Media Storm - S3E4 Strikes: What have trade unions ever done for me? - with Mick Whelan

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Hey listeners! We've launched a Patreon. If you want to support us for a small monthly fee, head to patreon.com/MediaStormPodcast What words come to mind when you hear the word 'strikes'? Delays, cancellations, chaos? With 'misery for ordinary people!' brandished across our headlines, it’s easy to see strikes as a general nuisance. But this week's episode of Media Storm looks beyond the everyday grumblings of train delays and travel chaos, to ask the question “what have trade unions ever done for me?” Spoiler alert - quite a lot it seems. Focussing on three key areas of union achievements - health & safety rights, wage increases, and equal pay - we speak to strikers standing on the shoulders of the first trade unionists. Hear from a Bristol midwife struggling with poor conditions who felt balloting for industrial action was the only answer, the then 23-year-old leader if the 2017 McStrike (who got the date tattooed on her arm!), and one of the warriors that won Glasgow women back almost three quarters of a billion pounds of stolen wages. In the studio, we have General-Secretary of the ASLEF union Mick Whelan - who is no stranger to tough media rounds, to dissect the myths and latest headlines about strikes, unions, and workers - and tell us whether he really did schedule a rail strike over Eurovision... Speakers: Ewan Gibbs @ewangibbs Sophie Inman @midwives_rcm @MidwivesRCM Rhea Wolfson @rheawolfson Shen Batmaz  Mick Whelan @ASLEFunion Sources: Scottish coal mining death rates eprints.gla.ac.uk/210374/7/210374.pdf  Working class journalists pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/journalists-class-backgrounds/  Royal College of Midwives rcm.org.uk  Glasgow council equal pay dispute gmbscotland.org.uk/assets/media/documents/unionline/ULS-News-October-2018.pdf  The McStrike waronwant.org/our-work/mcstrike Get in touch: Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Your hosts are @helenawadia and @mathildamall. Music by Samfire @soundofsamfire.  Media Storm was launched by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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which we're going to be launching next week on the platform. A special shout out to our first early bird subscribers. If you want to help us build our MediaStorm community, head to patreon.com forward slash MediaStorm podcast. Link is in the show notes. Matilda, what words come to mind when I say the word, strikes. Delays, cancellations, general kind of stress and chaos. Yep, that pretty much sums up the UK in the last year. I mean, I don't think there's a single industry that hasn't been on strike

in the last year. Rail workers, yep, train drivers, airport staff, bus drivers, barristers, post office workers, doctors, nurses, ambulance workers, teachers, university staff, firefighter. Wasn't it initially called the Summer of Solidarity, because it all started last June, but it can't be the Summer of Solidarity anymore. They're going to have to update that to every season of Solidarity. Right. But if we just go back to those words that sprung up for you, and I'm sure many others at the beginning, the delays, the cancellations, the chaos, those words have been splashed across headlines over the last year.

And we often hear there have been cancellations due to strikes. But it got me thinking, what is it really due to? Is it due to strikes? Or is it due to the rising cost of living? Soaring inflation, long-running economic austerity, causing people to feel that they have to strike? Yeah. And now I feel like a bit of an asshole for my initial answer because there's quite an important distinction there that shifts the blame from individual workers and puts it on a wider institutional context. So talking about that wider context, what is the government doing to quell these strikes? Well, as much as I wish the answer was negotiating calmly and reaching a sensible agreement with all workers to raise their pay in line with inflation, unfortunately,

it seems to be a little more sinister than that. Even though rail minister Hugh Merriman admitted in January that fighting rail strikes had cost the government more than settling, the dispute would have, they continue to push back and now a strikes bill, also known as the minimum service levels bill, has passed in the House of Commons and the House of Lords and it's in its final stages. What is that? What does that do? The bill would introduce minimum levels of service during strikes across certain key sectors. The government say the intention is to mitigate the disruption of strike action to the public. Of course, unions say the bill threatens the fundamental right to strike and is unnecessary and counterproductive.

Plus, unions in the public sector also point out that in many essential services, like nurses or other NHS workers, there are already minimum service agreements in place during industrial action. This conversation about restricting the right to strike reminds me of the conversations we've had this past year about restricting the right to protest. You know, yes, these things can be a nuisance to others, they are by definition disruptive, but they're also a fundamental right. They play a fundamental social role in preventing people in power from exploiting those of us beneath them. And as I've been discovering, it's far from the first time there has been legislation to try and curb trade union power. If we look beyond the everyday grumblings of

train delays and travel chaos, we can actually see what the unions have done for us. And let me tell you, it's a hell of a lot. So what are some examples of what trade unions have achieved? You like holidays? Nah, hate them. That's why I started a podcast. Well, holiday pay, not that we get it, is a big one. Two day weekends, that's another. Minimum wage, parental leave. I mean, I could go on, but I'm going to focus on three key areas. Higher wages, health and safety, and equal pay. So I'm off to ask the question, what have unions ever done for me? I'll be speaking to a trade union researcher, a midwife who felt strike action was the only way to go, a young worker who led the first ever

