Coffee House Shots
Can Labour really tame the unions?
Before we begin this podcast I'd like to tell you about a special deal. Subscribe today to the spectator for just 12 pounds and receive a 12 week subscription in print and online. Along with, here's the magic bit, a 320 pound John Lewis or weight trays voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/veture. Hello and welcome to Copy How Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by Fraser Nelson and Isabel Harper. Now Isabelle, I suppose the big news today this morning is that Azlef is going on strike again just two days after they announce the end of the national strikes, they're proposing a regional strike in the coming weeks. Tell us more about this. Yeah, so these are train drivers at El NER, who are going to strike every weekend in September and October, and then two more strikes in November. This is following the end to the long-running dispute over train drivers pay that has culminated in a 15% pay rise offer over three years. I think if you were a Tory who was trying to argue that Labour is sending the message to unions, not just the train unions, but the junior doctors unions and wider trade unions, then this is the perfect example that they will think that strikes work and that protracted strikes work as well, because I think this is the desire of Labour ministers to come in to government and resolve this industrial action and to say we're resetting industrial relations, whether it be with train drivers or teachers, and we're going to treat them properly, has been you can understand why they want to start government off by ending long-running strikes. But the problem is that unions don't see it as a relationship reset. They see it as an incentive to threaten or to go on strike further. Yeah, I mean, Fraser, of course, 50 years ago, we had the Who governs election by Edward Heath, and he lost that on the issue of the unions and Labour's promise to the country was that they would be better placed. They had the special relationship with the unions. They had this contract and actually ended up five years later, Jim Callahan being drummed out of office on the back of industrial unrest. I mean, we're nowhere near that stage now. We haven't got very different culture, for instance, in terms of business labour relations. But do you think there's perhaps a sense that Labour have come in? They've got this, they said they're going to have a deal with the trade unions because, on rail, it's going to end the strikes and that's going to save money. But actually, the danger is that they can't control the unions and it's going to make a mockery of their claims to competence. Well, I think Labour is certainly right to say that they're far closer to unions than the Conservatives were. I mean, take McCreland, for example. He is the head of Asliff. He is quite a close ally of Louise Hague, the transport secretary. He also actually sits, I think I'm right in saying, on Labour's National Executive Committee. So, this is somebody who is really quite well connected to the Labour government. And when the 100 million deal was done a couple of days ago, it was pretty generous. I mean, this would take their pay from 60 grand to, I think, 69 grand. And that's for a four-day week, so a backdated pay rise. And it was the other cave that's going to be expensive, but at least it will end the strike madness, to be like a new doctor thing. It's going to be expensive, but, you know, we're our better relations, et cetera. Now, of course, the big question was, is that, will I do the trick? Or will it simply establish a new principle that if you're seen to respond to pressure, you can get more pressure. I think that if you're McCreland, your job as Asliff, General Secretary, is to get the highest salary you can for your members. It's not really to strike a deal or to do Cody. She doesn't matter how close you are to the transport secretary. She is your adversary in the sink. If you're trying to negotiate and you're trying to push her as far as she will go, and if it seems that the threat of strikes has managed to get 100 million from her, then you might see, well, we'll threaten some more strikes and we'll see what else we can get. So I think right now we're in an interesting period where the unions of the Labour government are testing each other's boundaries. And it would be logical that unions wouldn't be doing their job if they weren't squeezing Labour to find out how much they can get for their unions. So far, by the way, I would say Asliff has done a good job for its members. I mean, 69 grand for a four-day week for a train driver. It's, by international standards, this is a good deal. Let's see if they can get an even better one. Isabelle, talk us through the kind of relationships between Labour and the different unions. Obviously, tradition GMB has been a big backer of Kier Starman's leadership and Fraser there talks about some of the individual relationships between Mick Whelan, the rail boss, and Louise Haig, the transport sector. I mean, what do you think the unionists have watched out for in the coming months and the next couple of years of this Labour government? Yeah, I think one of the really interesting things that is not to do with pay deals, but is to do