11.09.2002
Firefighters prepare to strike over pay
As the Weekly Worker goes to press, delegates of the Fire Brigades Union are assembling in Manchester at a recall national conference for the purpose of sanctioning a ballot of the union's 50,000 members on national strike action in pursuit of a pay claim for £30,000 a year. The strike will be the first one involving the FBU's full membership since the nine-weeks-long action in 1977-78, which ended in a settlement hailed as a victory by the union. On that occasion, as in the present, it was publicly known that the government - then the Labour administration of James Callaghan - was responsible for blocking an offer of a substantial pay rise from the local authority employers. In another parallel, it is clear that the Blair government intends to bring in troops as strike-breakers, utilising the home office's 900 50-year-old 'green goddess' reserve fire engines. The 1977 strike was settled on the basis of a pledge from the employers, with government backing, that they would henceforth use a formula linking firefighters' pay to that of the "upper quartile of male manual workers". However, the wages in that sector of the British economy have declined substantially, in relative terms, in the decades that have since passed. Firefighters with five years experience currently receive a salary of just £21,000 and the union has complained that many of its members are having to claim the state low pay top-up, the Working Families Tax Credit, in order to achieve subsistence level earnings. Whilst the union and employers have reached agreement that the formula should now be varied, to reference average earnings in the economy as a whole, deadlock has occurred over the union's claim for the £30,000 salary, to recoup lost ground. A meagre four percent rise is currently on offer, whilst it has now been revealed that the government blocked an employers' proposal to put an offer of 16% on to the negotiating table at a meeting on July 9. The office of deputy prime minister John Prescott, which holds the budget for fire service funding, had indicated that it would not finance that offer due to "fears that it would fuel inflation and trigger a wave of big pay claims in the public sector" (The Guardian September 10). There is, of course, nothing new about the Prescott line. It has been governmental policy since the Callaghan/Healy public spending review of 1976 to force local authorities to resist pay claims and reduce spending, in the interests of protecting capitalism's rate of profit. All of the public sector trade unions have complained that serious damage has been caused to the levels of public service provision and to pay as a result and the fire service is no exception. Prime minister Blair is determined to hold onto capital's gains and, in recognition of the seriousness of the FBU's challenge, he felt moved to make a statement himself to a press conference on September 3. Not only is the FBU's claim "unrealistic", Blair said, but it would cause serious damage to the economy, including putting upward pressure on mortgage rates. In response, the FBU general secretary Andy Gilchrist quantified the cost of meeting the pay claim at "41p per household, per week" and drew a comparison between the prime minister's unwillingness to contemplate fair pay for the firefighters and his apparent determination to spend billions of pounds of taxpayers' money on attacking Iraq - a move which was truly likely to have a devastating effect on the economy (FBU press release, September 4). The day after Blair's statement, Prescott's office announced the establishment of an "independent review" of the fire service. This inquiry will include in its remit, conditions of service of fire brigades' staff, raising the possibility that the government's agenda involves a bid to end collective bargaining in the service, a long-term objective that the ruling class has held and in which it has already had success in relation to teachers and nurses. Brother Gilchrist immediately announced that the FBU would boycott the inquiry, adding that conditions of service "are a matter for the Fire Brigades Union and their national employers" (FBU press statement, September 5). As the recall of the union's conference was announced last week, the strength of feeling was demonstrated in a rash of 'unofficial' work to rule action throughout the service, with firefighters in Scotland, Manchester, Derbyshire, Norfolk and the south-west answering emergency calls only. The executive committee will recommend that the conference authorises a ballot on "discontinuous strike action in pursuance of a fair wage for firefighters and emergency fire control operators". I asked FBU activist and leading Socialist Alliance member Matt Wrack if he felt that discontinuous action might lead to a protraction of the dispute, as had been the recent experience with the use of a similar approach by railworkers, and whether some delegates would argue for indefinite action, which was the method used in the 1977 strike. Comrade Wrack thought that, though there would be voices calling for an indefinite strike, these would be a small minority. Whilst the disadvantages of short, discontinuous strikes were apparent, the FBU had successfully employed this tactic in regional disputes. He stressed that "discontinuous" did not just mean one-day actions, but must be seen in the context of escalation in the progressive phases of the campaign. He saw no reason why the authorisation should not cover, for instance, an eight-weeks stoppage. Matt agreed that the FBU's fight was with the government, although he stressed that, even if the employers had been allowed to make their 16% offer, it would almost certainly have been rejected as inadequate. In reply to my question as to whether the militancy on pay - coinciding as it did with the reversal on the issue of democratisation of the political fund suffered at the union's policy conference in May - demonstrated the growth of a syndicalist sentiment within the union, he agreed that this assessment had some validity. The growth of the mood for the pay struggle had been accompanied by a marked increase in requests from members for political fund exemption forms, indicating a retreat from politics. However, he felt that the pay dispute and the political experiences it brings would inevitably rekindle the democratisation issue and would undermine the arguments used by the executive committee to centralise control of the funds which meant securing them for the Labour Party. Even before strikes start, the highly political nature of this dispute has already become patently clear. In a remarkably frank statement, the local authority employers' leader, Charles Nolda, admitted that army cover in 900 archaic machines for the 3,000 fire engines normally on duty would be insufficient and that "life and property will be at risk" (The Guardian September 3). In response to the same recognition, the general secretaries of the two big rail unions, Mick Rix of Aslef and Bob Crow of the RMT, threatened to hold their own strike ballots unless guarantees were forthcoming from rail operators about the adequacy of fire cover. The Socialist Alliance has members in leading rank-and-file positions in these unions, as well as in the FBU and in other unions where the fire protection issue is of crucial importance. The challenge to make solidarity real and concrete is one that the SA is well placed to meet. This of course, should be only one task within the overall political struggle to win the working class to the need for a political formation capable of taking on Blair and the UK state. Derek Hunter
Worker