McDonald's strike, and the woman behind the Glasgow Council equal pay fight that won women almost three quarters of a billion pounds back. And I'll see you all back in the studio with our very special guest, Mick Weaver, General Secretary of the Asloff Union, to discuss everything around this media storm. A fight between unions and the government left passengers disrupted again. A fresh series of walkout. We now know that some of these strikes are going to impact some major events coming. There's a Beyonce concert in London and you're going to be ruining their weekend by your guys being outstripe. Fresh travel misery today. Sitting and driving a train, you want more than 60 grand. Come on man. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts

for the people who are normally asked last. I'm Helena Wadia and I'm Matilda Marlon. This week's investigation, strikes. What have trade unions ever done for me? I want to see no more pit closures, no more job losses. Mr. Chairman, what we have seen in the past few weeks is not picketing at all. Now, faced with a loss of 20,000 jobs in the next year, will the miners be driven into a nationwide strike? It's Britain's longest and most bitter since 1926.

What would follow was a year-long. national strike that became one of the most bitter industrial disputes in living memory, ending in the miners' defeat. The UK coal miners' strikes. They took place most famously in the 1970s and 80s, a core part of the history of unions, worker organisation and industrial action, and also where the fight for worker health and safety can still be seen keenly today. Health and safety at work has been one of the core issues of British trade unions, going back to the 19th century origins of trade unions in the context of industrialisation, major changes to the organisation of work and the expansion of employment in new and often dangerous environments in factories and steelworks and in coal mines in particular.

That's Ewan Gibbs. He's a lecturer in economic and social history at Glasgow University. You'll hear him throughout this investigation as he spent his career researching work employment, labour and trade union movements. He told me here that we can see the huge benefits that organise labour, especially in the coal mining industry, obtained for workers' health and safety. By the eve of nationalisation of the coal mining industry,

at a point where the industry was brought into public, public ownership and trade unions were given significant influence in the operations of the industry. The death rate in Scottish coal mines just about halved. That happened in no small part because the ethos of the industry included the significant new social component. The voice of workers became important in how coal mining production was organised. And I think coal was maybe a very, very clear example of that. But we also have, you know, I don't work in a coal mining environment. I'm unlikely to be killed by a cavern in my work.

But we might be at risk of RSI, of the effects of working overly long, a lows of stress of a whole other myriad of workplace conditions. And I think the unions have played an important role there and continue to do so, especially in the public sector, where they're relatively strong still. One group of workers which has health and safety at the forefront of its collective action are midwives. We keep saying time and time again, there's not enough people on this shift. I haven't had a break in 12 hours. I haven't been able to go to the toilet or change my tampon or eat some food, drink some water.

Like basic human needs, if we are not looked after, we can't look after birthing people and their families. Hi, I'm Sophie Inman. I'm a midwife in the South West. Sophie is a member of the Royal College of Midwife's Union. Due to poor health and safety conditions and what the union has described as staff being pushed to the brink over pay, midwives have long been campaigning for change. It's important to demonstrate that strike action is often the end point of worker organisation. Our patients deserve better.

Our midwives deserve better. and our families deserve better. Please hear our plea before the whole maternity system collapses. Yours are very tired, burnt out midwife. What was March with Midwives in 2021? The point of the march was, first of all, to avoid strike action. And secondly, to raise awareness to the public, to the government, that the state of the service was in utter disrepair.

was collapsing. We weren't happy and they needed to do something now or it was going to get worse and it was already bad. Did anything come of the march? Did it achieve anything? No. Thousands of midwives across the country sent letters and emails to their local MPs. We've got some responses and essentially the message was this is our party line and there was no alternative response. They didn't say, this is outrageous. We need to do something about this. There was no feeling of a drive of, oh my goodness, we had no idea it was as bad. Ultimately, we got to a position where we felt striking was the only way forward, or at least we've got to the point where we had a ballot.

And to get that far, the unrest in a service has to be pretty substantial. A year later, though midwives in Northern Ireland did vote in favour of strike action, midwives in England didn't meet the legal threshold for industrial action. Under the Trade Union Act of 2016, at least 50% of trade union members have to take part in the vote. For midwives in England, 46.7% of eligible members voted. I asked Sophie why. The ballot was actually held during the postal strike at Christmas, which wasn't very helpful. I'm not convinced that the RCM anticipated there being a postal strike during the ballot.

