“I say to the new Prime Minister, as I’ve done to his predecessors – give my members back the right to strike or raise their pay, terms and conditions to a level where they would never need to!”
By Steve Gillan
Over the past year, as TUC President, it has been my privilege to put the urgent and serious concerns of my members – frontline prison officers and other workers in secure or correctional institutions – under the trade union spotlight.
In particular, I’ve tried my best to sound the alarm about the appalling injustice suffered by prison officers for over three decades – their lack of industrial rights and specifically the right to take strike action.
Since the Tories took away this vital right from my members in 1994, successive governments and prison service bosses have used this legal straightjacket to undermine pay, terms and conditions, knowing there’s no way for us to fight back.
We were left powerless to stop the real-terms pay cuts, year after year. Powerless to prevent pension age rising to 68, when we all know it’s cruel and unrealistic to make prison officers work the landings till their late sixties. And powerless to challenge the austerity cuts and privatisation that brought such devastation to a once-proud public service.
Mass lay-offs and the loss of experience that followed triggered a cycle of violence that’s still out of control – yet when my members are forced to withdraw to a place of safety, they are threatened under a permanent injunction, and their union is dragged into the High Court and fined six-figure sums for unlawful industrial action.
Privatising prison maintenance created its own crisis of squalid conditions and broken cells – a two-billion-pound black hole that’s making the capacity crisis so much worse. And it’s no surprise that both the public and private sectors can’t recruit enough prison officers to run the wings that are actually open, when pay is uncompetitive and promotion is unlikely.
All of these problems have been made worse because my members and my union have been unable to challenge poor management and ministerial decisions by exercising the most basic human right – the right to withdraw your own labour.
And now we have the shameful spectacle of a Labour government preparing to go to the European court to defend Tory legislation restricting the rights of workers. The POA have lodged a case at the European Court of Human Rights, and earlier this year the European Committee on Social Rights confirmed that the government is breaching my members’ human rights.
At this year’s TUC, the POA are bringing Motion 5 calling for a new Employment Rights Act “to ensure our laws comply with our ratified international obligations” – including the right to strike. Our motion last year on restoring our industrial rights attracted unanimous support, with Congress committing to “continue the campaign to bring government to the table for negotiations”.
Together with the TUC General Secretary, we have proposed talks with ministers mediated by a trusted third party – but so far the government has knocked us back.
I say to the new Prime Minister, as I’ve done to his predecessors – give my members back the right to strike or raise their pay, terms and conditions to a level where they would never need to!
Prison officers are disciplined, uniformed and loyal to the Crown. Their colleagues in Scotland won back the right to take industrial action over a decade ago, and the sky hasn’t fallen in. Quite the opposite – there have been no strikes, just improved industrial relations.
So I appeal to Andy Burnham: keep the promise made to my union by Tony Blair in opposition, but then reneged on in power. Give us back our much-needed industrial muscle – and together in a spirit of co-operation and mutual respect we can build a prison service we can be proud of again.
- Steve Gillan is the General Secretary of the POA and the President of the TUC.
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