Interview: Polly Smythe

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

You’re Novara Media’s Labour Movement Correspondent, could you tell me a bit about what do you do and why the post was established?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

I've been in that role for about seven months now. It came about because Novara realised that while they were doing good reporting on industrial disputes there's a limit to how much freelancers can do. That’s because, essentially, industrial reporting is the building of contacts, and understanding quite specific legislation that's often quite complicated and understanding union bureaucracy, which is also again quite complicated. And so, they felt that it was better to have somebody who would be there all the time; rather than people picking up pieces and putting them down they wanted someone who could do it in a sustained way. My job is mainly talking to workers and trade unionists, whether that's shop stewards or general secretaries or just ordinary members, about work. Sometimes that’s about live direct disputes, sometimes that’s about union strategy. And sometimes it's people who aren't even in unions, who have organised and come together and are unionising or are in the process of unionising. It’s basically just talking to people about their jobs, whether they like them and what they've done to make them better.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

It’s often said that there’s a shortage of labour journalists, or that there used to be more and now there are fewer. Why do you think that is? Is it a problem and if so, what could be done to address it?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

It’s hard to realise quite how powerful union reporting was once upon a time; I was reading a book recently that talks about how in the 1930s, the Labour and Industrial Correspondents group (who were a group of industrial reporters) were actually allocated a room at the Ministry of Labour, and they had telephones for their own use. And union reporters maintained that level of power for a long time. In the 1980s, the Financial Times had six labour reporters. Everyone would have had a team of industrial reporters — they wouldn’t have just had one. Most papers would have had five or six. But something that’s important to note is that more reporters doesn’t translate straightforwardly to better coverage. I remember reading Scargill chastising reporters during the early days of the Miners’ Strike. He called them “a bunch of Piranha fish that will always go on supporting Mrs Thatcher”. But even if coverage wasn't necessarily more sympathetic, it was at least more accurate. After the defeat of the miners, the sidelining of unions in everyday life meant the sidelining of industrial reporters. With the threat of action falling off, the news agenda basically changed to reflect that.

It was also convenient for the government to be able to bypass industrial reporters and to give that information to the lobby because lobby journalists lack the industrial knowledge to interrogate claims. It's a shift that's worked well for the government. People thought that this was all pretty terminal: I think people thought that organised labour wasn't going to come back. In fact, I was reading an article this morning, it was a meeting of people who'd worked as industrial reporters and Peter Hitchens was there. And he said — this was in 2011 — we are now a nation which sells cappuccinos and mobile phones to each other, so there's no need for industrial correspondence. But if you fast forward to the present day, industrial reporting has made something of a comeback — you have Alan Jones at the Press Association, there’s me, you have Left Foot Forward who have just hired someone, and there’s Tribune doing industrial reporting. And there has been a return in the general press of reporting on industrial disputes. But the pitfalls of not having specialists are really evident. Often there are really stark factual inaccuracies about the very basics. Often, there's also real confusion around how strikes and trade unions function. This can also include an overemphasis on PR.

What could be done to improve things? I think it'd be an interesting question as to whether unions wanted to invest money in training reporters, whether unions saw this as an issue about being able to get good information and getting good and accurate information about disputes into the public domain as something that they wanted to commit to tackling.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

When disputes are covered in the mainstream press, it’s often more from the perspective of how people might be affected as consumers or commuters. Would you connect this media framing to the history of labour reporting that you’ve just given? And also, what does this all mean for the state of public discussion about trade unions?

Similarly, does the lack of reportage of disputes cause a problem for the ability of the left to strategise? Once upon a time, there would be entire books written about a single dispute. Nowadays that top to tail coverage is extremely rare.

