Notes on the strike

Rang around a few union branches for views on last week's local government strike action, and on the list of demands that unions will apparently put to the Labour national policy forum this week:

Barnet Unison branch secretary John Burgess describes rallying the troops at Barnet Council for last week's two-day strike action as 'pretty hard, to be honest.' About 900 people went out on the first day (16 July) at Barnet and about 1100 on the second (Burgess thinks he had about a 55% turnout). The strike action closed about 20 schools, and partly-closed about ten others. 

Burgess says that the logistics of organising strike action on this scale, and in this environment, were almost too challenging. The sentiment is there - public sector workers are as worried about the credit squeeze as anyone, and they are incensed about the privatisation of public services - but unfortunately, the sector is also disparate, disorganised, and easy for management and strike-breakers to circumnavigate. 

Burgess estimates that about a third of the staff providing council services at Barnet are temps and/or agency workers, or are outsourced workers who are as frightened of the consequences of taking strike action as they are difficult to co-ordinate into it.

Another problem this time was that members of other public sector unions weren't out on strike (the GMB, for example, accepted the government's 2.45% pay offer, which meant that GMB members were at work - although some refused to cross the picket lines).

Things are made even more challenging by the behaviour of Unison's leadership - specifically, the leadership's ongoing reluctance to acknowledge that its members are demanding that the union break its formal link with the much-loathed Labour party.

'You could see the response that the leaders got at the [strike] rally (in central London on Wednesday). Any time that they mentioned Labour, they got booed. People were shouting 'Disafilliate! Disaffiliate! [Unison deputy general secretary] Keith Sonnet got a real howling when he spoke... People want someone to lead them. It gives them confidence.'

Certainly, people can be reluctant to follow leaders who appear to be galloping towards oblivion. 'There were people crossing the picket lines this time around. There were a lot of people crossing the picket lines in Children's Services. I didn't really understand that. I was disappointed with that.'

All of that said, though, Burgess was impressed by the effort made by many staff - low-paid staff in particular. 

'They are the ones who find it the hardest to lose two days' pay. There were a lot of really inspirational stories. There was one guy (a refuse loader and driver) who is the only Unison member at his depot. The other people there were GMB members. He went out on strike by himself, which was pretty brave. The next day, the GMB members he works with refused to cross the picket line.'

It's this last that leads Burgess to say 'we are not going to deliver this [industrial action] again without the help of other unions. We need to work with the PCS and the NUT, especially at steward level.'

As for reports that unions are starting to organise well at a strategic level, and plan to jointly present the national Labour party policy forum with more than 100 demands - 'I was listening to that on Radio Four and it sounds like another Warwick to me.'

He doesn't just mean that it will again be based at Warwick. As many in the union movement are all too well aware, the Warwick agreement was an agreed union/Labour Party policy programme which Labour pledged to address in return for union support - the agreement covered issues like corporate manslaughter legislation and pensions protection.

Perhaps needless to say, Labour has failed quite spectacularly to deliver on almost all of its Warwick commitments, so there's some cynicism about priority that Labour is likely to give this new list of demands that union leaders plan to present. There wouldn't be much reason to hope even if a couple of the demands made it onto the Labour party conference agenda and were adopted as policy. This government has, after all, a history of ignoring its own party conference decisions on Labour issues - council housing is one that comes to mind.

Hackney Unison branch chair Brian Debus feels that the strike went reasonably well in Hackney, on the face of it at least.

'It's hard to tell the numbers exactly yet (Hackney has a Unison membership of about 3000), but I felt that there were more people on the picket lines [than usual]. We had a rally on the Town Hall steps and there were about 150 people there. I would say that about 30 or 40 went into town [central London] for the demonstration.

The high numbers of non-unionised agency workers remain a problem - 'lots of them went into work' - but the action worked in services staffed by permanent workers. 'About 90% of librarians were out, because we're well organised there. About 22 schools were affected by partial closures, so that was a victory for us on the schools front.'

Debus says that the public was 'generally sympathetic. We were at the Town Hall and Learning Trust where a lot of members of the public come in and there wasn't any abuse. I think the mood is with us. People understand the worry about wages.'

He wonders if the Unison leadership is entirely with the mood, though: Debus says that although the leadership made the right noises about supporting last week's strike action, there is still little indication that it can hear its members baying for disafilliation from Labour (Debus is among those making the most noise - as we speak, he's being disciplined by Unison for criticising its standing orders committee for quashing debate about the Labour link).

'[General secretary Dave] Prentis indicated a bit more militance [in his speech to Unison's June 2008 national conference], but they're still not going all the way. Keith Sonnet got a lot of abuse when he spoke at the strike rally [last week in central London]. People were shouting 'break the link! break the link!' as a chant. Then, I heard [Unison's head of local government] Heather Wakefield and her argument was that the money [for a better pay settlement] should be found from the savings employers have made . They weren't even mentioning the Labour link.'

And the list of demands going to the Labour national policy forum? - 'Another Warwick.'

Hammersmith Unison housing convenor Bruce Mackay reports a mixed day: 'HR said that only 300 people were out, but that was rubbish. The vast majority of our members were out, but we didn't have so many on the picket lines.' The union was also disappointed by the number of people who crossed the pickets - 'especially in housing benefits, and areas that have traditionally been very strong. We had people crossing the line who were saying that they couldn't afford to take two days off.'

He agrees that co-ordinated action between unions need to be the next step - 'we will need to join the PCS and the NUT when they strike later in the year. We need to keep up the momentum. Our national leadership has committed to this.'