40,000 BT staff strike over pay: ‘We won’t have bosses use Swiss banks while workers use food banks’
Over 30,000 BT Openreach engineers and 10,000 BT call centre workers are staging a walkout today over pay, as the summer of strike action continues.
Members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) will also be taking action tomorrow in what the union has called “serious determination” to get a bump in wage.
The action comes off the back of a historic strike ballot result announced in late June, which opposes the flat-rate pay rise offered by BT of £1,500 per year.
In the context of RPI inflation levels already hitting 11.7 per cent this year, the CWU have regarded this as a “dramatic real-terms pay cut”.
The workers on strike look after the vast majority of Britain’s telecoms infrastructure, from mobile phone connection, broadband internet and back-up generators to national health systems, cyber security and data centres.
CWU General Secretary Dave Ward said: “The disruption caused by this strike is entirely down to Philip Jansen and his ridiculous refusal to speak to his workers about a fair pay deal.
“These are the same workers who kept the country connected during the pandemic. Without CWU members, there would have been no home-working revolution, and vital technical infrastructure may have malfunctioned or been broken when our country most needed it.”
“We won’t have bosses using Swiss banks while workers are using food banks. BT Group workers are saying: enough is enough. They have serious determination to win, and are not going to stop until they are listened to.”
Morning Wire understands that BT’s operations were relatively undisrupted by the strike action taken at the start of August, with the major impact hitting scheduled appointments and call centre wait times only.
However, a union source told Morning Wire that most branch representatives estimated that less than two per cent of BT Group employees attended to their regular tasks.
Labour frontbencher Lisa Nandy also joined a union picket line at her Wigan constituency, signalling a clear defiance to Sir Keir Starmer’s lukewarm response to industrial action.
Tomorrow’s action will coincide with Royal Mail, which has 115,000 CWU members due to strike over worker pay.