THE Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has seen the attacks on workers’ rights contained in the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill coming for some time.

For years, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services and the National Fire Chiefs Council have sought to attack firefighters’ ability to collectively bargain.

They have argued for chief fire officers to have full operational independence, effectively allowing chief fire officers to force through changes to firefighters’ contracts and the work they do, without negotiation or any meaningful collective bargaining.

These are the same chief fire officers that have presided over more than a decade of cuts, allowing over 12,000 firefighter jobs to be slashed across Britain, closing fire stations and leaving fire appliances sitting idle due to a lack of firefighters.

The same officers have, for years, ignored the now-proven scientific fact that firefighting is a class 1 cancer-causing profession.

Despite this legacy of failure, the government issued a white paper consultation titled Reforming the Fire and Rescue Service; while specific to England, it is impossible to enact the proposals without destroying sectoral collective bargaining for firefighters across the whole of Britain.

Predictably, it proposes removing firefighters’ right to collectively negotiate their pay and conditions by removing the National Joint Council and replacing it with a pay review body, introducing a code of ethics and an oath, like that which binds police officers and prevents them from taking strike action.

There is a brutal irony in the Tory government now legislating for minimum service levels during periods of strikes when nurses, doctors, teachers, rail workers, firefighters and many more are highlighting the ideological cuts their industries have suffered after 13 years of Tory rule have left their workplaces — hospitals, schools, the transport network, and whole communities — at huge risk due to understaffing and under-resourcing.

Daily, fire appliances across Britain sit idle as there are simply not enough firefighters to crew them, many of the appliances that are crewed don’t have the agreed safe number of firefighters on them, putting both the public and firefighters at increased risk.

Our control rooms are at risk of being trapped in a chronic, self-perpetuating cycle of stress-related absence, due to routinely running below critical crewing levels.

It doesn’t suit the political narrative to acknowledge the fact that firefighters would be delighted to see “minimum service levels” mandated through legislation for every day we are not on strike, rather than face unsafe crewing levels in our control rooms and on our fire appliances.

There is no evidence base to show a need to legislate for minimum service levels — it has been 20 years since there was a nationwide fire strike.

Before that, the last national fire strike was in 1977. During these strikes, like nurses and ambulance workers, firefighters have voluntarily left their picket lines to respond to incidents to save lives.

This Bill has nothing to do with public safety, it is about removing workers’ rights and removing collective bargaining and replacing it with collective begging for the sole purpose of driving wages and working conditions further down.

Despite 45 years of anti-worker legislation, 2022 saw workers uniting and repeatedly smashing the regressive strike ballot thresholds — and public support for striking workers has remained consistently high.

Faced with this, rather than listen to workers and get around the table for meaningful negotiations, the government now tries to legislate its way out of a self-made crisis and is now taking striking nurses through the courts.

History shows us the lengths the state is willing to go to oppress and crush workers’ power. Winston Churchill put tanks and troops on the streets of Glasgow in 1919 that fought running battles with workers demanding a shorter working week.

Margaret Thatcher used the police as an instrument of the state when she unleashed them to attack miners at Orgreave.

In collusion with bosses, the state used spycops to infiltrate unions and civil rights groups, at times inciting violence to attempt to undermine legitimate causes.

They have already forced through draconian legislation such as the Public Order Bill, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, giving police sweeping powers to intervene and impose further restrictions on public assembly, pre-emptively arrest potential protesters and break up protests that they or the Home Secretary deems as being too noisy or obstructing a highway.

Both of these pieces of legislation strip away democratic freedoms and affect our human rights.

We have already witnessed journalists being arrested for covering protests, and climate protesters jailed for five years. Now they plan to criminalise workers for withdrawing their labour.

But we have examples of successful fightbacks against the government. In Scotland, collective action and mass non-compliance with the poll tax led to a Britain-wide campaign of non-compliance and non-payment that ultimately brought down the hated Thatcher government. 

Collective unity by the community of Kenmure Street in Glasgow prevented the Home Office from snatching two of their neighbours, a community action that has been replicated across Britain.

The FBU believes that while we must exhaust all legal routes to challenge, change, slow down and undermine the progress of the Bill, it is highly unlikely that this government will change course or allow any meaningful concessions.

This Bill is not going to be stopped by defeat in the Lords, it is unlikely to be defeated in the courts, and given the trajectory of Keir Starmer, it is unlikely to be meaningfully challenged by the Labour Party — they have, however, publicly committed to repealing it in the first 100 days if they win the next general election.

The First Minister of Scotland’s comments to the STUC Congress, confirming that the Scottish government will not enforce the Minimum Service Levels Bill and will never issue work notices is a significant step forward in undermining this abhorrent attack on workers.

But an injury to one remains an injury to all; it remains likely that firefighters and other public-sector workers in England will be subject to this Bill.

The FBU has called on the TUC and wider trade union movement to organise behind a strategy of mass non-compliance with this Bill.

It was mass action that won the release of the Pentonville Five jailed under Ted Heath’s 1971 Labour Relations Act. The resulting wave of industrial action forced a general election that brought down the Heath government.

Defeating this Bill will take a mass movement, and we do not underestimate the scale of the task. The strength of our movement, while experiencing something of a bounce right now, has been seriously weakened in the 50 years since the defeat of the Industrial Relations Act.

This is likely to be the biggest industrial relations battle in a generation: if trade unions and workers unite to defy the Bill — does anyone believe Rishi Sunak, assuming he is still PM by then? — will oversee the mass sacking of nurses, paramedics, teachers, firefighters, border force, nuclear and rail workers?

To defeat this Bill, we need to continue to rebuild our movement and return to the militancy that has defeated anti-union laws in the past.