Union leader who fought for the minimum wage
A “compelling orator” Rodney
who was modest and Bickerstaffe
compassionate, principled 1945-2017
yet pragmatic, Rodney Bickerstaffe, who has died aged 72, was one of the British trade union movement’s most prominent leaders, said The Daily Telegraph. He was also one of its most recognisable, with his Buddy Holly-ish shock of dark hair and NHS glasses. His greatest achievement was arguably the introduction of the minimum wage, in 1998, but he first hit the headlines during the Winter of Discontent (1978-79), when he encouraged gravediggers to join in strikes in protest at James Callaghan’s wage restraints. “What about the dignity of the dead?” Bickerstaffe was asked. “What about the dignity of the living?” he replied.
Rodney Bickerstaffe (“Bick” to his comrades) was born in London in 1945. His mother, Elizabeth, known as Pearl, was a nurse from Yorkshire. She met his father, an Irish carpenter named Tommy Simpson, during the War, when he walked into Whipps Cross Hospital, in the bombed out East End, with an injury. They had an affair and she fell pregnant, but he wouldn’t marry her as she was not Catholic, and instead returned to Ireland. (Rodney never met his father, nor even discovered his identity until he was six – but decades later, he was delighted to discover that he had three half brothers in Ireland.) When he was three, his mother – by now forgiven by her family for having a baby out of wedlock – moved back to Doncaster, where he was educated at the local grammar school, and Rutherford College of Technology. Elizabeth was a union member; she recruited him, and by his 20s he was a senior member of Nupe (the National Union of Public Employees). In 1981, he became its general secretary. Bickerstaffe began his long campaign for a statutory minimum wage in the late 1970s, to give some basic security to the country’s poorest people. Many of his colleagues were resistant, fearing a minimum wage would undermine collective bargaining agreements; but he persuaded the TUC to adopt it as a policy in 1983, and Neil Kinnock made it official Labour policy two years after that. It was finally introduced in 1998 – by which time Labour had become New Labour. Bickerstaffe was no fan of Tony Blair’s politics, said The Times: he led the opposition to Blair’s campaign to drop Clause IV of Labour’s constitution, which stated the party’s commitment to nationalisation (“common ownership”). Asked once about the chief difference between himself and Blair, he replied: “He didn’t go to an infants’ school in Doncaster.” Yet he forged a good working relationship with the PM, the better to continue his campaign for social justice and advance his members’ interests. By then, he was general secretary of Unison, a union that he had helped to create by engineering a merger (in 1993) between Nupe, Nalgo, the local government officers’ union, and the health workers’ union, Cohse. It had more than a million members. He retired from Unison in 2001, to replace Jack Jones as the chairman of the National Pensioners Convention.
A workaholic, with few interests outside politics, except collecting second-hand books (mainly about labour reform, and the union movement), Bickerstaffe lived in Catford, south London, with his wife Pat and their four children. Though radical in many respects, he described himself as a “small c” conservative, and insisted that he was no extremist. “People challenge me, ‘Are you ultra-left? Are you hard-left?’” he once said. “I say, ‘I’m sensible Left.’”