So essentially, we didn't strike because of that. So then I suppose my final question is, do you think that collective union action, like striking, is necessary for tangible change? At the moment, it feels that way. It feels like the only way to put pressure on the government to sit down and have a conversation with a potential result coming out of that. We were hoping that March with Midwives was going to be a way to avoid that and hopefully start a conversation. it's very difficult with striking in a healthcare service because you're fighting your morality, you're fighting your built-in desire to look after people. That is what the NHS is running on right now.

It is running on the morals of its staff. People stay after work because they know they have a duty of care and that's going to run out at some point. Midwives, like many other industries, often consider strike action over. wages. Indeed, most of the strike action we've seen in the last year has been to do with raising pay in line with soaring inflation. And fair pay for workers, of course, has a huge history behind it. Here's Ewan again. It's notable that when trade unions are strong

as when Britain is most equal in economic terms. And we reach the lowest level of economic inequality in the 1970s, you know, that point where right-wing journalists will tell us that Britain was falling apart and things were terrible because everybody was on strike and you couldn't get a train anywhere and you couldn't get your rubbish collective. Well, that was actually the point when, according to statistical evidence, people were recorded as being happiest and Britain was actually mostly economically equal. And, you know, that's not an accident. That is because that was a period when trade unions enjoyed their largest strength, the largest member, and they had an influence over economic policy making.

So when the lowest paid people in society were actually more likely to the union members, that pushed their wages considerably. And, you know, the basic mechanism to do that is through the exercise of collective power. The workers united will never be defeated. McDonald's has been hit with its first strike in the UK since opening bear 43 years ago. Workers from two restaurants in Cambridge and Crayford, London are demanding pay increases to around 11 euros per hour. If we're talking about unions fighting for fair wages, we've got to talk about the 2017 McDonald's Strike, also known as the McStrike. McDonald's workers made history when they joined the Baker's Food and Allied Workers Union and went on strike for the first time ever.

The McStrike Industrial Action won McDonald's workers across the UK, the biggest. pay rise in over 10 years. I'm Shen Batmas on the first McDonald's strike. I was a McDonald's worker. I was one of the leaders in the Crayford store. And now I work for a union called Unison. Also, is it just me or can I hear like a

tweeting bird in the background? I'm really sorry. There is a parrot in the office next door. Oh yeah. If you hear bird noises throughout this, that's a parrot in Shen's office. She's not in the rainforest. What were the conditions like when you work at McDonald's. This is the thing, right? It was a usual hospitality job. Hospitality jobs in the UK are horrible for a lot of people. The hours are bad. You work what you're given. You kind of just have to deal with it a lot of the time. McDonald's was surprising for me though, because for such a big

company who you think would care about their image, they didn't care very much about the people that worked there. So the biggest thing for me in terms of conditions was the zero hours contracts, which were used a lot as punishments. So when people would stand up for themselves or if people did something wrong or they didn't get all with a manager, a lot of the time, those zero hours contracts were then used

to cut their hours down completely. So there was like a technique. If you were troublesome, they would put you on something called window one, which if you know drive-through, it's the window you pay it. And a lot of the time, they'd put you there on your own

and they'd keep you there the whole shift. And that started to happen to me as well. So when I started to speak up at work, I found that my shifts started getting messed around, but also every single shift I was on window one because they didn't want me to influence the other crew. God, it sounds like some kind of weird torture practice. Were you ever intimidated taking on a big corporation like McDonald's?

I didn't know about McDonald's history of union busting. What basically happened was it was really, really cool. These unions from the US and from New Zealand who had been fighting McDonald's for years, they heard what we were doing, sent people over to talk to us, and to train us how to do it, and to prepare us. And it was a little bit frightening because it was kind of, you know, what have we actually gotten ourselves into here. How did it go from joining the Baker's Union to actually taking strike action? The intention at the beginning wasn't to strike.

It started out just as a general, we want to look after each other, we want to try and fix this work situation. So we started getting union members signed up. We were putting in grievances and we were following the people. procedures that McDonald's wanted us to follow and we were trying to get things done that way. And it was just frustrating. Every single thing that we tried was ignored. And because we got so frustrated, it made us sort of think. So how do we get their attention? How do we make something happen? Is this the only way? We came together in this big meeting. We sat there and we said, right, do we keep, you know, not being able to afford to live? Do we keep being treated this way? Or do we

choose to do something that's a little bit scary, but could work. And it was this amazing moment of everyone raising their hand in this meeting and then standing up one by one and being like, yes, let's do this. Let's stick our head above the parapet and let's make history. And it was probably the coolest moment of my life, actually. It was really cool. What was the initial reaction? I can't say that everyone's opinion was bad because we had so much support and so much solidarity. but for the most part, the opinion was, well, you're just McDonald's workers. If you don't like it, go get another job. And there's kind of this attitude, and it's like drilled into us when we're young,

that if you don't do well in school, and if you don't deserve a well-paying job, McDonald's is where you end up. And it's like, you know, you don't deserve respect for being there because you haven't done well enough. And that's really rubbish, because people still want to go and get their nuggets at 3 a.m. People still want to come through the drive-through and get their burgers. and someone has to work there. How did it feel actually being out on the picket line? Incredible.

