[A-List] UK state: trade unions

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

It looks like the TUC has been strongarmed into falling into line with
Blair, as the ejection of Bob Crow from the general council yesterday
would indicate. Here's John Birt's buddy Polly Toynbee, on a mission to
explain why Blair is essentially right and that the fire brigades union
is just a bunch of throwback neanderthal men who want to preserve gender
wage inequalities which, by the way, can only be reduced by reducing the
pay of men. Absolutely breathtaking!


Firefighters will need more than mindless muscle

Blair can flatter the unions because he knows the old days are over

Polly Toynbee
Wednesday September 11, 2002
The Guardian

So is this war? The noise from new trade union leaders Bob Crow (RMT),
Mick Rix (Aslef) and Derek Simpson (Amicus) sent frissons of delight
down the spines of the rightwing press. At last! History will repeat
itself and the Tories sweep to power on the one issue that remains
unassailably Mrs Thatcher's triumph. The public may blame her for 18
years of public service ruination and rusting infrastructure, but the
one thing they give her in the saloon bars and the taxi cabs - she did
stop the unions running the country. So is this a flicker of dawn in the
long night of Tory opposition?

Almost certainly not. Tony Blair's reasonably emollient tones and his
correspondingly good reception by the TUC yesterday suggest that the
noisy new boys are not mainstream. Where were the wild cat calls in the
Winter Gardens so eagerly predicted by the Tory press? Instead there was
applause. As things stand, the unions are in a surprisingly strong
position - unless they play their present hand very badly indeed. Right
now, public opinion is with them. Most people think Thatcher went too
far in crushing them: the snarl of Tebbit is detested more than the
bellow of Crow.

The Guardian ICM poll shows 59% think strikes in the public sector by
rail, tube and council workers are justified. Tony Blair's praise for
unions was well in tune with his focus groups, but he rightly warned
them of losing that public support. His easy confidence in facing them
comes from knowing what wiser old TUC heads also know: the public is
fickle and they have suffered no real inconvenience yet. A one-day
strike for the dinner ladies is heart-warmingly easy to support, but the
country grinding to a halt soon sets public teeth grinding. The danger
is not that Labour will be brought down again by the unions, but that if
the unions answer the siren calls of Bob Crow et al, they will get
mashed by Blair as soundly as they were squashed by Thatcher, because
the thwack of firm government is what the voters would expect again if
it came to serious disruption. So, as John Monks knew, it is partnership
or carry on declining.

Physically the unions are weak, membership concentrated in the old not
the new service occupations - 19% membership in the private sector and
even in the public sector only 65%. However desperately needed unions
are among the low-paid and down-trodden, the new recognition laws have
only succeeded in slowing long-term decline. (There should be compulsory
ballots in every non-unionised workplace, where organising can be next
to impossible for casualised shift workers unsure of their rights.) But
it is not on muscle, but on public opinion that unions rely for their
real power. Crow and partners need that political lesson, since public
alienation seems to be almost a strategy with them.

To succeed, unions need to capitalise skilfully on the general sympathy
for public service staff who have fallen far behind and deserve much
better. Yet at the same time they must be wary of polls that show 78% of
voters fear the extra money for public services will be "used up" in pay
instead of improvements. The council workers' victory was exemplary:
they won, they got a long-term pay review and they kept public affection
to fight another day.

But next up, the firefighters are in danger of overreaching themselves.
This may be 9/11 we-love-firefighters week, but if train drivers and
tube drivers come out in support of firefighters, avoiding the secondary
action laws by claiming that running trains without firefighters is a
safety issue, sympathy may wane.

Andy Gilchrist, the new Fire Brigades Union leader, is making a splash
with a startling 40% demand - 40%! Many other trade union leaders roll
their eyes and sigh. "Hope Andy's got an exit strategy," says one, who
is himself regarded as a radical - 40%! Some of the women trade
unionists who helped organise the low-paid council workers strike spit
with fury. "Who do these willy-wavers think they are?" said one, as her
cooks, cleaners and carers settled for £5 an hour, less than half what
firefighters get now, let alone another 40% on top. "What makes them
think a firefighter is worth so much more than a senior care assistant,
breaking her back lifting old people all day, saving lives too and,
frankly, working a darned sight harder. Firefighters are asleep half the
bloody time they're on duty!" On the record, the brothers' omerta means
the TUC general council supported the firefighters nem con, but some
shook their heads.

Well, has he got an exit strategy? There is still a long way to go
before a possible strike at the end of October. There is plenty of room
for compromise, so long as they don't paint themselves into a corner.
Income Data Services, which monitors pay in all sectors, calculates that
like all public servants, the FBU has indeed fallen far behind. To catch
up with 1978, they need 21%. It is not impossible to imagine a phased
deal that got them close. Both sides agree their skills have grown
greatly, raising them up from manual workers to assistant professionals.
Their present £21,531 is not a lot of money - though it is the median,
so half the workforce earns even less. But 40%? If them, why not
everyone?

The employers want a quid pro quo: a review of working practices as well
as pay. But unlike the council workers, who welcomed it, the FBU refuses
any review, especially not of their working practices. Emotional pleas
about the danger - three die a year - may wear a bit thin among
trawlermen and building trades with far higher death rates.
Firefighters' jobs are sufficiently desirable so that almost alone among
public workers, there is no shortage. Once the public focuses on all
this, the firefighters may look a bit less loveable than they do this
week. Blair's political education dates from 1979, hearing those
famously disastrous words of the leader of the London ambulancemen: "If
it means lives must be lost, that is how it must be." If the Fire
Brigades Union or anyone else threatened anything like it now, they'd be
seen off. Times have changed.

But both these strikes bring home the great public pay dilemma the
government will have to face. The review of council workers' pay will
stub its toe at once on "comparability". What is any worker worth? How
do you value them? Easy to give points for training, for exams, for
responsibility but allowing for these, they are all indispensable and it
gets difficult.

Until now women's work has been downgraded simply because women do it
with no rhyme or reason, only tradition - from teaching, social work and
nursing to caring, cleaning and catering. Women's jobs will have to be
revalued upwards. Then where do firefighters, who are compared now to
the upper quartile of male manual pay, fit? (An FBU leader reputedly had
a racehorse called Upper Quartile.) All need more, but women's pay
cannot rise relatively unless some men's pay falls back, relatively.
Awkward truth.