[A-List] UK labour militancy & public order

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

Blair has been burned already

However it is resolved, he is the loser in the firefighters' dispute

Kevin Maguire
Wednesday November 20, 2002
The Guardian

The world has turned upside down when a militant seafarer threatens to order
troops to cross firefighters' picket lines, prompting warnings from army
brigadiers that soldiers do not want to be deployed as strike-breakers.

John Prescott, the only union heavyweight in the cabinet, will have been
well aware that by raising the prospect of seizing red engines he was
inviting echoes of the general strike. Certainly military commanders,
anxious to avoid doing for Labour in 2002 what they did for the Tories in
1926, recognised the danger.

The growing nervousness in No 10 at the course of events should not be
underestimated. That a Labour leadership elected to improve public services
found themselves unable to provide one of the most vital of those services
for 48 hours is bad enough. But there is more. The government is anxious to
avoid other unions clambering aboard the Fire Brigades Union bandwagon - and
the damage that would do to its reputation in the City for financial
caution. And yet the unions remain Labour's biggest single source of party
funds and facing down the firefighters would risk tearing the party apart.

This dangerous situation could have been avoided had Tony Blair not been
lulled into a false sense of industrial security. Local authority workers
ran up their flag during the summer before quickly retreating and, apart
from outbursts of industrial action on the railways, relations have been
relatively harmonious since 1997. Clear signs from early this year that the
firefighters were serious about pressing the strike button were missed and,
when the government finally woke up to the threat, it attempted to sideline
the problem with a review rather than negotiate a solution.

A government in thrall to newspaper headlines must have believed it was
winning the public battle. Its biggest ally in this dispute - Fleet Street -
has unleashed wave after wave of incendiary words against Andy Gilchrist and
the FBU. Columnists and leader writers in virtually every paper have
published thousands of hostile words. The FBU's lone national ally has been
the Daily Mirror.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, newspapers have a long tradition of
misjudging the mood of their readers and this fire dispute can now be added
to that list. The more papers demonised Mr Gilchrist and the firefighters,
the more their readers chose to see public servants simply seeking better
rewards for doing a dangerous job well. Yesterday's Guardian ICM poll,
showing 53% of people supported the firefighters after last week's strike,
with 62% critical of the government's handling of the dispute, will have
made unhappy reading in Fleet Street as well as Downing Street.

The government's priority is to avoid a second strike and allow both sides
to settle with honour which, inevitably, will involve fudged figures and
arguments about the value of efficiency savings from "modernisation",
formerly know as changes in working practices. After refusing to fund a
16.1% two-year deal floated by local employers in July, the government
ordered the review under Sir George Bain. Presented as the key to settling
the dispute, Bain has become an obstacle.

The employers have already ditched two central planks of the Bain report:
cutting strings imposed on a 4% offer this year and agreeing a new annual
pay formula opposed by the review chair. A critical analysis of the Bain
report for the FBU by Roger Seifert, a professor of human resources
management at Keele university, accuses Bain of muddled thinking. Take the
overtime ban, denounced by Bain as a restrictive practice. As Seifert points
out, it was the logical outcome of the old pay formula which added any extra
earnings to overall earnings, reducing the following year's pay rise.

Bain (male, white) and the government's newspaper cheerleaders
(overwhelmingly male, white) have also condemned firefighters for being
mainly male and white. Even leaving aside the failure of the employers to
recruit women and crew members from minority communities, this is
disingenuous. As Seifert points out, Bain's proposed return of overtime in
the fire service, a family-unfriendly practice, would only undermine the
recruitment of women.

During negotiations over the next few days, as 11% over two years is nudged
up, all those involved in the dispute will be looking for a way out. But it
will be too late: burning braziers, troops on the streets, double-digit pay
demands, threats of secondary action and newspapers raging against trade
union leaders have returned to Britain. Tony Blair may still be able to
defeat the firefighters but, in a damaging sense, he has already lost this
dispute.