I actually have the date tattooed on me. No way. Yeah, I've got it tattooed on me. And yeah, it was incredible. We had like over 100 supporters on our picket line. We had news cameras. We had music going. We were chanting.

We were singing. We were dancing. And it was the most powerful I've ever felt in my life. Before that point, I never ever think I knew. how to be heard. And for that day, I felt like we were fine being hurt. How did it feel as a young woman organising this kind of action? I mean, you were 23 years old during the McStrike? I know that a lot of the higher-ups of unions still kind of are male dominated. But being younger and starting this, especially in places like hospitality

that haven't been organised before, it felt like a new wave of this movement. We were reinvigorating it. It was this whole wave of young hospitality workers who started to join unions and started to come out and strike and demand better. Yeah, and that's beautiful for me anyways. There is a long history of women's involvement in trade unions and workplace collective action in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries too. And the concept of equal pay for work of equal value has an important history in British trade unionism. Fair pay goes hand in hand with equal pay. Probably the equal pay strike, if your listeners have one in mind,

that they might know is the one that's obviously profiled in the film made and dagging them very famously. This is about one thing. Equal pay or nothing. Everybody. You have this group of machinists at the Ford factory just outside of life. London that are people who saw seats onto cars, a job that they viewed as a highly skilled job. And it wasn't the only strike that was fought for equal pay.

But I think that that disputed fold was very important in the later passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1970. By no means is that the end of the story of Equal Pay. In fact, there was a major series of strikes in Glasgow a few years ago by local government workers. Until Ewan mentioned the Glasgow Council equal pay dispute, I hadn't really heard about it. And you know what's wild? Their battle has been going on for over a decade. And their 2018 strike? It's believed to be the biggest ever equal pay strike in the whole of the UK.

Hi, my name's Maria Wilson. I am currently the head of Internal Industrial Relations for GMB Union. previously it was an organiser for GMB union involved in Glasgow's equal pay payment. From the mid-noughties, Glasgow City Council women workers identified that they were being discriminated against. So predominantly care, catering, cleaning and school support staff. They, through the support of unions and private lawyers, submitted equal pay claim. So they sued their employer. And that legal fight rumbled on for a number of years, over 10 years, it was going nowhere.

The council were not serious about actually doing it and thinking about these claims. The members got more and more active in campaigning. They started protesting every single council meeting. So every council meeting, every month. There was an equal pay demonstration outside it, letter writing campaigns, public meetings, member-focused meetings. When it was very clear that these negotiations were going nowhere, We balloted for strike action. We smashed the threshold, 65% turnout, 98% in favour of strike action.

And in October, 2018, 8,000 workers took strike action, two days of strike action. Every single school, the whole local authority was shut. Every single public building. You can't open a public building if it hasn't been cleaned. Every cleansing depot was shut. Because, of course, who cleans the cleansing depots, it's the women workers, it's the cleaners. Those two days were monumental. Have to be appreciated that the people that deliver these services

and have for decades have had pay inequality. Straight after the action, everything changed. The council actually started negotiating with us. They started putting money on the table. The first wave paid just shy of £540 million, and the second wave will be another around £250 million. So in total, the council has stolen and then compensated women workers almost three quarters of a billion pounds.

That is such a huge amount of money. It's interesting you said that everything changed after the industrial action. Do you think there was a gendered element at play? There is a particular dynamic when women workers are organising because there is, I believe, a feeling amongst those with power that women workers won't take that action. and I think fundamentally when an employer or a government thinks that your leverage is limited

fundamentally strip everything back what power to workers have. They have the power to remove their labour and we don't always want to go to strike action but we have to be willing to and that is one of the dynamics that was definitely in play in Glasgow because it was articulated a number of times to us that hand on heart the employer did not think that women would go out and when they did go out

it radically changed their behaviour I wonder, Ria, what was the press coverage like at the time? So we had a lot of press coverage locally in Glasgow. But outside of Glasgow, there is very little focus. We started to think, gosh, this is a national story. People should know, but we just could not get any traction. You know, on the strike days, the penny did drop, and we did have a lot of coverage in the front pages of national newspapers.

