S WE GO to press, last-ditch A
moves were still being made by the employers and by the FBU to avert the renewal of strike action over the firefighters' pay claim.
The strikes are due to resume with a 24hour stoppage tomorrow (Tuesday 2l January), followed by two 48 hour stoppages beginning on january 28 and February I. They follow the ten days of solid strike action late last year, which were suspended mid-stream as the FBU leadership opted to seek a new round of talks with the employers.
Calling off a national action that is gaining momentum and winning public support is a high-risk tactic, and it seems that in doing so FBU leader Andy Gilchrist and his executive have lost out.
By that point it was already clear that the FBU's 40 percent claim for a £30,000 salary for a qualified firefighter had been set aside, with union officials dropping heavy hints that 16 percent would be enough to settle the dispute.
It had also emerged that the employers had been willing to offer that much, but had been prevented from doing so by the government, which has stubbornly refused to help fund a settlement, and repeatedly intervened to crank up the level of confrontation, while at the same time arguing that the FBU should in John Prescott's words "talk, not walk".
The firefighters' action had emerged at the centre of a mini-wave of strike action over public sector pay at the end of last year, and ministers dearty still see it as a point of principle to force the FBU to dimb down and accept humilang zerms nouding a "modernisation" package that would axe 4,500 jobs and close fire stations.
The talks proved worse than fruitless: far from offering any improvement on their offer of 4 percent plus additional money with strings attached, the employers dug in, insisting that as a precondition to any negotiated settlement the FBU had to "commit unreservedly to the reforms set out in the Bain Review" - precisely the proposals which the FBU had rejected from the outset.
Despite this, FBU leaders have been obviously reluctant to build back up the momentum of the strikes they called off in December: they have suggested that this is to leave the door open for further talks.
But with a confused and angry union membership demanding to know what happens next on the one hand, and an obdurate set of cash-strapped employers - with hoscie ministers breathing down their necks -£30K on the other, it is clear that there is no easy way out.
Now, as a new round of strikes has approached, BBC reporters have claimed that key clauses of the employers statement have now been withdrawn in an effort to entice the union into once again calling off its action and going back into talks.
Apparently the demand for prior acceptance of the Bain reforms has been dropped, along with the explicit requirement that the FBU accept the loss of jobs through natural wastage"
The pressure is back on Andy Gilchrist who, for all his statements (reported in the last Socialist Resistance) about a political challenge to New Labour, has always been a
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ce February 2003