The union leaders about to ruin your life

Fears are growing that Labour politicians will cave into the unions, sending the UK back to the 1970s

The Government’s decision to agree pay deals with junior doctors, teachers and – most controversially – train drivers in very short order after the election has revived fears of Labour politicians caving into the unions and sending the UK back to the 1970s. 
It hardly helped that the deal with Aslef was quickly followed by the union announcing 22 days of strikes on LNER trains later this year. That the two disputes were unrelated was lost in the noise; it gave the strong impression that train drivers had pocketed the inch and promptly demanded a mile.
James Cleverly, one of those in the race to become the next Conservative party leader, claimed this week that Labour was being “played by union paymasters”. However, experts on industrial relations argue that the Government is merely seeking to clear some of the problems they inherited from their predecessors. Even the former Conservative rail minister Huw Merriman has admitted he can see the wisdom of this approach. 
Unions became increasingly militant in the dying years of the Conservative government. Rolling strike action drew comparisons to the industrial unrest of the 1970s and 1980s when union bosses like Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon and Arthur Scargill became household names. 
Next month, the Trades Union Congress is expected to push the government for “pay restoration” to make up for a decade of real-terms salary cuts in the public sector. With the Tory party busy picking a new leader, for the time being these are the unofficial leaders of the opposition, their relationships with the Labour government and their demands.
Wrack, who was born in Manchester and spent most of his career as a firefighter in London’s East End, has been head of the relatively small Fire Brigades Union since 2005. But he gained a heightened public profile during his one-year presidency of the Trades Union Congress. 
The meeting he will preside over next month looks set to be a seminal moment for the union movement after 14 years of Conservative party rule. Wrack told The Financial Times last week that he expected delegates of the umbrella group’s convention to back a demand for broader above-inflation pay rises.
“That’s the first gunshot in a more serious battle that’s still to be fought,” says Gregor Gall, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Glasgow, who has written biographies of Bob Crow and Mick Lynch. “And at the moment it’s hard to see how there will be a meeting of minds between the Labour Government and some of the unions. How will it go? Impossible to say. Some unions will play ball but some will play hard ball.”
And, if the government is prepared to move on pay, what kind of counter-demands to improve efficiency and productivity (translation: fewer jobs) will it make?
The motion at the upcoming TUC for “pay restoration in the public sector” to be “a key feature of our campaigning with the new government” has been championed by the PCS (Public and Commercial Services) union, which represents nearly 200,000 public sector workers. 
A former racehorse groom in her native Somerset, Heathcote only took over as the first female general secretary of the organisation in February when Mark Serwotka, who had been in the post for 23 years, stepped down. She is a 30-year veteran of the civil service, all spent in the Department for Work and Pensions and its predecessor departments. 
The PCS, which is widely considered one of the more Left-wing unions, claims it’s not advocating a particular figure for any proposed deal. However, if public sector pay was increased to the same level as it was in 2011, taking inflation into account, wages would have to rise by 21pc – or more than £50bn.
Labour had barely been in power for three weeks when Graham called on Rachel Reeves, the newly installed Chancellor, to borrow more to “give Britain a break” and help “hurting” workers. She said: “We need the straitjacket off a little bit, get some wiggle room there. Borrowing to invest is not the same as other borrowing.”
This is no surprise. Sharon Graham, the head of one of the UK’s largest trade unions, with 1.2m members across 19 sectors of the economy, clashed with Labour when the party was in opposition over Starmer’s reluctance to support strikes openly. Nor has she made any secret of her laser-like focus on jobs, pay and conditions.
This marks the 55-year-old out as a different type of union boss to her processor Len McCluskey, who fancied himself as an éminence grise of internal Labour party politics. By contrast, Graham has deliberately distanced her union from the party. She has reduced financial contributions to Labour, using the money instead to “mobilise in communities” and fund strike pay.