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

Something interesting about what you’ve just mentioned is that it’s not just that coverage is bad. It's also the question of what is determined as an industrial issue, and the limiting way that industrial issues are defined. There are lots of issues, I think, that are inherently industrial, but that are framed as business quirks. And a lot of that comes from the fact that when you had industrial reporters — who were essentially bumped for other news coverage — a lot of the coverage they were bumped for was business news. Business reporters would take the slots that industrial reporters would have; there would be reporting on hundreds of job losses, and they’d ask what the stockbrokers and the banks thought.

There are lots of things now that are fundamentally industrial issues, like, for instance, the issue of the “Great Resignation”, when, in 2021, we had this historically high quit rate. The question there was really “Is this a moment of increased worker power and strength or is this a moment of trade union weakness?”. But those aren’t the kinds of questions addressed in the press.

Instead, coverage tends to focus on the relationship of the unions to the Labour Party, for example. And so disputes, like the Coventry bin dispute, which was one of Unite’s longest disputes, and was really interesting in terms of the machinations of public sector pay determinations, for example, are presented in the media as if they’re only a story of a Labour council vs Unite.

As for the framings of “commuters and consumers”, one thing that I find interesting is the way in which trade unions have actually used that framing rather than challenge it. The government and the media are attacking trade unions in the name of patients and commuters, for example, and unions are saying “Okay, fair enough, even if that's the case, don't you as a patient want to have a good service; we're striking for the NHS to save the NHS, we're not striking for ourselves”, or  “Okay, you might be a commuter. Well, the trains are really rubbish! And we want the railways to run properly!”. They use that hostile media framing for their own advantage.

As for how left coverage of disputes should be, it’s a tricky question. While a dispute is live, you have to be in solidarity — you don’t want to pour water on a fire. But at the same time, you have to be careful. I think that left coverage can sometimes focus more on the individual, or it's easier to focus on kind of the individual worker than maybe the entire dispute. It’s maybe easier to say that X person is striking because of the cost of living crisis, or their material conditions, but then you can create a slight trap for yourself wherein rather than industrial action being an exercise of a lever of power, it’s presented as the product of the most dire circumstances. People can be paid well and also be on strike and that framing can be a bit of a trap.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Does the current strike wave – hot summer, hot autumn, hot winter, hot spring?– live up to its name?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

This has been probably the biggest challenge of my job — trying to narrativise the current moment. Clearly, it’s not merely an arithmetic challenge, where you add up the number of workers on strike, and then if it hits a threshold, you have a strike wave. It's far more qualitative than that. It’s difficult because the one hand, there are unions who are not joining the fray because they haven't been able to meet the restrictive anti-trade union balloting rules: the Royal College of Midwives missed out on their vote, Unison missed out in almost all of the (NHS) trusts that they voted for (I think they only reached the threshold and eight out of 262). But it is interesting that we're seeing strikes in the private sector, even if the biggest of those are in formerly nationalised industries, like railways and the post.

I think also, the other thing is looking not only at who is joining but at what’s happening.  There have, for example, been indefinite strikes taken — the criminal barristers, for example, and the dockers, too. But in general, the strike days have been kind of less about grinding things to a halt and more sort of one or two protest strikes. So, the strike wave is, is big, and is really considerable. But I think it is hard to assess because of the patterns of the strike days that we’re seeing.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What tactics or actions are the most exciting or innovative in the British trade union movement at the moment?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

I'm sure there are really interesting questions about tactics going on. But I think we're seeing the fact that most people who are striking are striking for the first time in their lives means that there isn't a wealth of institutional knowledge floating around.

The current strike wave is showing that not every worker has the same amount of industrial strength that is needed to move an employer. And that can be for all sorts of reasons. In the Coventry Bin Dispute, it was about the difficulty around determining public sector pay, via skills grading, so it was very difficult to make the dispute a pay dispute. It can also be that the wealth of employers doesn't necessarily straightforwardly depend on our production anymore — the company you're striking against is owned by a parent company, who are massive, and so it's actually really difficult to ever damage their bottom line.

