An autumn wave of strike action is sweeping across the UK, embracing industries and sectors long untouched by industrial strife, as workers struggle to make ends meet in the face of double-digit inflation.
Here, we speak to three trade union activists on the frontline of the cost of living crisis about why they got involved, and what they are fighting for.
Bella Fashola
“You are never going to win the fight overnight. But we’re going to give it all we’ve got because we have no other option. It’s as simple as that,” says 26-year-old train cleaner Bella Fashola.
Employed by facilities management company Churchill, she works on Govia Thameslink trains, from Hastings station in East Sussex.
As an RMT rep, Fashola has been helping to organise colleagues to fight for a £15 an hour wage, sick pay and help with travel costs. They took strike action earlier this year and are now preparing to ballot for a fresh round of stoppages – and coordinating with cleaners from other outsourcing firms.
“We’re currently on the real living wage, if you can call it that, which is £9.90. We still have no company sick pay, and obviously Covid hasn’t just disappeared into thin air,” she says.
Fashola describes having “roughly eight minutes” to clean a train – removing rubbish from seats and on the floor, cleaning the tables, emptying the bins, and cleaning the toilets. “It’s kind of like you’re set up to fail really, aren’t you?” she says.
“You can’t take pride, because you feel like you come into work and you’re just completely beaten down. You’ve been battered from pillar to post with the cost of living going up.” She blames the business model of outsourcing, arguing that it encourages undercutting. “We will fight to the bitter end until they put us back in-house,” she says.
Fashola decided to become actively involved in the union after the Covid pandemic, when her mother was diagnosed with cancer and she ended up taking unpaid leave to care for her.
“When I came back, I was like, we need to sort this out. We need to get this organised. And we will need to fight back. Because surely people can still remember what a vital role all cleaners in all sectors played during the pandemic?”
Recruiting her colleagues to the cause has meant bringing together such a diverse group, some fellow trade unionists have called it the “United Nations strike”. “We’ve got about 40 different nationalities on the Churchill contracts alone,” she says.
Joyce Stevenson
“I’ve been employed by BT for 44 years, all of which time has been dealing with 999 calls – so it’s not a decision that anybody would take lightly but the responsibility for where we are has to lie with the company.”
Joyce Stevenson, 63, was among the emergency call handlers employed by BT who joined in strikes this week. They had been excluded from previous industrial action; but the Communication Workers Union (CWU) leadership decided this time they would join the picket lines.
Stevenson says the job, which involves fielding emergency calls and passing them on to the relevant service, can sometimes be intensely stressful. “For example, my members had to deal with Grenfell. Because we couldn’t get calls through to the fire authorities, we had to keep speaking to these people, many of whom would not have made it out of the building alive. That’s not something that happens every day, but it is something that happens,” she says.
She says her colleagues accepted that the depths of the pandemic was not the time for a pay rise, but decided to take action when BT opted to impose an across-the-board £1,500 increase earlier this year.
“A lot of our members are only being paid £21,500 for working 37-and-a-half hours; and they don’t get any paid breaks, so all their breaks are over and above that,” she says.
“Some of the call centres have got food banks, and it’s food banks for the staff – with a notice up, saying: ‘If you feel like you’ve run out of money at the end of the month, come and get a few bits.’”
“From the day that I started, I loved my job: loved answering the calls, loved everything about it. I really did – but it really is soul-destroying now, when you see what’s happening,” Stevenson says.
“We all got a kind of pin badge during the pandemic, and on it it said: 999 Heroes. And at the time you thought, I’m really doing my bit; but that was on the basis that you thought: well, when we come out of the pandemic, we’ll be treated with respect. But it’s just not happened.”
Trevor Chalkley
“We don’t want to go out on strike. We don’t want to have picket lines. We don’t want to fall out with people. We just want to get on with what we love,” says 67-year-old Trevor Chalkley, a guide at the National Coal Mining Museum for England in Wakefield.
Chalkley, who leads visitors underground to give them a taste of life at the coalface, was a miner himself for 43 years. “Generally, we all absolutely love the work we do, especially preserving the mining heritage,” he says.
Yet staff at the museum have just voted in favour of industrial action, after they were offered a 4.2% pay rise earlier this year – a deal that was rejected by Unison members “quite overwhelmingly”.
“I suppose like many people in our type of work, over a number of years we’ve not really had any significant wage rises, or anything that’s matched inflation,” he says, adding that this year has presented “several financial challenges”.
Predictions of sharply rising energy prices and double-digit inflation “really spooked people”, he says.
With the full-time wage at £18,000, those who can afford it have been forced to dip into their savings, he explains. “Nobody can keep doing that, can they? So it’s changed the mindset of people.”
With his Unison colleagues, Chalkley has been arguing for a more generous deal and for the museum to “share the pot out” instead of offering a percentage increase, with the aim of helping lower-paid workers.
Even before they have set the date for any walkout, there are signs the staff’s defiance may have borne fruit. “The museum has now indicated that they will make a revised offer, which we will be considering,” Chalkley says. “I wouldn’t say there was light at the end of the tunnel, but at least we’re talking.”
Asked whether he took part in the miners’ strike of 1984-85, he says mildly: “I was involved in the strikes in the 70s. I was in a different position in 1984.
“It’s amazing really: everybody when you talk about the miners, the first thing they say is, oh, 1984, the strike – but it was one year out of 200 years of mining.”
• This article was amended on 13 October 2022. The National Coal Mining Museum for England is not “part of the Science Museum group” as an earlier version said, although it does receive its core funding from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport through the group. The reference has been removed.