But before and after, nothing. Is it a case that our press, is just not paying attention unless there's a strike. As Ewan told me about the coal miner strikes. The hours of the working day of minals, the wages of minals, the economic security of minals, these become important issues that dominate newspapers and debates in Parliament. So unions and industrial action can bring workplace conditions

and working class concerns to the forefront of British politics and make front-page news. But what happens if that front-page news isn't asking the right questions? That takes us back to the studio. Thanks for sticking around. Welcome back to the studio and to Media Storm, the podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. Today we're talking about how the mainstream media covers unions and strikings. and with us is a very special guest.

He joined the railway industry in 1984 when it was still British Rail, and then, after qualifying and working as a train driver, he became a full-time official for the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen Union, also known as Aslef, the union which represents train drivers. In 2011, he was elected as General Secretary of Asvef, a position he still holds today. We're very lucky to be joined today by Mick Weiler.

Welcome, Nick. Good morning, lovely to be here. Hopefully a little bit lovelier than most of the media appearances you make. Thank you. It's very kind. Yeah, it is interesting at this moment, the island storm. Well, to dive right in, I think we should start with myths because it's always important to get some basic facts down before, you know, we head straight into what the mainstream media gets wrong.

Now, often the media failed to debunk certain myths about unions and striking and instead perpetrate these myths. One of the most common misconceptions is that it's easy to go on strike, whereas from other interviews I've done for this episode, it seems striking is not only difficult, but it's a last resort. So Mick, help us out. Is it easy to go on strike? Look, even before the two latest batches of authoritarian legislation brought in by this government, we already had the second worst trade union laws outside Lithuania. It's very, very difficult to get strike in the UK. From the days of Thatcher, which,

brought in her legislation, which was never repealed by new Labor, you have to have a certain turnout. You have to have a certain mandate. Nobody wants to go on strike. Seriously, no member of any trade union wants to lose any money. And when you get to a point, you're getting 93 to 99.9% in favour strike action. That tells you how alienated and how fed up they are. And you mentioned there, you know, nobody wants to lose any money. I think that's also another myth that workers still get paid if they go on strike, but that's not the truth, is it? truth. Now a union, we're a small craft trade union. Anybody who goes on a strike doesn't get any strike pay, there is nothing to replace that. Another kind of misunderstanding or myth that we get from the media

is this, this idea that union leaders are above their union members in status and dictating the terms of these strikes. To actually quote the express, you are described as militant union barons. Mick, as a union general secretary, is this true? Could you maybe tell us some of the process behind the appointment of union leaders? Quite simply, you have to stand for election. And if you're not doing the job that people want you to do, they will get rid of you, quite rightly so. All you are is the voice of the people that you represent. You know, I may have to articulate policies I may not particularly agree with. And that's how trade unions work. Trade union leaders are only there to give voice to the people they represent. The other thing they want to do is demonise general secretaries for their salaries. Because

they say, oh, their workers get this and the general secreties get that. Of course, no general secretary sets their own salary either. It's all done by the members and the people they represent. You mentioned, of course, what's currently in its final stages of readings, the minimum service levels bill, this anti-strike bill. I wonder if you could shed some light on that. One of the bills was they were going to, at the right to arrest you, if they thought you were thinking about striking or protesting, how more 1984 can you get? Surely the right to demonstrate strike or protest is something we should all share. I can't even believe that. I can't even believe that the people are going to be forced to enforce it, actually wants it, or believe it's the right

way forward. But quite simply, most people think that the right to strike is a human right. The employers have a role to employ this as well. The first groups and the BLEOs and all the people that have been in my industry since privatisation. What they did after COVID was discreetable, dishonest and deceitful, they signed up to contracts. And despite having made £500 million out of COVID, by the way, which they paid their shareholders, right, they signed up to contracts. that they wouldn't give us a pay rise with the government so they could keep their stouts in the trough. And we went for this massive merry-go-round that wasn't reported in the press where we would go to, we need a pay-rise. Inflation that year went to 13.4. But the government

then say, we can't talk to you. You've got to talk to your employers. So then we go to the employers and they would say, well, no, no, no, we've done these deals with the government, you've got to talk to the government. This doesn't seem like a normal industrial dispute. It seems ideological. We don't have a problem in Scotland. We don't have a problem in Wales. This is an ideological or which means the problem. Okay, so it's time to deep dive a bit more into the language the media uses and the way the mainstream media talks about unions and striking. Possibly the biggest issue is the media failing to report on the context of strikes. So most articles will say there will be widespread disruption this weekend due to strikes by train drivers, for example.

