Unions are to push the government for “pay restoration” deals that would award above-inflation pay rises to public sector workers who have suffered a decade of real-term salary cuts. Members gathering for the Trades Union Congress’s annual meeting next month are due to vote on a motion that calls for pay restoration to be “a key feature of our campaigning with the new government”, the final agenda for the event shows. The current holder of the TUC’s revolving presidency, the Fire Brigades Union boss Matt Wrack, told the Financial Times – which first reported details of the campaign – that he expected delegates to back the demand. The PCS union, which is championing the motion, said it aimed to make up for the fact that pay levels had actually fallen an average of 1.5% a year since 2011. However, it is likely to fuel attacks on Labour from the Conservatives, who have accused Keir Starmer of being “played by union paymasters” after a series of pay deals to settle long-running disputes with striking workers including junior doctors and train drivers.
The government has so far offered a 22% pay deal over two years to junior doctors, who had been calling for a 35% rise to counter a fall in real-wages over the past 15 years. The British Medical Association is holding a member ballot on that deal until mid-September. The government made an offer to the Aslef train drivers’ union on Wednesday last week in an effort to end two years of rail chaos. The deal involved a pay rise of nearly 15% over three years, all backdated and pensionable, without any changes to terms and conditions. It has gone out to members to approve. However, by Friday Aslef had announced plans for 22 days of strikes at weekends from late August to November on LNER trains on the state-run east coast mainline. The rail union emphasised that the strike action was unrelated to the pay deal offered by Labour, which is meant to settle a long-running national dispute involving 16 other train companies. News of the Aslef strike was compounded by an announcement by the Public and Commercial Services union, which represents nearly 200,000 public sector workers, that 650 of its Border Force members working in passport control at Heathrow would strike between 31 August and 3 September, and would then work to rule, with no overtime, until 22 September. Separately, nearly half of GP surgeries in England started taking part in industrial action this month for the first time in 60 years, with one in four doctors capping the number of patients seen at 25 a day. The industrial action is being launched in protest at the last government’s decision to increase their budget by only 1.9%. Labour has pledged to increase funding for 2024-25 to 6%.