Strike!

Workers in the UK banking industry have never been particularly militant. During the thirty-six years I worked for Midland Bank/HSBC, there were, to the best of my knowledge, only two disputes that led to strike action. Largely this was due to the fact that the trade union was weak; the majority of staff were not union members.

At some point during the late 1970s or early 1980s, a union rep from what was then either the National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE), or the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union (BIFU) – the name changed in 1979 – came to the branch I was working at in Romford as part of a recruitment drive. He was told to leave by the branch manager and not darken our doors again after he called non-union members “f*****g parasites” for accepting pay rises that the union negotiated.

The only times strike action that I can recall being taken during my time in work came in the late 1970s, and then in the mid-1980s, and that second one was somewhat feeble to be honest. In the late 1970s, workers at Midland Bank’s data centre in Brent, north London, went on strike for two days a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) for a while. The majority of customers would have been blissfully unaware that any industrial action was being taken, but for those of us who worked in branches, it was pretty inconvenient.

At some point during the 1980s there was a dispute over working on Christmas Eve. When 24^th December fell on a weekday, we closed at mid-day, but one year when the last working day before Christmas was not actually Christmas Eve, and we were expected to work a full day, the union decided to flex its muscles and a ballot was called to see if union members were in favour of striking and walking out at lunchtime.

The ballot having been called, the vote went in favour of strike action. I recall that at Midland Bank, Barking – where I was working at the time – the majority of union members voted in favour of striking, but some were somewhat reluctant to follow it through. In the end, I was one of those that walked out at mid-day. To be honest, it was pretty insignificant and a full day’s work in similar circumstances became the norm in later years.

I was always of the opinion that had there been any further disputes in the bank, then a work to rule would have been much more effective than a strike. Most employers rely on workers going the extra mile, doing unpaid overtime and shortcutting processes in order to get the job done. I worked in a number of departments where, had everyone decided to do their jobs exactly by the book, work their contracted hours only, and work strictly in accordance with their job descriptions, then the bank would have ground to a halt. I’m sure that many workers, in many other industries, would say the same.

The 1970s were rife with strikes in many industries and it was almost an act of faith by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to reduce the power of the trade unions, and as a result, membership fell from 13 million in 1979 to around 7.3 million in 2000. We have therefore become used to a period of some decades in which industrial action and strikes have become a rarity. Now, however, many industries are seeing strike action; railway workers, nurses, ambulance workers, junior doctors, university lecturers, and teachers are all striking or threatening to.

The very people who were applauded at the height of the covid pandemic, the very people who were lauded as heroes, the key workers without whom we wouldn’t have got through lockdown, are now being vilified because they are striking in pursuit of reasonable pay rises. I mentioned the former editor of The Sun, Kelvin McKenzie, in my last blog as he called the men and women who drive ambulances as “vile shitbags.” He has subsequently decided that the NHS is full of vile people, that firemen are more interested in their other jobs (pretty sure that this is an outdated, urban myth), and that he looks forward to unions being fined and public sector workers being sacked when they strike.

I’m not picking particularly on McKenzie, it’s just that his vitriolic tweets keep appearing in my Twitter timeline, despite my not following him (coincidence or not, but since Elon Musk bought Twitter, my timeline now seems full of people I don’t follow), and his views seem representative of a section of society – and members of government – who have decided that fighting for a reasonable pay increase is a heinous offense. There have been suggestions that – as McKenzie alluded to – the government may legislate to sack public sector workers who strike. This of course is a bonkers idea; imagine an industry in which workers like nurses or paramedics, or doctors, need several years of training and cannot be replaced overnight, and having those very workers dismissed for going on strike. That really would improve the level of service.

The language used in describing some of these disputes is interesting. “Hard working people” will be unfairly affected if certain workers strike, they say. But the strikers are hard working people too, hard working people who would like to be fairly rewarded for their labours. And as for nurses and others in the health service, there’s a suggestion that what they do is less a job, and more a vocation, the implication being that that somehow that justifies poor salaries, that these workers should be selfless and regard a job well done as reward itself. None of which puts food on the table nor pays energy bills.

It’s difficult to be envious of people with extreme wealth sometimes, but the man next door, who normally earns the same as you but who suddenly gets a generous pay rise, is fair game for our jealousy and resentment, or at least that is how we have been programmed to think by the government and the media.

It’s true that strikes inconvenience ordinary members of the public as much, if not more, than the employers, but in the disputes currently taking place it seems that there is a lot more sympathy among members of the general public than is often the case. In most of these disputes, it seems that the public recognise that the striking workers have legitimate grievances. It also helps that in the dispute on the railways, RMT union leader Mick Lynch is a much more reasonable and measured figure than his predecessor, the late Bob Crow, who was much more combative.

One way or another, the current disputes we are seeing will be resolved. What sort of reaction this provokes from the government in terms of legislation to limit union powers even further than Margaret Thatcher’s did remains to be seen. Perhaps if striking becomes more difficult, then unions may have to look to alternative forms of action, like the work to rule, because surely you can’t be punished for doing your job properly, can you?