Striking is really hard. And strategy is something that is learned and not obvious from the start. There are debates about tactics, like for instance the debate within UCU about indefinite vs targeted definite strike days. But historically those tactics would have been debated within the context of a wealth of institutional knowledge and memory, particularly through a very thriving shop stewards movement, which is now largely absent.

One thing that I find very interesting is Sharon Graham’s “leverage tactics”. They started before her but as a set of tactics, they’re associated with her, and Unite have pioneered them. The idea is that you take this three-dimensional approach to looking at a company — you take the company, and you break it down and look at where and what the union would need to target in order to find leverage. You examine the company’s directors, shareholders, the political climate they’re situated in, their creditors, likely future clients, and ask “Who do we need to hit”.

Sharon Graham has called this a “strike plus” approach, it’s not just naming and shaming, it’s an integrated industrial strategy. It was used in setting up the Liverpool dockers’ dispute — they used it identify and target hidden company decision-makers. I think that’s a really interesting approach.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

That’s such an important point. You’d normally have had people who’d have been in many disputes. That loss of memory is crucial.

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

And it’s something that you can’t shortcut back to. What’s happening now will also generate information for future disputes, for future strikes.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What are workers winning at the moment?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

A surprisingly difficult question is how to establish when a win is a win. At the moment, you'll see what can look like a massive win — workers secure 26% — but often a large part of this will be made up of a one-off payment. Those are far less good as they don’t represent a permanent salary uplift. They won’t leave you in a stronger place for next year’s pay deal.

I’d say that most current pay rises are still real terms pay cuts when inflation is considered. But of course, they are far more than people would have won had they not taken strike action.

Things are different in different sectors. Some of this is because unions are working through certain sectors and certain employers quite methodically. Take Unite — they’re working through bus companies like Abellio, Arriva, Stagecoach methodically. There has been an 827% increase in strike action for bus drivers. The same pay demands are being applied across the sector.

There is also a rise in action in sectors which haven’t previously had much union activity, and with lots of wins, too. The charity sector, for example. Workers at Shelter won a one-off pay offer. There’s lots of organising in the charity sector.

There have been some really notable wins around outsourcing. Often, smaller independent unions like the UVW and IWGB led the way with this. Other unions too, now, are working on outsourcing. The RMT recently organised the first national cleaners’ strike. And GMB has been fighting NHS outsourcing. That unions are taking on outsourcing is really significant and suggestive of a change to the landscape of labour organising.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How do you see the strike wave sustaining itself or growing in the future?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

A lot of people are saying, partly because this is what the government is briefing, that the government won’t settle with X Y Z group of workers, whether it’s nurses or paramedics, because then they would have to settle with everyone. But, of course, they can settle! They can just say, nurses, here's this, and paramedics, here’s nothing. The logic behind that would be if you give nurses a pay rise, other unions would use their leverage to demand a pay rise too. That’s when that statement might become true, but I just don’t think that’s the situation we’re in. For example, midwives didn’t pass their ballot. Unison’s turnout was disappointing, some of the teaching unions also didn’t meet the threshold. So, determining the future scale of action is difficult. We’ve not seen the end of the national set piece disputes like the CWU and the RMT and ASLEF, they’ve been rumbling on for a while now.

Everything is to play for — which sounds like a non-commitment! But I think that the present moment has laid deposits down. The experience of striking really changes people. And the experience of witnessing other people’s striking changes people. So, whether or not the wave grows or has already crested, it will have left deposits down, the effects of which we will feel for a long time.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What are the new Minimum Standards regulations that have been proposed? What's likely to happen if they are passed?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

It’s a death by a thousand cuts of the ability to have the right to strike because this is a further impediment to the ability for trade unions to mount effective industrial action. And that is because there's no right to strike in Britain. There’s no positive right. Instead, there are protections that are afforded to unions, and to striking workers if that action is deemed lawful. And so, there are already lots of requirements on trade unions that they have to meet in order for an action to be deemed lawful. This proposed legislation is an attempt to build on that framework, by increasing requirements that unions have to meet to make action lawful.