“She plays a strange game: sometimes she blows hot with Labour and sometimes cold,” says Prof Gall. “It’ll be interesting to see where she lands.”
Under Ward, who started as a messenger boy at Tooting delivery office in 1976, the CWU has adopted a similar strategy to Unite. In 2021, its 200,000 members voted to suspend any donations (other than affiliation fees) to the Labour party and instead work directly with specific members of parliament, mayors and councillors “who have our backs”.
Many of the CWU’s members work for former state monopolies, such as BT and Royal Mail, that have long since been privatised. The management teams of these companies have often clashed with the union in their attempts to modernise and reshape their business to compete against more nimble upstarts. 
In 2015, Ward endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to become Labour leader arguing that “the grip of the Blairites and individuals like Peter Mandelson must now be loosened once and for all”. A born and bred South Londoner, Ward’s politics might be red but he bleeds blue as a lifelong Chelsea supporter and keen blues guitarist who cites Rolling Stones legend Keith Richards as one of his musical heroes.
Now probably the best-known of the current generation of union bosses, it may come as something of a shock that Lynch only took over at the UK’s largest transport union in 2021.
Quick witted and deadpan, the 62-year-old has been accused of causing misery to the travelling public with his members repeatedly bringing the country’s rail network to a halt. But he has also repeatedly proven he is a match for anyone in a verbal sparring match, earning the respect of even his opponents. 
The RMT is widely considered one of the most militant unions in the country and Lynch, a former electrician and Eurostar worker, has said his role models include Corbyn and Scargill, the figurehead for the miners’ strikes in the 1980s. 
The RMT has revealed it will be holding new talks with the Department for Transport next week where it will push for a significant pay rise for its members at train companies. In a letter to RMT members, Lynch wrote that he would “defend jobs, pay and conditions” and expected an offer from the Government next week.
The UK’s largest union is also the one with the closest ties to Labour, a fact underlined by the party’s appointment of a Unison executive to act as its main liaison with the unions, according to Prof Gall.
Similarly, McAnea is considered something of a moderate and broadly “centrist” by the standards of the union movement, has recently written that Starmer’s government offers a “beacon of hope” that will hopefully usher in “a new dawn for public services”.
That said, the 65-year-old Glaswegian is clearly no pushover. McAnea started her career as a housing officer at Glasgow City Council before working for the GMB and then moving on to Unison when it was founded in the early 1990s. Reputed to be one of the top negotiators in the union movement, McAnea says she operates according to her father’s advice: “Walk in there as if you own the place.”
After two years of strikes, Whelan appears to have won a major victory, which could end “the longest pay dispute in the recent history of Britain’s railways”.
The settlement due to be voted on by members of Aslef, the union representing 96 per cent of Britain’s train drivers, includes three pay increases covering pay awards between 2019 and 2025. For the average train driver, this would raise salaries from £60,000 to £69,000, and include an immediate payment of £6,000 in backdated wages. Whelan has described it as “a good offer – a fair offer”. 
Before the election, Whelan, who was elected head of Aslef in 2011 and is rarely seen without his burgundy union tie, claimed that the Conservatives had “re-energised a new generation of people who want to be trade unionists, who want to be activists”. 
Like Lynch, Whelan is the son of Irish immigrants who moved to the UK in the 1950s, and claims that growing up poor inspired in him “the politics of aspiration”.
Smith joined the GMB as a 16-year-old gas apprentice, taking over Britain’s biggest industrial union in 2021 when his predecessor Tim Roache abruptly quit just six months after being overwhelmingly re-elected. 
The old-school union boss is not afraid to throw barbs at Labour, in the past claiming the party under Starmer has “become more and more remote from the concerns of working class people”.
He has also not held back from expressing his concern that the transition to a low-carbon economy could have dire consequences for those of his members who work to extract North Sea oil or in other heavy industries.
Smith has said politicians have been “fundamentally dishonest” about how difficult and expensive the move to net zero will be and warned Starmer not to risk “economic destruction”.