26^th January 1987: About 117,000 British telephone engineers began a nationwide strike, called by the National Communications Union after British Telecom rejected a union demand to reinstate engineers suspended during a dispute over pay and working conditions. Management said there will be no change in its pay-raise offer, ranging from 5% to 5.8%. The union demanded a 10% increase, with a number of productivity strings attached, including ‘flexible working hours’ (the ability of management to impose work on people for a wider ranging working day), Saturday as a normal work day, and abolition of the ‘9 day fortnight’ (restricting the maximum number of days in a fortnight workers could be made to work).

The context to this was BT’s determination to reduce staff numbers: proposals had been made to lose 70,000 jobs over the next five years. British Telecom formed the communications network privatized by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government two years previously, a jewel in the 1980s privatisation program that partly fuelled the boomtime of financial capitalism in the UK in the late 80s. Productivity deals aside, BT workers were actually very productive at the time (calculations at the time suggested each worker in fact produced an average of £9000 annual profit for the recently privatised firm).

A root cause of the strike was the huge profits the newly privatised network had been making: pre-tax profit was over 1 billion in 1986, and BT’s workforce, 85 percent of whom were shareholders, decided to demand a bigger share of the proceeds.

One group of workers demanded a “flexibility deal” of about 4.5 percent. Other workers wanted rises on top of this, and Telecom’s management decided to resist these calls for sharing the takings…

At the outset of the strike, stoppages had evolved from a refusal to work overtime ban in support of pay claims. When workers refused to go back to work when ordered, strikes broke out in various areas. Telephone engineers, demanding a 10 percent pay rise, refused to work: phone repairs went undone. Later BT clerical workers, who process BT’s telephone bills, went on a three-day strike in support of the engineers. It’s worth noting that workers staffing the City of London phone networks were not ordered to work overtime (profits being made here meant strikes could not be afforded…?)

The wildcat beginnings of the strike progressed, as an East London National Communications Union branch decided to strike in support of by then over 20,000 BT engineers who had been ‘stood down’ for refusing to work overtime. The union leadership initially told them the strike was unconstitutional, but faced with workers’ determination actually called a full strike the next day.

The strike caused widespread disruption to telephone services, and threatened BT with heavy financial losses if no early end to the dispute – over pay and working conditions – was found. There was solid support for the strike (80% had voted to strike in a secret ballot). In some areas management accused ‘hotheads’ of sabotaging equipment, with cables severed & public telephones removed. In Rotherham emergency services were maintained, after the phone system developed faults, by emergency vehicles touring the streets.

The initial effect of the stoppages was to cause a moderate amount of disruption to phone traffic, especially at first between London and other cities. Later international calls were affected.

At one point, the newly computerized City of London, venue for vital financial transactions, appeared to be in danger of suffering major communications failures.

Telecom managers said that although a big effort had been made to modernize the network since privatization, trade union activity in BT remained intense. Privately, they said that a program of cuts in manpower had been only partly successful. The company’s initial hard line was regarded as a test of privatisation backed by the anti-union stance of the government. BT was dead set on its ability to push through post-privatization measures that would produce ‘more efficient’ practices – ie reducing its workers’ autonomy and squashing unionisation.

For more on this story, see here

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An entry in the 2016 London Rebel History Calendar – check it out online