Pay, hours, conditions

On an average day, US corporation United Parcel Service (UPS) moves the equivalent of 6% of US and 2% of global GDP! A strike by its heavily unionised US workforce – 330,000 International Brotherhood of Teamsters members out of half a million workers – would have been an event of global significance. That seemed to be in the offing this summer, but now won’t happen. On 22 August it was announced that 86% of Teamsters members voting on a new “contract” (collective agreement), on a 58% turnout, had opted to accept. This despite a vocal and by many accounts unexpectedly vigorous No campaign. In...

Doctors, members of the British Medical Association (BMA), are demonstrating more fight over pay than most public-sector workers. Both to show determined action can win workers real improvements, and to shore up our tottering health service, their fight demands active support. BMA junior doctors in England struck again on 11-15 August for “pay restoration” to real-terms 2008 levels; they are now reballoting under the anti-union laws for further strikes (till 31 August). Consultants (senior doctors) in England struck on 20-22 July and will strike against 24-26 August. Join the picket lines at...

Media reports suggest the Labour leadership wants to weaken its commitment to ending the use of casualised contracts and bogus self-employment to deny workers basic rights. The details are vague, partly because the documents from the 22-23 July Labour Party National Policy Forum (NPF) have not been published. Angela Rayner has denied the party is watering down its New Deal for Working People , but has avoided commenting on the actual issues of controversy. One useful left-wing summary concludes: “We await confirmation that this is the trajectory — but the latest evidence is bleak”. The general...

Official figures for June 2022 to May 2023 show 3.9 million striker-days, about ten times the average in the 2010s

Amazon workers at two sites struck again in early August.

Amazon workers' strikes over pay and conditions are due to spread, as workers at a fulfilment centre in Rugeley, Staffordshire, have voted for industrial action. The GMB balloted just over 100 workers, who voted by an 86% majority to strike. Although the union's membership represents a small minority of the workforce, union membership at the BHX4 site in Coventry exploded as an ongoing campaign of strikes began, and activists will be hoping for a similar effect at Rugeley. The GMB says its membership in the Coventry site is now over 1,000. The fight there has an additional dimension, as the...

It could produce the most immediately recognisable picket lines in the entire history of trade union disputes

The working-class movement is on an uphill journey. The latest official (Certification Officer) statistics on union membership, published 6 July, are thankfully out of date, but sobering. Between December 2019 and December 2020, union membership rose a bit. Between December 2020 and December 2021, it fell a bit, despite lockdowns and work-from-home beginning to fade. The figures depend on unions compiling returns at their year-ends (mostly December 2021, a few as late as September 2022) and sending them in. Even now, the result is incomplete because Unite the Union has done no report since...

11 July, 6:30am, Coventry, Amazon BHX4 warehouse. 570-plus workers out on lively pickets

The Tory government remains hardline on public sector pay. It now threatens to dismiss even the miserly recommendations of its own official Pay Review Bodies for 2023-4. The Tories say that squeezes on pay and NHS spending are necessary to slow inflation. But: • It now looks as if inflation will remain high (probably not as high as now) for longer than the Bank of England estimated when the Pay Review Bodies were pondering. Meagre pay rises will mean new real-wage cuts in 2023-4. • Profits were up in the early months of 2023, as spending power stashed during lockdowns flowed into markets. The...