But really, if we think about the context, what is the disruption really due to. due to. There's no details about pay, no figures, no details about conditions. Do you see that missing in the media? Well, yeah, when you get the opportunity, you sometimes get the ability like today or in other interviews to get those things in. The real problem with, as you know, with most things, you can only answer the questions that you're asked. Let's look at this current disputes, give it some context. We or train drivers in the UK went to work every day running whatever time tails were expected, whenever they expected to do so during the pandemic. And we saw it as our duty to protect our communities, get other key workers to work, get the food on the shelves,

and in the freight sector, move food and medicine around the country. And during that period of time, we worked incredibly well with the government and every other trade union agency, because there was this very much of the spirit that were all in it together. As soon as the government decided it was over, then they decided we weren't worth our wages. And here we are four years after the pandemic, having not had a pay rise for four years. Then we see the mass demonisation of those workers on their salaries. The intention is to create these little cracks in society that put people against each other. To create a politics of envy between worker against worker.

I think it's really interesting you mentioned that, you know, during the COVID lockdown, you were cooperating with the government so well. I never really heard that story. And I think what I see in the media is a lot of coverage on how strikes and how unions are causing damage and nothing on how they're creating good. An example of this, I mean, maybe the biggest example we see is when there are strikes, the media will give a lot of weight to interviewing people affected by strikes. Like the person who can't go on holiday or can't get their elderly mum to the hospital. I'm sure listeners remember last summer, the Rail Maritime and Transport Workers Union went on strike for three days. So the BBC ran an article titled Rail Strikes, the passengers who fear they will miss life events.

Now this is a really telling editorial decision to actively seek out five sentimental stories that demonise the strikes and not even mention in the article why the strikes were happening. It is not to say that the societal impacts of strikes isn't worth covering. But is there a case to say that we only report on like the bad and not the fundamental social good of unions? Well, of course, dear, look, we spend most allies donate and affiliating to good causes, standing up for other courses, standing up for disabled groups, standing up for green groups, and it's the nature of what trade unions have done throughout their history and standing together and trying to look after, you know, the weaker in society, trying to make society better? And you think that'd be a common cause. There's an old saw internally here that, you know, for Azleft, there's only three. three stories. One is trading falls out with itself. The second is strikes. And the third unfortunately is a tragedy. Everybody wants to talk to you when there's unfortunately been an incident

when none of us want those to happen. When we're doing the rest of stuff we do, 85, 95%, when we're actually working in partnership with the employers, that's not reported on. Absolutely. And, you know, we've heard some pretty shocking language actually when strikes have been reported on. Words like chaos for the British public, inflicting misery on ordinary people. Mick, how do you deal with being called selfish and being told that you've betrayed the public, you know, every other day. You don't get on your soapbox and you don't rant. You give the figures. You give the data. You give why you're there and what you're doing it for. And then you also make the point that you don't want to be there. There isn't a day of the week whereby you won't hit ordinary people going to work or people going to school or childcare or hospital appointments.

And we truly apologise that. We don't want to do it. Because strangely enough, the people that we work for are workers. They've got families who will be experiencing the discomfort that we're causing by having to go on strike. But what we do have this moment in time is, in the last two years, it's a massive amount of ordinary public support, which isn't reflected in the right wing press or house reported. Because every time I'm standing on the picket line, people coming up, shaking their hands, buying us coffee, tooting their horns. You know, you might get the odd person, the odd swear word in your direction, but not to the levels we would have previously expected. Okay, we want to talk while we're on this topic about,

very specific clip from Sky News last year when Kay Burley interviewed Mick Lynch, who's head of the RMT union, we'll play the clip quickly here. I think I know the one you're talking about, but go on, yes. I do enjoy it. The government is saying that they are going to bring in agency workers. My question to you is, I'm guessing that some of your members will still stay on the picket lines. What will they do if agency workers try to cross those picket lines? Well, we will picket them. What do you think? do. We run a picket line and we'll ask them not

to go to work. Do you not know how a picket line works? What if they do anyway? I very much know how a picket line works. I'm much older than I look, Mr. Lynch. What will picketing involve? Well, you can see what picketing involves. I can't believe this line of questioning.

Picketing is standing outside the workplace to try and encourage people who want to go to work, not to go to work. What else do you think it involves? And what if they want... Well, I just want what else it might involve, because I very well remember the picket lines of the 1980s, Mr. Lynch. I'm asking you what your members would do, Mr. Lynch.