They're doing that by imposing minimum service levels, which are basically requirements of trade unions that an agreed proportion of their members will have to work on strike days, despite those members having voted to take industrial action. And in fire, ambulance and rail services, the government are going to impose the minimum service level, but then in other parts of the public sector that the legislation targets like education, the government will impose a minimum level if a voluntary one can't be reached.

It’s really fraught with a lot of problems. Firstly, it’s really unclear what a minimum service level looks like. Take, for instance, the railways — if the minimum service level is that 40% of the trains will run, you need more than 40% of signallers, for that to happen, you need almost all the signallers. And so, actually determining what a minimum service level looks like is really hard. If you have a class at a school, how do you choose which two teachers are going to come in?

It's also unclear how it will be implemented. Because, let's say, an employer says to a worker, you have to come in on the strike day and work and then it comes to the strike day and they say, I'm feeling a bit poorly and I won’t make it in. It’s really unclear how that happens.

If a critical number of people decided to just disobey the minimum service levels, then, in skilled roles, you’ll actually be left with not enough people to run the service on non-strike days, which is more disruptive. And unions have pointed out that also incentivises other kinds of action, like work to rule or actions short of a strike, or an overtime ban, which will mean that disputes will run for much, much longer, and are probably actually more disruptive in the long run.

We’ve covered this a little already, but health unions are specifically frustrated because their workplaces are not able to meet staffing levels on a day-to-day basis. And now the government are trying to claim they are protecting public safety by imposing minimum service levels! The health unions already have arrangements in place for emergency services. So, there’s no need for the legislation. It’s very bad legislation.

It’s also legislation that will take a long time to pass. With a Tory majority, it will go through in the House of Commons, but I think that in the House of Lords, it will take a long time to be clarified.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How do trade unions fit into a wider left or progressive strategy to democratise the economy and redistribute power and wealth?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

There’s a line that the employers try to put out which is that unions are only interested in representing the needs of their members. Whereas trade unions would love to represent the whole of the working class, and they would love to be able to go beyond their sectoral boundaries, and not doing so means that they are not actually doing the most they can for their members. But the rapid decline of union memberships means that they have fewer members and so they spend more time servicing the needs of their existing members, rather than focusing on active recruitment. When they have fewer members, they spend more time defending the interests of those members, rather than participating in broader class struggles.

That’s the starting point for slotting unions into a left and progressive strategy. It’s a dynamic that I think was present in the strike wave. I was reading a book on strikes by Richard Hyman, and he talks about trade unions being a tension between cautious bargaining and class assertiveness. What we’ve seen in this strike wave is unions broadening out their struggle to campaigns like Enough is Enough, with a framing of class struggle. But at the same time, the actual reality of what unions are bargaining for often is defensive campaigns against pay cuts and terms and conditions, rather than a more class-assertive bargaining. Given all this, it’s difficult to know where unions slot in.

There’s a risk of presenting industrial and political struggle or strategy as if they’re completely separate or a binary. All strikes have a political dimension and often the industrial and the political goal being sought are the same: think of something like repealing restrictive anti-trade union laws or moving towards a Gren New Deal. Those are both political and industrial priorities that depend on each other.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I agree, there’s a relationship of interdependence there. One additional thing that makes it tricky is bans on secondary action. In general, it’s really hard for unions to flex the kind of muscles they would have done in the past. It forces the separation of the industrial and the political activity in a way that can put limits on consciousness and on action that would naturally come from their interwovenness.

