Scabs?

Two days ago I posted about the unions inability to garner support at a national level thanks to their outdated and reactionary responses to, well, everything. Now have a look at this short video of the Fire Brigade Union (FBU) strike on Saturday at Southwark in London. 


Frankly, it's sickening. A group of angry grown men standing around chanting 'SCAB!' at firefighters who had the temerity not to strike. 

Today the FBU has again walked out of negotiations with the London Fire Brigade (LFB) and looks set to go ahead with it's 47-hour strike starting on 5 November, which is the most active period of the year for firefighters because of Guy Fawkes night. David Cameron has branded the strikes 'irresponsible' and I wouldn't be surprised if there are now increasing calls for the fire service to be classified as an essential service alongside the police and the NHS and prevented from striking. Boris Johnson's calls for new strike legislation will also get a boost. 

Yet again we're seeing unions screw up their chances by resorting to strike action which has minimal public support. Even Labour has been mute on the strikes, so poisonous are they to public opinion. 

To strike you need a really solid public argument and a great narrative. The FBU don't. The LFB want to change the focus of the fire service so that they prioritise fire prevention, rather than fire response. So they are altering the shift pattern to make workers do 12 hours during the day instead of 9. That's pretty much it: a strategic decision made by management about how the service should function. 

It's not enough to go on strike about - and certainly not at the busiest time of the year. They also managed to have an RMT union banner at the Southwark strike. Which suggests Bob Crow's widely despised militant union was out to support the firefighters. Which is illegal. And even if it wasn't illegal because no-one from the union was there in an official capacity, the RMT is so disliked by Londoners that it was, again, PR suicide. 

But they'll go on fighting a losing battle. The LFB will win because it has public and political support from across the spectrum. It's another fight poorly picked by the unions.