A week today 1.3 million low-paid council workers will take part in the biggest strike for decades. Schools, libraries, swimming pools and every other council service will close for the day. Council-run ferries, toll bridges and airports will shut. Cleaners, dinner ladies, teaching assistants, rat catchers and bin men will all walk out, with further strikes to follow. This is a women's strike, since more than 70% of them are women who are paid only 34% of what their male colleagues earn. Ninety per cent of the part-time women earn less than £5 an hour.
This is a totemic strike and its effects will be felt far beyond municipal workers. It will represent the armies of the low paid who have no chance of joining unions. Many of them are contracted out from public services. Labour's minimum wage was a good first step, but it was set so low it made only a marginal difference. Indeed, economists have been congratulating the government on the lack of "wage inflation" despite near full employment: if the low paid catch up a bit, the economists regard that as dangerously inflationary.
The government has promised all the new money will not "disappear down the cracks" but every penny will be spent on better public services. What or who are the "cracks"? They are the workers who actually provide the better services, caring, cooking, cleaning, washing, feeding, teaching in the engine rooms of delivery.
This is a totemic strike because it represents all the one in five people hurrying to work each day for less than £6 an hour, under £240 a week. The Daily Mail inadvertently made the point with a picture of a Westminster roadsweeper beside a parking meter: "This parking meter earns £4 an hour. The roadsweeper working for the same council is on £3.50." (Alas, they drew a bizarre conclusion: "Astonishing insight into the exorbitant cost of motoring in today's anti-car Britain.")
Some of the low paid under Labour are topped up with working families tax credits, but now the biggest single group of the poor are in work. "Work is the best welfare" was the government's early mantra, but that is only partially true. A job is better than no job, but work at £5 an hour does not lift people out of hardship.
The strike goes to the heart of this uncomfortable fact and every Labour MP knows it. That is why ministers have vanished down rabbit holes, not one to be found for interview. Any Labour MP will say in private that of course people are grossly undervalued and under-rewarded in the public sector. Every week in their constituency surgeries they meet women who work at two jobs in unsocial hours for pitiful pay to keep their families afloat, the most deserving of the poor. But they shudder at this spectre of 1979 as the Tories crow "Here we go!" to headlines reading Summer of Discontent!
How the opposition relished the thuggish primitivism of the RMT leader, Bob Crow, and his crude attempt at strong-arming John Prescott by withdrawing union funds. The unions organising this municipal strike were quietly spitting at this damage done to their own just cause. In fact, Crow's brutish intervention points up how very different most modern unions are now.
But are the Tories right? Is this strike lethal for Labour? Not if the government steps in at once and prevents the local government employers making a needless mess of it. A hawks and doves row is raging among municipal negotiators, with sympathetic councils angry at the pointless confrontation others favour. What is Birmingham doing threatening their staff with savage jobs cuts and privatisation? Since central government controls most of the purse strings, ultimately it is down to them to forge an agreement and it should not be difficult to achieve before next Wednesday.
"The door is shut, there is no discussion and looking for a government minister is like looking for Lord Lucan," Jack Dromey, national organiser of the Transport and General Workers Union says. He has been reading the Local Government Assocation's paper setting out a vision for renewal over the next decade and is appalled to find not one mention of the workforce that will deliver it. "Extraordinary how they think they can renew local government with no reference to the people who will make it happen. It really should not take a strike to give them this wake-up call."
The model is there: NHS ancillary workers have just settled a sensible long-term deal with 6% for the lowest paid and 3% for the higher paid as part of Agenda for Change, a rolling programme of training and pay agreed amicably.
Council budgets are tight and the government needs to cover a reasonable pay increase, but what stops Labour politicians, local and national, is a gut fear of appearances. Dare they be seen to "give in" or would they rather be seen to "tough it out" to prove them are not in hock to the unions? The sooner they step in, make a fair deal and explain why, the less the loss of face.
The low-pay figures given by the unions for their members working for local authorities are even worse than they seem. Most low-paid council work is now contracted out at yet lower rates of pay and worse conditions. In 1979 7.4 million people worked for the state. Now it is only 5 million. Maybe 2 million work for contractors, but no one knows. The Tory government, pretending to shrink the size of the state, never counted those contracted out as public employees, though they still work as public servants.
In four years from 1980, the NHS shed 40% of its ancillaries. A 1993 report from the Environment Department confessed that 51% of contracted-out council workers had taken direct real cuts in pay, bonuses, holiday and sick pay. Manual staff, the report concluded, had borne the brunt of savings made through contracting out. Downsized, working twice as hard for less pay, these workers have waited with remarkable patience for a Labour government to at least set them back to where they were.
If Labour is afraid of being seen to back down, it is because they have not faced up to the fair-pay question. Where is the debate on the relative worth of the care home worker on £4.10 an hour and the CEOs' secretive millions in share options? Dangerous thoughts.
Tony Blair said he would have failed unless he left behind a fairer society, but there has been silence on fair pay. Gordon Brown refuses to consider pay important in achieving his poverty targets. He prefers to dispense credits as charity, not to vex employers by making them pay a living wage. But it should not need a strike to make the government do what its own members already know is right.
