The strength of the trade union movement, historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, cannot be fully understood by looking at the curves on a graph that show membership. Instead, there are “jumps”, “jumps” and “explosions” in the activity. For him, these unpredictable peaks and sudden moments of uplift are produced by “accumulations of combustible material that ignite only intermittently, as if under compression.”
Britain is currently experiencing a moment of resurgence. Welcome to what many have already called a “hot strike summer.”
Clearly, what happens to our paid packages is a big part of the story. If you factor in inflation, wages are expected to shrink by £1,750 over the next two years. The only group of workers whose wages rose in line with prices were those earning more than £170,000 a year.
But that’s not all. For the first time since records were kept, the contraction in the labor force means there are more job vacancies than unemployed. Struggling to attract people to unfilled positions, some employers have tried to impose compulsory overtime on their existing staff – this was one of the contentious issues in the Caterpillar strike in Northern Ireland.
Then there’s the pandemic. While disrupting and reorganizing our patterns of work, Covid-19 also laid the groundwork for today’s unexpected surge in worker confidence. Pandemic battles over firing and rehiring tactics and the reopening of schools have provided workers with an opportunity to flex their muscles and build their collective confidence. A key lever in many of the disputes we see now – the Communications Workers Union action against Royal Mail and BT Group, the RMT action against Network Rail or the number of external hospital cleaners and porters actions – is the idea of the ‘key worker’. Faced with excessively long hours, the stress of pandemic work and rapidly deteriorating workplace conditions, those deemed “essential” were repeatedly told they deserved better. But as CWU Deputy General Secretary Terry Pullinger recently stated: “We are not getting what we deserve. We get what we bargain for.”
Industrial action is now at its highest level in five years, although the average for recent decades is historically low. RMT strike 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 Royal Mail, making it the biggest mandate for strike action since the implementation of the Trade Union Act 2016. In the 10 months since she was elected general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham has watched 63,000 Unite members enter into disputes. If workers are made to “pay the price of inflation”, she warned there could be hundreds more disputes.
At present, strike action is largely concentrated in the public sector. This is partly due to the disparity in the growth of the average wage, which this year is 7.2% for the private sector and only 1.5% for the public sector. This is also due to a disparity in membership: the latest figures show that while 51.9% of public sector workers are unionized, only 12.9% of private sector workers are. But this has the effect of giving strikes an explicitly political dimension, as public sector pay is ultimately determined by elected representatives. Add to this the way unions bring analysis and ideas into the public discourse that Labor has largely shied away from – think demands to cap profits to tackle inflation rather than suppress wages – and you can see why even relatively small strike action can have a huge impact.
But those who are excited about the present moment should be cautious. Where strike action exists in the private sector, it has not made much headway beyond previously nationalized industries – for example British Airways or the railways. And as feelings of injustice grow into militancy, it is far from clear that unions are up to the task of realizing them. In June, when the RMT defiantly took strike action in response to Network Rail’s 2% pay rise, supermarket workers’ union Usdaw saw the agreed 2% pay rise for Morrisons workers as a victory. When the pay deal – which one unionist called “the highest basic pay in the supermarket sector” – was put to a vote by Morrisons Usdaw members, they voted to reject it.
What we are facing now, in the words of American labor scholar Kim Moody, are “opportunities, not certainties.” While this year’s conflicts so far have been impressive and significant, they are also defensive: the battle is largely to prevent even worse conditions, even if the rhetoric is more ambitious. The surprise onset of economic circumstances that are susceptible to worker power—high inflation, a tight labor market, and supply chain disruptions—can also lead to the risk of complacency. There is much promise in the increased readiness of both rank and file and leaders to act, but circumstances that tend to waver do not guarantee success.
As Hobsbawm notes, there is a difference between accumulating flammable materials and igniting them. But when workers see each other fighting back, sparks can start to fly.
Polly Smythe is a labor correspondent for Novara Media
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