Union organising

Our outsourced worker members at the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) will strike again on 5-6 and 13-14 September. It’s part of their long-running fight for workplace justice. They’re striking to win improved pay and terms and conditions. The outsourced contracts at BEIS are due to be re-tendered next year. The employer plans to take a number of outsourced contracts and consolidate them into a smaller number of regional contracts, with one for security and a separate one for cleaning, reception, and catering. We’re mounting a legal challenge to that, as we don’t...

Conversations with my workmates now, as a traffic controller on construction and civil engineering sites in Queensland, Australia, are completely different from what I had before as a seafarer and a construction worker. We are employed by traffic-control contractors which function like labour-hire companies, and there are almost no conversations with the workers directly employed on the sites. Traffic controllers want to talk about traffic. There’s almost no talk of politics. There are a lot of complaints about how we are treated by management — by the labour-hire companies, that is, not the...

We’ve been holding members’ meetings to build for our national ballot starting on 26 September. The ones I’ve been to have been well attended, and there’s a clear mood amongst members for taking action. This mood is undoubtedly helped by all the other strikes taking place and a real understanding that PCS is part of a wider movement. People are talking about what other unions are doing, and taking confidence from that. We’re getting people signed up as activists, committing to take responsibility for getting the vote out. A lot of them are younger members, under 30, so hopefully this can be...

Several PCS branches are reporting increases in membership since the RMT announced its strikes. Having a major national strike taking place and being spoken about, in the media but also in workplaces and communities, makes the labour movement visible and reminds people what unions are fundamentally for. We want to take advantage of that atmosphere to build for our strike ballot in September. On 6 July, lay reps and officials will meet with full-time officials to agree a plan for a series of campaign meetings. Those meetings will help organise the effort to mobilise the vote in the ballot, but...

For six months, from December 2021 to May 2022, delivery couriers across the UK waged the most sustained campaign of strikes ever in the gig economy. These strikes have now been suspended over the summer, a quiet time where low volumes of business make it hard to create disruption by striking. During the summer lull in business, workers and the union are preparing to re-start a campaign of industrial action and lobbying and activism by supporters for a pay rise, when the weather changes. Drivers had previously planned a day of action for 1 August. That has now been postponed to a later date...

“To introduce the debate about making work better we thought it would be really good to organise a bit of a panel,” said GMB National Officer Mick Rix at the start of the third day of the GMB union congress (13-16 June). The panel members were Paul Bedford (Deliveroo), Emma O’Dwyer (Uber), and Carl Lyon (Evri, formerly Hermes). These are not GMB activists. They are senior members of management in the three companies. The discussion was set up on the congress podium as a cosy round-table discussion. According to Rix: “The gig economy does not have to be the Wild West of workers’ rights. I do...

Millions of office workers are now in the workplace maybe two or three days each week in the workplace, otherwise working at home. Most workers welcome this, if only because it saves on commuting. But it’s a problem for union organising. Work-from-home tends to atomise workers. Their managers find sufficient control and surveillance by electronic monitoring. But workers can’t have the chats around work, in tea or meal breaks, or after work, which best underpin a culture of us seeing our workmates as people whom we should support and who will support us. It’s harder for union activists to get...

I visited the picket line of our members at the British Council, who struck for three days from 15-17 June, in a dispute over job cuts. The employer wants to restructure the organisation; the demands of the dispute are for transparency in the restructure process, no compulsory redundancies, and no outsourcing or privatisation of jobs. The strikers have been boosted by the support they’ve received via social media, and from several MPs. I’ve also been meeting recently with officials from the Government Property Agency, a body which is responsible for overseeing government buildings. It will...

Delivery couriers across the UK are using the summer to re-organise before ramping back up their campaign for better pay. Since December, delivery drivers working for Stuart, a firm that does deliveries for JustEat, have been mounting strikes across the UK against a pay cut. The drivers’ next day of action will be on 1 August. Organised in the IWGB union, drivers took six months of strikes, and are continuing to carry out protests and days of action, including invading corporate HQs of big clients and turning up at shareholder meetings. As the strikes wore on they inspired action by riders...

Food couriers across the UK are continuing their six-month campaign of fighting for fair pay. Couriers employed by Stuart Delivery, a French firm (a subsidiary of DPD and the nationalised French postal service) which performs deliveries for JustEat and other companies. The strikes started in Sheffield, where couriers have been building an organisation for several years with the help of the local branch of Workers’ Liberty. From there, they spread across the UK and in particular the north of England following a pay cut which Stuart rolled out in late 2021. With daily strike action and regular...