with conditions is the workers' rights package that Angela Rayner is working. And she had meetings with business this week where they were urging her not to rush into these changes, some of which are quite significant. So applying certain rights such as sickness benefit and so on from day one of somebody being hired, even though it's still possible to keep them on a probationary period. But that's something that businesses are quite concerned about because their fear is that it's already quite hard to get rid of someone who's not very good. And if you have people who aren't a good fit or who come in and then disappear, that they're going to sort of be stuck with them. But if you have unions who are threatening industrial action, then you may well have ministers tempted to push a further on the workers' rights package to try to modify the unions. And certainly before the election, that was the big fight between Labour's most troublesome union, Unite, which prior to the election was a fight that Keistamu was really happy to have because it sent a message about the new Labour party and Unite was very close to Jeremy Corbyn and obviously Keistamu loved nothing more than regularly announcing in public that Jeremy Corbyn wasn't invited to his birthday party. And this was a completely different Labour party. So that worked in opposition. But we're now in gritty, boring, difficult governments. And so they now have a much more difficult balancing act to manage. I think it was really interesting also that pretty quickly after coming into government Labour made clear that it was going to make assaulting a shop worker, a specific offence, that was one of the key demands of Buzzdoor, which is probably the friendliest Labour trade union. That's the most moderate. It's the shop workers union. It's the one that the Blair rights will get on with. And they tend to ask for much more reasonable things. And therefore Labour tries to sort of give it what it asks for because it will be quite faithful in sticky situations. And then in terms of the sort of non-affiliated trade unions, obviously the BMA is, I think, the toughest trade union to negotiate with. If you talk to any former health secretary, including those who've done transport, who've done the other briefs and had to deal with with other big beast union bosses, they say that the BMA is the trickiest and its members are the most difficult party because they don't regard the BMA as being like a traditional trade union. I mean, we've obviously seen that it is now taking a stance on the CAS review. It's a trade union, not a policymaking body, but it apparently has a stance on gender. And it does tend to stick its aura in on NHS reforms as well, even though it's supposed to be representing doctors rather than offering verdicts on how commissioning should be organised and so on. So I think that again, the government gave a very generous payoff for two junior doctors, but the BMA is, you know, a difficult trade union. It's a junior doctor's committee is the most difficult bit of that very difficult trade union. A lot of people within the BMA hate the junior doctor's committee because they think it's really militant and untrustworthy. So there is this really difficult balancing act that Labour has to strike. And I think one of the things about the BMA and then the teachers unions as well is that a lot of their industrial action has been driven by understandable and I think totally valid discontent within those professions over conditions. So, you know, doctors, whether or not you think they're paid enough, I think are treated pretty badly by the NHS as an employer, I think, you know, and you can understand why a lot of them are either leaving medicine or going overseas or going, you know, practicing privately, because they just think, you know, why am I putting myself through this? And similarly, teachers have, you know, have had a pretty rough ride over the past few years outside of their pay. And so you've had the secretaries of state in both of those areas where straightening in health and Bridget Phillips and in education, talking a lot about a reset in relations and talking about improving the conditions of these workers. That's not the case for train drivers, because as Fraser outlined, their conditions are great. I mean, lots of people listening to this podcast might be thinking, why am I not a train driver? And that's, you know, it's a very different matter to saying to doctors, oh, actually, we are going to try to change things so your employer thinks it has a duty to tell you when you're going to be working more than two weeks in advance so that you can, you know, have a family life, maybe get married, study for your exams and that kind of thing. That's, you know, that's not the issue for train drivers. Thank you, Fraser. Thank you, Isabel. And thank you for listening to Coffee House Shot. And can I add a plug for our spectator live podcast? We'd love to meet you at an event we're recording here in Westminster. It's going to be at 6.30 on Wednesday, the 4th of September. You can get tickets on spectator.co.uk/live. So do come along. It's always great to meet the people we're speaking to. And we can discuss Labor's year ahead with a special guest as yet to be announced. [Music]