When Margaret Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street in 1979, few could have guessed that a small group of civil service engineers would fire the starting gun for her titanic series of power struggles with trade unions. But under the leadership of Bill McCall, in June that year the 30,000 professional and technology officers in the departments of environment and defence, and in other public bodies, embarked on nine weeks of strike action in pursuit of a differential pay claim with administrators.
Bill, who has died aged 91, had made it his mission to remedy a notorious injustice of the British workplace: that the pay and status of specialists in laboratories and in the field were inferior to those of their counterparts behind a desk.
Nowhere was that disparity greater than across the government estate ruled from the corridors of Whitehall, much to the fury of Bill’s members in the Institution of Professional Civil Servants.
The initial challenge failed. But after years of being held back by incomes policies in the 1970s, he used his experience to fashion a reversal in the workers’ status despite the adverse political climate. Through a series of surveys and reports, backdoor meetings and clandestine manoeuvres, Bill emerged in 1987 with the first pay agreement of any significance with the Thatcher government. In it he controversially abandoned opposition to performance-related pay in return for a 15% pay rise for his specialists.
In truth, this was the last gasp for a system of national bargaining that would finally expire under John Major in the 1990s. But it won recognition for the role of public sector scientists, technologists and other experts that was key for the operation of a modern economy.
Born in Wanlockhead, Dumfries and Galloway, to Alexander McCall, a lead miner, and his wife, Jean (nee Cunningham), Bill attended Dumfries academy and then studied at Ruskin College, Oxford. He entered the civil service in 1946 and was elected to the executive of the Civil Service Clerical Association. In 1954 he went to work in the TUC’s social insurance department.
He came to the IPCS as an assistant secretary in 1958, and five years later was appointed its general secretary, aged 33. The institution had just 55,000 members; by the time he retired in 1989 it had 90,000 members in the civil service, agencies and private companies, including the Ordnance Survey, British Nuclear Fuels and British Aerospace.
In the process he welded together an industrial force of skilled workers as varied as air traffic controllers, weather forecasters, nuclear physicists, statisticians, forensic scientists, health and safety inspectors, museum curators and researchers in a host of disciplines.
There lay a further achievement. While bitterly opposed to the privatisation policies of the 1980s, he ensured that the case for belonging to a trade union remained alive and relevant to members in public and private sectors. In this way he laid the foundation for the transformation of a rather staid body of white-collar professionals into Prospect, today one of Britain’s fastest-growing unions with more than 145,000 members.
An exacting boss, Bill had a respect for professionalism matched by his own standards, whether serving on the 1980 Finniston inquiry into the engineering profession – which led to the formation of the Engineering Council and restricted the status of chartered engineer to those with engineering degrees – or appearing before arbitration tribunals.
Milestones along the way included guiding the 21-week campaign of strikes in 1981 to defend the civil service pay agreement, then the longest national dispute in British history. It was a close-run thing. Although the strike action denied the government £9bn of tax revenue, the unions eventually accepted a meagre “jam tomorrow” offer because they could no longer afford the cost of paying strikers’ wages.
Three years later the bombshell landed that became the civil rights issue of Bill’s career, when Thatcher banned trade unions at GCHQ communications centre on national security grounds. “An indelible stain on the record of this government,” he called it.
A whirlwind campaign of speeches, protest marches and opposition in parliament, much of it instigated by Bill, persuaded several ministers to implore Thatcher to change course. She refused, also ignoring opinion polls, while paradoxically supporting the Solidarity trade union in Poland. But Bill had convinced the public that national security would not be endangered by union membership, winning widespread sympathy for the union’s case. He also lined up a Labour party promise to restore union rights when elected, and in 1997 Tony Blair reopened GCHQ to union membership.
After retiring from his trade union posts, he served on the Police Complaints Authority and on the councils of Goldsmiths College and the University of London.
In 1955 he married Olga Brunton. She died a few days before him. He is survived by their son, Martin, and daughter, Ruth.
• William McCall, trade unionist, born 6 July 1929; died 15 April 2021
