A strike wave started in June 2022 as workers strove to match wages to prices, especially of food and energy, rising much faster than at any time since the early 1990s.
With unemployment low as bosses hired anew for post-lockdown expansion, workers also sought to reverse the decline in real median weekly wages from economic crash and then austerity since 2008. Public-service wages had declined particularly, being only 1% higher than private-sector wages (for comparable qualifications, age, etc.) in 2022 where they were 7% higher in 2011.
On the rail, on the Tube, and in Royal Mail especially, workers were also battling to save conditions against restructurings attempted by the bosses in the wake of losses during lockdowns.
In the private sector, a number of strikes, such as the Liverpool dockers' and some busworkers', won sizeable rises and rejuvenated workplace organisation.
Public service workers, however, faced a stubborn government, and they mostly lack the capacity to make their strikes bite directly into profits. Everywhere but in the civil service, they have pushed the government into some improvement of offers; but as of April 2023, the not-so-bad outcomes (Scottish teachers, Scottish local government workers...) have amounted only to coming out with real-wage cuts much smaller than the employers had first proposed.
The public-service strike campaigns have taken a form never seen before, or not on this scale: what CWU (post union) Deputy General Secretary Postal Terry Pullinger called "a marathon, not a sprint". And stop-start marathons at that.
A sally of one-day, two-day, or occasionally longer, strikes would be announced. After that sally, then a pause, sometimes explained as helping negotiations with the employers, but often just a pause. Then another small schedule. After six months, a re-ballot as mandated by anti-strike law. Then more small schedules, more pauses.
From early 2023, the pauses became longer, the sallies scantier and more subject to cancellation, the recommendations to accept poor offers more frequent. And those recommendations were often made by union leaders to members already long demobilised while they waited on talks.
Many disputes remain open. Workers can reject the poor offers, take control of their disputes, and start a new tempo of renewed struggle which can get better results.
But there is already some dismay that what appeared, and was proclaimed by union leaders, as a once-in-a-generation fight back has turned out so tame, for now.
From a Marxist point of view, a central factor here is the role of the social layer of full-time paid union officials.
Beyond a certain size, unions need some full-time paid officials to function. Over the decades, the layer of full-time paid officials (and usually of "career" full-time paid officials) has mutated into an independent social and political factor. The top officials are paid like, and live like, top capitalist managers. They come to see trade-unionism as primarily as matter of their negotiating skills, and working-class action as a supplement, sometimes necessary, but chancy.
When they call for workers to vote for action, they often phrase it as calling on workers to "support the union", as if a workers' vote for action is back-up for skilled negotiators, rather than skilled negotiators being a back-up for workers' action, and as if "the union" is the negotiators.
Pat Cullen of the RCN takes £190,000 in salary and benefits; Gary Smith of the GMB, £259,000; Mick Lynch of the RMT, £149,000 (though he got the union to cut his official payment by 20%); and most others comparable amounts.
There are three union leaders who pay back to the union some of their high salaries: the General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, Matt Wrack, who takes the wage of an experienced firefighter in London; the Assistant General Secretary of PCS, John Moloney, who takes the much lower average wage of the most numerous grade in the civil service; and BMA council deputy chair Emma Runswick, who takes a junior doctor wage to match what she would have received had she not been elected. But the rule in all the sizeable unions is: high salaries and benefits.
Even the highest-paid union leaders aren't capitalist managers, and within limits they want to get a better deal for their members. Within limits. The limits bite especially in times when union workplace, branch, and committee organisation is weak, as it has been in recent decades; when union democracy is weak, in terms of rules, or in terms of active engagement, or both; and when energy and strength is lacking for networks of rank-and-file activists organised specifically to put pressure on the officials, to call them to account, to surveil them, and to replace where necessary (and where possible: many high-up union officials are appointed from higher-up, not elected from below).
The answer is to fight for union democracy, to organise rank-and-file networks, and to organise within those networks a nucleus of activists (Marxists) who have studied the theory and the history and learned about the logic of class struggle. As Leon Trotsky put it: to "strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to create in all possible instances independent militant organisations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society".
The texts below give some idea of the theory and the history.
• The trade union bureaucracy: a summary from Workers' Liberty, with a video version
• The origins of the trade-union bureaucracy in Britain, by Brian Pearce - an excerpt from the pamphlet Some Past Rank and File Movements
• Rosa Luxemburg on the trade union bureaucracy, from The Mass Strike
• Debate and discussion on the "organising agenda", a new model of trade-union organisation, publicised by the SEIU in the USA and by now gaining lip-service from almost all unions, heavy on paid officials but claiming to stand in contrast to a "service model" of trade unionism: The wrong organising model; a debate "The organising agenda and the democracy-and-solidarity agenda" vs "Take organising seriously" vs "Defects of the SEIU-Crosby model".
• To make the Marxist critique of union bureaucratism more than academic commentary, we need the agency to make that critique a political force. In other words, we need young activists who have been radicalised while still in formal education (as many are) not to siphon themselves off into NGO or think-tank jobs, or into careers as trade-union officials. We need them to take jobs in the better-organised, more militant workplaces; become workplace activists; and become active forces for transforming the unions from within into militant and democratic organisations which can reach out and mobilise the millions of workers currently unorganised or only nominally organised. Change the world: organise at work!.