Which picket lines are you talking about in the 80s? Minor strikes. Minor strike. Yeah. Does it look like the minor strikes? What are you talking about it? No, it doesn't, Mr. Lynch, and I'm just to clarify. I'm just going off into the world of the real. No, Mr. Lynch, and I'm sorry if you feel the need to ridicule me,

but I'm just asking you, you expect your members to do if agency workers are verging into the nonsense i'm asking you pick it as effectively we can and what does that involve the the idea that there's some sort of aggression here have we seen one picket line anywhere in the country in the last two years given the level of strike action we've had but it hasn't been peaceful and we had one reported arrest we've had a few picket lines where people have been harassed by the police and employers photographing people on picket lines I wonder what purpose that's for? I don't know. Maybe they just would have put it in their staff magazine and say, look at how good these people are, standing up for their rights and their voices.

It's not just that she, Kay Burley in this clip, you know, suggests the strikes would lead to violent confrontations. She then shared the clip on her Twitter with the caption that Mick Lynch was flustered in this interview. You won't stop agency workers crossing the picket line. We will try to stop agency workers crossing the picket line by asking them not to go to work. What is it your suggesting we will do? I'm just asking you. I'm trying to clarify for the benefits of the British public who are being stopped from travelling around the country, Mr Lynch.

I'm just trying to clarify exactly what your members will do. What is it you're trying to clarify? Thank you for... I'm replying to you politely. Okay, Mr. Lynch. I've answered the question about six times. If there are people trying to cross the city line, we ask them not to cross it.

Me, Mr. Friend and a colleague, He's one of the least flustered people I know. Actually, yeah, his reputation is growing and growing because of the gentle way he rebuffs people with humour on most occasions. I mean, you know, he just calls out for what it is. I mean, he actually sat on one show where there was a Tory MP, I think it's Chris Field, speaking untruths, and he just called him a liar. Mick Lynch has previously said he would not negotiate with the Tory government.

The head of the, you've said that. I've met every Tory transport minister in the last year, bus, rail, maritime and the Secretary of State. we've never said we won't meet the Tories. You are a liar. But you know, you get there on a regular basis. I think the treatment of union leaders like yourself and like Mick Lynch on these programmes are indicative of how working class people are perhaps treated differently in the news media. And we have to look at why that is.

According to a report last year, 80% of journalists come from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Now, while other metrics like race and gender represent, have slightly improved in recent years. Working class journalists are still massively underrepresented. And Matilda and I can attest to this. Newsrooms are full of middle class people, us included, and we have to be honest about this and about how it affects coverage of working class issues. And I wonder, Mick, have you come across this? And do you think part of the solution is having a more representative media? I've got an awful lot of good friends the media who worked in mainstream media and did carry out the policies of the papers

they worked for it so they got the job that they wanted because that would you have to do sometimes to build a career and build a reputation so therefore is it actually the people working for the organisations which i'd like to see it be more representative of course or is it people purely carrying out the policies of a small view you you're saying let's look at these top down problems. And maybe an example of that is the demise of industrial correspondence that we've seen in the media over the past decades. So there used to be specialist reporters who concentrated on covering trade unions, pay disputes, redundancies, workers' rights. Ironically, now most of them have been made redundant. And whether that's because of financial issues in the media or because

they're just no longer seen as like modern in an ever-changing media landscape, you know, many of these Labor correspondents have just disappeared. And I wonder, Mick, if you think that that is in some way responsible for the very biased coverage we've seen. Of course it is. I won't name the newspaper, but I've been a guest at several newspapers when they do their stories for the day. And the bulk of now about entertainment and gossip, then sport and then, you know, what would traditionally have been the front page in the past, the big issue sitting on society. I think the 24-hour media news round has dumbed down the media to a certain extent. There is an exception I'm talking to today, of course. You know, because of the lack of industrial correspondence now,

reporters basically only come around during the culmination of the issue, which is the industrial action. So that often means that coverage is disproportionately concentrated on just strike action. Time now to look at some of the stories making headlines on this issue. This is from a few days ago. So the short headline is Heathrow Airport staff announces strikes every weekend of. of summer holidays, and the every is all in caps because, you know, this is the Daily Bale. One key quote is, a Tory MP believes union bosses should be banned from launching strikes at

Heathrow Airport as thousands of families face a summer of holiday hell. Without being disruptive, the media surely wouldn't cover these strikes at all. So workers who want to fight for their rights are basically caught between a rock and a hard place. You're either going to get no media coverage or you're going to get this kind of media coverage. What do you think about, you know, this mention of like family and summer holidays? Well, the way we rebut that is that every worker is going on strike is also striving for their family. So they possibly might have a whole lane future or could put some food on the table or pay their rent or do what they need to do. All we can do is then say, well, look, we have the same problems.

