At Manton Sports Club in Worksop, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady is rallying the crowd.
“We have a Prime Minister more worried about saving his own job than worrying about other people’s,” she tells a packed meeting. “Meanwhile four million children are living in poverty, and most have at least one parent in work. We don’t just say we deserve better for working people, we demand it.”
The cost-of-living crisis is hurting people locally. Pay packets in Worksop, Notts, are set to be worth £440-a-year less this year according to new TUC analysis – as inflation outstrips the increase in wages.
Many of those hardest hit are key workers who held Britain’s hand through Covid.
“During the pandemic, Downing Street was Partygate central, with cleaners wiping up red wine and vomit from the walls,” Frances says. “Meanwhile care workers, nurses, firefighters, were doing their duty at huge personal cost, putting their health and their lives on the line.
“What has been their reward? Ministers clapping for key workers. And that’s it.”
The rally is one of many held by the TUC across Britain ahead of Saturday’s cost of living demo in London.
With a black campaign T-shirt pulled on over her summer dress, O’Grady – who recently announced she would be stepping down later this year as General Secretary – is going out fighting.
“ Boris Johnson is not a stupid man,” she tells me. “He knows that giving a pay rise to a care worker is not going to bring down the country. But he is playing all the old tunes, trying to keep a particular group of backbenchers happy.
“Everyone saw what happened at P&O. The Government barely lifted a finger. They cried crocodile tears while P&O sacked people over Zoom and replaced them with agency labour. Now the Government is threatening to replace striking workers with agency labour. It’s P&O by any other name.”
The old Manton Colliery wheel sunk into the road outside is a reminder of a time when people in Worksop had guaranteed work at decent pay, and strong unions.
“It’s not easy to go on strike in Britain,” O’Grady says of upcoming strike action across the UK, including on the trains. “You need a democratic majority. Most people don’t easily give up money. You have to have a real burning sense of injustice. People are on a long fuse, but when it blows, it blows.
“They are trying to make people apologise for wanting to bring up their family on a reasonable wage. We’re not going to feel ashamed about that. Most people understand that workers deserve a decent standard of living. If it’s not good for working families, it’s not good for this country.”
The Government is now intent on a headlong battle with trade unions. “Well, they picked the wrong fight,” O’Grady says. “We’ve been here before.”
In Worksop, people tell of their struggle to survive. “Nearly one in four children on free school meals. That’s levelling up,” says NEU joint General Secretary Kevin Courtney. “Children hungrier and hungrier. Wearing their school trousers back to front to avoid the shame of holes in the knees.”
But the rally is also to celebrate two recent union victories. When the B&Q warehouse on the old colliery site offered a below-inflation pay rise, Unite the Union ran a picket line right where the miners used to stand during the 1984-5 pit strike.
The new strikers were often mums who dropped their kids at school before the picket, explains senior Unite rep Pat McGrath. “There is real hardship here,” McGrath says. “Our members tell us they have been relying on foodbanks, they are struggling to put fuel in their cars.”
Local MP Brendan Clarke-Smith had suggested union members give up their subs if they were hard up. But it turned out being in a union paid out.
B&Q had offered 4%. “In the end, members won a 10.75% pay deal,” McGrath says.
In her speech, O’Grady also pays tribute to Unite members at the Riverside Bakery in Nottingham – flan- and quiche-makers who won a 7% pay rise after taking industrial action. “This is a town I know that stands up for its friends,” she tells the crowd.
This week, O’Grady appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs where one of her choices was Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. As tomorrow’s rally approaches, she seems more fired up than I’ve ever seen her.
“As I get older, I’m more like my Dublin grandad,” she says of her grandfather who was a founder member of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. “I’m more impatient.”
She looks around the crowded club house. “The Government and boardrooms try to grind people down, so they lose belief,” O’Grady says. “But look at B&Q and the Riverside Bakery here. There are more of us. They can’t take us all down. That’s the point of joining a union in the end.”
