The unions are losing out to the cost of living crisis
Support for industrial action throughout the country is visibly melting as patience with the mounting disruption wears thin
I‘The unions have refused to take into account the broader national interest’
n the ongoing battle between the militant trade unions and corporate Britain, it is tempting to see the latest skirmish as a victory for the labour movement, and a defeat for all the “fat cats” supposedly short-changing millions of hard-up workers.
That is how the Commercial Workers’ Union may like to portray the news that BT has built 40,000 fewer full fibre lines than expected, owing to the latest round of strike disruption.
As many as 30,000 BT engineers and 10,000 call centre workers were urged to down tools in October as part of an ongoing dispute over wages. The CWU accuses BT of implementing a real-term pay cut with a flat £1,500 annual rise for 58,000 employees that was backdated to the beginning of April.
It was the first nationwide strike that the UK’S national telecoms champion had suffered in 35 years, and even 999 call handlers were persuaded to join in, forcing BT to retrain employees from other departments in order to continue providing the critical emergency service.
In their attempts to bring the country to a halt, the trade unions have repeatedly refused to take into account the broader national interest, but the threat to BT’S ability to continue handling 999 emergency calls was a new low.
And the results of the latest bout of industrial action are now quantifiable: fewer connections mean falling broadband customer numbers, which adds to the sense of gloom in which BT feels the need to increase its cost-cutting target by a fifth to £3bn and press ahead with inflationbusting price rises for the majority of its customers.
Yet the idea that this might somehow represent a decisive victory for the unions is plain silly. So what if BT missed its rollout targets by tens of thousands? It is nothing more than a minor blip in an otherwise highly efficient nationwide programme to blanket Britain with the communications infrastructure of tomorrow.
For an organisation whose sleepy culture has held it back for decades, the pace of engineering work remains impressive. A recent ruling from Ofcom that allows greater margins to be made on fibre broadband than older copper wires have put a rocket under a £15bn pledge to furnish 25m premises with ultrafast full-fibre broadband by the end of 2026.
From a standing start roughly three years ago, Openreach’s full fibre network now reaches 9m homes and businesses across the UK, while the pace of engineering is expected to ramp up from 2.6m premises last year to more than 3m this year, and again in 2023.
But here’s the bit that the CWU won’t want its members to hear: support for its strike campaign has been nothing like as widespread as it might have hoped. Of the 40,000 BT workers that the CWU claims to “proudly represent”, it is estimated that the highest turnout was less than 24,000, equivalent to just two thirds of the membership base.
What’s more, the numbers have been tailing off, falling by an estimated 20pc between the first day of action in July and the eighth and final day at the end of October to just 19,000 – less than half the BT membership.
The reason for this is obvious: as soaring energy bills and spikes in mortgage costs exacerbate the cost of living crisis for millions, frontline workers cannot afford to keep voluntarily forgoing pay.
The CWU has emphatically rejected the suggestion that some members have lost the stomach for a fight, lambasting “the folly of senior management” for presuming “that battle fatigue and financial pressures would sap the will of employees to continue fighting for a fair pay rise”, as industrial action came to an end. It has urged employees to “remain resolved to win and stick with your colleagues” and insisted that “there can be no wavering in the determination to secure a fair pay deal for all”.
Yet it is inevitable that for some, the financial realities of repeatedly taking home lower pay packets will inevitably begin to weigh, if not triumph over ideology altogether. Some will have also begun to grasp that their actions amount to a form of self-harm, in that they risk undermining the very cause that they are fighting for.
This is in full view at Royal Mail, where hundreds of millions of pounds of losses resulting partly from repeated strikes have prompted chairman Keith Williams to lose patience and draw up plans for 10,000 job losses.
The effectiveness of postal strikes has been further weakened by the fact that few people seem to care if their post is a day or two late, while train strikes look increasingly selfdefeating as the railways slide further into crisis.
Even the co-ordinated nature of this summer’s strikes may have backfired – company bosses say it has provided a form of air cover for them to adopt a more uncompromising stance during negotiations.
Like Williams, Jansen too is refusing to budge. Talks with the unions about this year’s pay deal would not be reopened, he told The Daily Telegraph. Jansen said “the matter is closed” and insisted BT’S 5pc average pay offer was “market leading” when it was made in April. The message may finally be getting through to the CWU, which responded by saying that it was “seeking a resolution to the dispute” and is hopeful of further meetings next week.
Not for the first time, the unions look to have overplayed their hand in their attempts to hold the country to ransom.