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

I think part of the problem as well is that this is a problem of periodisation. A lot of the current disputes have much longer running histories than Hot Strike Summer, Winter, Autumn. A lot of them began a long time ago. They can't all be neatly collapsed into this into this one moment. For example, the RMT dispute over driver-only operations has been running for years. And the CWU balloted a couple of years back to take action against Royal Mail but then never took that action. A lot of these frustrations have longer histories, so it makes sense that people push back on the framing of this as one big Strike Wave movement. Which is interesting because there are risks that might come with just imposing the narrative on top of the disputes, but there is an opportunity to broaden them out, too.
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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Have any of disputes you’ve covered included questions of firm governance and workplace democracy?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

I looked back over my notes from the event that Common Wealth and Autonomy did for the launch of Democratize Work and something that I took away from that is that there is on the one hand a very specific definition of workplace democracy or industrial democracy, but on the other hand, there’s a broader definition of workplace democracy which might include the involvement of workers in some degree of managerial control, even if not in the form of, say, workers on board, then there definitely is some of that present in current disputes. There was a question asked at the talk about Scargillism in the 70s and the rejection of industrial democracy, that question of “Do you elect your boss or you do abolish him?”. That sort of thing isn’t present. But it’s hard to know what is present because of the absence of industrial reporters.

Relatedly, unions nowadays have press officers: unions lean heavily on them and on a slick media operation. This means that disputes in the present moment tend to be narrativised as about pay — we’re in a cost of living crisis and that framing tends to garner a great deal of support and it’s a way of making common sense of a dispute which is probably actually far more complicated — but when I chat to workers that more complicated picture comes through. Recently, I interviewed six Amazon workers in Coventry. They were going on strike, they were rejecting a pay offer. But while everybody wanted more pay, there was a sense that pay wasn’t that terrible relative to other warehouse work, and in fact a lot of our conversation was just about bad management, not just algorithmic management but just bad management by bad bosses. The thing I remember most is this guy telling me that they all chip into a communal fund which goes towards paying for a radio that’s meant to play throughout the day. Every day, management would turn it off. There was a constant battle about whether the radio could or couldn’t be played.

That was really interesting to me as it was indicative of another push factor to striking, that fundamental age-old battle between the worker and the boss.

I’d add that this sort of thing is especially present in gig work — which is where we’re seeing a lot of wildcat strike action, particularly by food delivery couriers —  which is often about the involvement of workers in some kind of managerial control over their shifts and the patterns of their work.

In this broader sense, workplace democracy is something that workers are fighting for. And more broadly still, the strike wave has come out of the pandemic, when we had capital able to push workers harder to produce more with less and faster, and then we came out of that to a situation where workers have greater confidence because we’ve got a much tighter labour market and also workers have a sense of their social importance. That’s been demonstrated publicly, through the public conversations about key workers and essential workers. The bosses are trying to hold on to those pandemic gains, and the workers are trying to fight for their share.

Even the disputes about pay are still about this battle between the worker and the boss. Conversations about workplace power and workplace democracy are informing the strike wave.

One interesting thing is that during the pandemic a lot of people were doing massive overtime when their colleagues were sick when they had nowhere else to get work from, but now that question of work/life balance is back on the table. That’s one way that issues of democracy and control come to the fore even if they’re presented as terms and conditions issues.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Finally, what’s your favourite book or article about the labour movement or the history of work, that you think isn’t read enough?

[.cdw-name]Polly Smythe[.cdw-name]

That is such a good question! I think I'd say the book that I am reading, I haven't finished it yet, but I think it’s great if you want to learn who is involved and who is not involved in the current strike wave. It’s Class Power on Zero Hours by Angry Workers.
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One really interesting question that it helps answer is whether the strike wave is bottom-up or top-down: is this worker militancy driving unions to action or the other way around. And one of the best telltale signs of worker militancy is when workers start rejecting management pay offers, and that’s a topic explored in Class Power — what happens when workers reject a union-endorsed pay offer from management at a supermarket. From there, I started talking to supermarket workers about what it was like working in say Tesco’s or Morrisons which are the two supermarkets represented by USDAW. And something that that struck me was that they said, “There are people striking for more than we will ever be offered”. In that way, the book is useful as a reminder of who is still excluded from the current strike wave and of what unions could be doing to rectify that.