for operations. You need only look at the number of potholes in the roads or the lack of teachers and equipment in schools, to see how our essential services have been thinned out. Less visible but even more deadly is the rise in the number of children going hungry, families using food banks and soaring household debt, with a winter of fuel poverty ahead.
The government hopes that strikes will distract from or even be a scapegoat for everything that doesn’t work. The vanishing of its long-promised employment rights bill shows its sharp change of direction. Starmer has accused ministers of wanting the country to “grind to a halt so they can feed off the division”, and of planning “attack ads” instead of getting round the negotiating table. Labour should use this chance to promote its own employment policies that would revolutionise power in the workplace.
Under those plans, employees who have never seen a union will be looking on at the battle for inflation-proof pay that is waged on everyone’s behalf. Now is the time for Labour to herald its pledge to give unions a new right to recruit in every workplace. Better than strikes, the party would bring in fair pay agreements across every sector to reset decades of rewards flowing unjustly backwards from workers to shareholders. The party would turn the table on bad employers by ending zero-hours contracts, P&O-style fire-and-rehire policies and bogus self-employment. Rachel Reeves has promised “radical insourcing” that would return outsourced workers from profiteering contractors back to the public sector. From day one, all employees would get sick pay, parental rights and protection from unfair dismissal.
But as things stand, unions are weak. Public workers, especially teachers, doctors and nurses, bear heavy responsibilities that make striking painfully difficult, despite the considerable pay they have all lost since 2010. That’s why the government has a moral obligation to treat them well. Johnson’s turbulent regime is to blame for the coming wave of strikes. Watch his people relishing the mayhem, but yet again, on this they may miscalculate.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
