UNION reps and activists have reasons for qualified confidence as we mark the second great labour movement carnival of the summer, the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival.
Attendees at an event celebrating the victory of people power over unjust anti-trade union laws can march with a spring in their step following the humiliating defeat of the government at the High Court this week, when its legislation allowing employers to use agency workers to break strikes was ruled illegal.
Nor can we underestimate the significance of the government’s climbdown on public-sector pay.
From declining even to publish the advice of pay review bodies, Rishi Sunak has dramatically accepted them, leading to education unions suspending planned strikes and recommending acceptance of a 6.5 per cent pay offer. Raises of between 5 and 7 per cent are now to be awarded to workers in healthcare, education, policing, prisons and the military.
Last Monday Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey were telling City bigwigs at the annual Mansion House dinner that pay was growing too fast — despite workers facing the fastest real-terms loss in income on record over the past year — and urged that wages be held down to slow inflation.
The government’s mood music on disputes was aggressive, with ministers declining to talk to unions unless strikes were taken off the table and a refusal even to address questions like the cumulative loss of pay over the last 13 years. The about-turn is a sign that unions were right not to back away from threatened strikes: the government has been moved by pressure from below.
Even so, as TUC general secretary Paul Nowak tells the Morning Star in tomorrow’s edition, there will be no “popping champagne corks” at results like this.
Sunak continued the bully-boy tactics even while retreating — education unions for example were warned that unless they agreed to recommend the 6.5 per cent offer to their members, it would immediately be withdrawn.
The Treasury says the awards will not be funded by borrowing or higher taxes. In some departments there are fears that this will mean cutting back on services.
Extra money has been pledged for schools, but the government is not retrieving this from the record-breaking profits being accumulated by energy or food companies — the foremost driver of inflation. It is raising the cost of visa applications and charging immigrants more money to access the NHS.
In no department will the new award match inflation, so public-sector workers are to get poorer for the 15th year in a row.
And though accepting recommendations from the likes of the School Teachers Review Board is better than offering a lower figure as ministers have previously done, we should not for a moment allow these bodies to be depicted as independent or objective arbitrators.
Their composition and terms of reference are decided by the government. Unions point out that those sitting on these pay review bodies are generally from corporate executive backgrounds. Unite leader Sharon Graham has previously called for the abolition of the NHS pay review body and its replacement by a system of direct national negotiations — real collective bargaining.
Like the High Court ruling against scabbing by agency workers, which was based on ex-business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng’s failure to consult and does not prevent the even more serious assault on strike rights in the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, this week’s victory for public-sector workers is partial, a step forward, but not a resolution to the steady immiseration of Britain’s working people by the rich or the crisis across public services.
The question now is how we use this demonstration of our movement’s power to embolden workers and confront these twin threats.
