Unions have secretly drawn up plans for a series of rolling strikes that could paralyse Britain, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
By Christopher Hope, Whitehall Editor
8:17AM BST 14 Sep 2011
GMB, Unite and Unison are preparing to announce plans to ballot nearly two million public sector workers including nurses, council workers, teachers and civil servants about regional and national strikes.
The industrial action will start in late November and continue into the summer of 2012, with one union leader warning that it will rival the "winter of discontent" of 1978 when bodies went unburied and rubbish filled the streets.
Details of the plan emerged as Ed Miliband was heckled as he told union leaders that they were wrong to strike over pensions and risked becoming "irrelevant" in modern Britain.
He added that Labout would have also made significant cuts if it was in government.
He said: “The new economy that emerges from this crisis must be built on foundations of co-operation, not conflict, in the workforce.
"If we were in Government we would also be making some cuts in spending. I sometimes hear it said that Labour opposes every cut. Some of you might wish that was true, but it's not."
The Daily Telegraph has learned that a secret union battle plan has been drawn up mapping out “blocks” of strikes across the country running in “target areas” for two to three days at a time.
One senior union leader said: “It will be a battle. It will be blocks of strikes over the winter, through the Spring and into the Summer. It will be a major dispute. The troops are ready to roll.
“In some areas there may be 2 or 3 days. In other areas it will be continuous. In other areas it will be a rolling programme. There are lists that are being drawn up of target areas.”
The unions are looking at ways to use surplus money in their accounts to ensure that members on lower incomes do not disproportionately lose out. The union leader added: “We are not going to ask people who are low paid to give up a day.”
Since January the unions have met with Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude for talks about cuts to pensions on eight occasions. The unions are understood to have decided that they will have to strike after fruitless talks with Mr Maude last Thursday.
That coincided with the PCS union announcing plans for a one-day strike towards the end of November, possibly coinciding with the publication of the Pre-Budget Report.
Last night Paul Kenny, the leader of the GMB union, said that the unions were now “on the verge of being forced” by the Government into the national strikes.
Unite union leader Len McCluskey said that industrial action now looked “inevitable”. He said: “Negotiations don’t leave us with any cause for optimism. It looks very much to us that we are heading inevitably to industrial action.”
Mr McCluskey added that it was likely that the action in November would see more than one million public sector workers take industrial action. He said: “I would not just look towards a one day stoppage in perhaps November.”
He said he wanted unions to be in a “coalition of resistance” with “church and community organisations, students, retired citizens” involved.
Asked if the industrial action would run into next year, he said: “I do, without a shadow of a doubt. This could go a distance, we are certainly in Unite planning it to be a long dispute.”
Dave Prentis, leader of Unison which has 700,000 members in local government and 500,000 in the National Health Service, said the Coalition had told unions to agree to the 3 per cent hike in contributions into public sector pensions by the end of October.
He said: “If we have only got a number of weeks to complete these negotiations then we have no alternative but to seek a mandate from out members for industrial action.”
Asked if strikes now looked inevitable, he added: “At the moment things are not looking good. If we decide to move to a ballot it will be biggest ballot this country has ever known.”
Yesterday Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office who is leading the talks with the unions, said he had always thought it “astonishing” if the pension reforms had not sparked strikes.
He told a journalists’ lunch in Westminster: “Is there an appetite among union members for prolonged serious industrial action? Maybe but I doubt it and don’t see it.”
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