THE ferocious anti-union wish list published in the Daily Mail by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps shows the government is running scared.
Scared of the power workers are demonstrating as they take collective action to defend their jobs, pay and conditions.
Scared of the evidence that unions are winning for their members.
Big private-sector unions like Unite and GMB are securing significant pay awards in workplaces up and down the land through targeted industrial action — most recently the 1,800 Arriva bus drivers in north-west England organised by Unite, who returned to work today after strikes won an 11.1 per cent pay offer from management.
For a government determined to protect record-breaking corporate profits at workers’ expense, each of these wins is a defeat.
That’s why they are so alarmed by the spread of national strikes involving tens of thousands of workers in transport and communications. That’s why they are dreaming up ever more repressive legislation to stop workers withdrawing their labour.
They fear the example being set to hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers in health, education and the Civil Service who are themselves starting to take action against the vicious real-terms pay cuts being imposed by Conservative ministers.
While average annual pay growth in the private sector, at 5.9 per cent, lags way behind inflation it is even further behind — at just 1.8 per cent — in the public sector.
Shapps’s proposals are outrageous: even higher participation thresholds for strike votes, doubling the notice unions must give employers of strikes (giving them more time to deploy the Tories’ newly legalised scab labour), limits on the number allowed to attend a picket line.
There’s no public appetite for any of this — the current strike wave enjoys majority support.
That won’t stop the Tories. The biggest possible public demonstrations of support for striking workers are needed.
And whether that’s on picket lines themselves or at town hall meetings or on high streets, we must rip through the tangle of lies told to smear striking workers.
When they claim there’s no money for a proper pay rise, take a look at the cash being lavished on shareholders — like the £400 million Royal Mail handed to shareholders last November, or the nearly £1 billion paid in dividends by the railway’s rolling stock companies during the pandemic.
In a business world where famous brands are owned by little-known conglomerates and money is channelled off to minimise tax obligations, it’s easy for bosses to plead poverty when the money for a raise is there when you know where to look — as Unite has shown with its successful leverage tactics.
When they talk about “modernisation,” what do they mean? We know Shapps thinks the right to a day off is “archaic.”
Tory “modernisation” plans for rail simply degrade the service and attack staff rights. Royal Mail’s “restructuring” is merely an attack on negotiated working hours, sick pay and Sunday pay, accompanied by threats to hive off its profitable parcels business from letters, placing the universal service obligation at risk.
None of this will strengthen the services concerned. Like Liz Truss’s jeer that British workers need to “graft” more, when we work among the longest hours in Europe, it accelerates a race to the bottom.
It’s an effort to squeeze more profit out of overworked staff, when Britain’s low productivity has more to do with low investment, both capital investment and funding for research, development and training. This lags behind other G7 countries because our corporations prefer to siphon money out of the country rather than invest in its future.
There is every justification for the strike wave, and the Tories know it. Workers fighting for pay that shields them from soaring inflation need all our solidarity.
Bosses claiming their pockets are empty while paying astronomical salaries to executives and posting record profits must be taken down.