We have families. Be members of our families that won't be able to go on holiday or won't be able to go to a football match or can't get to hospital appointment or can't get a kids to the school. We're not divorced from the society that we live in or communities that we work in. We are that society. We are that community. You know what is also so interesting about this article is that it starts with quoting reasons for the strike from the government before actually quoting anybody from the union or any of the strikers. But sometimes, you know, you don't even get the quote. We put out press releases every day when there's something going on. One line will be used out of what you say when you try and contextualize everything else is

going on. We also have to talk about these headlines from last month because it directly involved you, Mick. The Transport Secretary Mark Harper claimed during an interview that rail unions had called strikes specifically targeting Eurovision, which took place in Liverpool on May the 13th. Now, these claims that Aslef and the RMT unions had called strikes over key events like the FA Cup final and Eurovision. Then led to accusations from the Transport Secretary that unions who decided to strike were not standing in solidarity with Ukraine as the UK was hosting Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine, who are of course still struggling under the illegal invasion from Russia.

Now Mick, you then had to defend Aslef strikes to say that they weren't deliberately scheduled over Eurovision. First of all, what was the truth? And then second of all, how was it doing the media rounds defending Aslef strikes? Well, there were two things there. I'll do with the Ukraine issue first if I might. We put out a tweet immediately saying that Mick was in Ukraine on the day as bomb started landing in Dombas. All of a sudden, that tweet changed. So try and demonise us by throwing Ukraine into the mix, went out the window, when they actually found out we'd done more than they had.

Then on the other side, if you actually look at the chronology of our first day of strike action, we got that non-deal, right? And then we have to give 14 days notice before we can take any action. So from the day that we got the non-deal, we put one day in for protection so we don't end up in court. The first day action we took, it was 15 days exactly was to that Friday. So it was the chronology of designing safety action after the act of bad faith that drove what we did, not Eurovision. But Mick, you know, 15 days after, because, you know, that's policy, that's just not as good a headline as targeting Eurovision. There isn't a hashtag 15 days later trending on Twitter.

There is a hashtag Eurovision turning on Twitter. So, you know, you just got to remember that. Apparently, you know, last weekend I was Target Beyonce. Beyonce? That's it. I'm against the straight. Not the Queen B, Mick. Not the Queen B. Look, there won't be any night of the week where there isn't a major concert on a major city somewhere in the UK. But again, it's how you quite rightly identify is how they try and spin it.

You know, it's unpatriotic of us to go on strike at all. Or, you know, we're trying to bring the Tories down. No, we're not. Looking for a pay rise. It's nothing more complicated. The one thing I loved is the idea that the nurses were going out and strike. strike to bring down the government. I don't think the nurses are striking to bring the government down. I think they're striking

to feed themselves. It was honestly almost comical, Mick, like you having to be on these programmes standing there going, I don't even watch Eurovision. When I was in your revision, you're a black and white tell you on a Saturday, you know, how you were saying how

you know, strikes will always be over some kind of event. I feel like people are missing the point. The point of a strike is to be inconvenient so that as to make the value of your work apparent, right? I feel like that whole point gets completely missed all the time

in the media. But also, you don't actually then get any cued us when you think you do the right thing. And we will do the right thing. Again, when the Queen passed away, we cancelled our strikes during a period of morning. I don't remember Mr. Harper or anybody coming out thanking us. Can we just take a moment to think about how sinister

it is that a member of the government would use the suffering of people in Ukraine to invalidate work is in the UK fighting for their right. That's mad. Well, the fact that we, you know, I've met with all the free trade unions, and I've met with all the old trade unions in Ukraine. I've met with the mere Kiev. I met with the defence minister.

I've met with the ombudsman. I've met with, you know, we've gone out and shown our support. So it does hurt. You shouldn't even have to, you know, make that defence. It's absolutely bizarre that you're even put in a position where you have to make that defence. Mick, I just want to thank you so much on behalf of Helen. myself and all of our listeners for you joining us. Is there anything you would like to plug? Obviously we've got the Twitter feed, we've got the website, we've got Instagram,

we've got everything else that everybody else does in this day and age. Thank you for having me here today but I think what you're doing. Asking the right questions in the right way to highlight the arguments we should be asking about ourselves in the society is a very brave thing to do and I thank you for it. And while we all keep doing that, then maybe we'll get a more balanced society and maybe then the right to protest, the right to strike, the right to have the debates we need to have as a better society will happen. I thank you for today and thank you for inviting me along. Thank you.

Oh, that means a lot. Thank you for listening. Exciting news, we've launched a Patreon. So if you love what we do and you want to help us build our Media Storm community, please consider pledging at patreon.com forward slash MediaStorm podcast. We'll be back next week with a special bonus episode for Refugee Week. And our next investigation is on UK policing. and that'll be out the following Thursday, the 29th of June.

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MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast, produced by Helen Awadier and Matilda Malinson. It came from the House of the Guilty Feminist and it's part of the ACAS creator network. The music is by Samfire.