Union discontent
- 11 Sep 07, 11:54 AM
So, are we heading for a Winter of Discontent? The posties’ union - the CWU - are threatening more national strikes today. The TUC looks set to back a motion calling for "coordinated industrial action". And last week local government workers in Unison rejected an improved pay offer.
There is, it's clear, real discontent in the unions. There's anger at what they see as, at best, a centrally imposed public sector pay freeze and, at worst, real pay cuts. There's fury at Gordon Brown's to that arch critic of the unions, Digby Jones. And there's brewing annoyance at his efforts to curb their power to debate and vote on topical or so-called contemporary motions at Labour Conference.
But - and it's an important but - the appetite for a confrontation with the government is limited to a couple of unions - the civil servants' union, the PCS and the prison officers’ union, the POA. Unison negotiated an improved pay offer for health service workers in England which looks set to be backed in a ballot - first results should trickle out this evening. The union's leadership were proud to have secured a better package for those working in town halls and are likely to do all they can to get a marginal improvement that allows them to avoid going on strike.
Ministers believe that its strikes there - in hospitals or town halls - which the public would notice, would care about and which would raise echoes of the Winter of Discontent. They are reasonably content to sit out trouble in the prisons, job centres and benefit offices and the post office.
What one ally of the prime minister told me yesterday is that the unions were simply staging precisely the fight which Gordon Brown wanted - proving to the public his willingness to stand up to the unions in order to defend economic stability.
So, will there be a Winter of Discontent? The same question's been asked pretty much every winter since the first - and only proper - one in 1979. The answer now is the same as it's always been - almost certainly not.
That, of course, doesn’t stop journalists using the phrase. I remember in one of my first jobs in TV in the mid-80s being asked to research a piece about a new Winter of Discontent. I managed to kill it when I pointed out that the programme I was working on had - only six months earlier - made a film predicting the death of the unions. Both couldn't be true then and they aren't true now.
