CWU Sets Timetable for 2 Day National BT and Openreach Strike

The Communications Workers Union (CWU) has this afternoon formally served notice for strike action against UK telecoms and broadband ISP giant BT (inc. Openreach), which will take place on Friday 29th July and Monday 1st August 2022. Up to around 38,000 workers could potentially go on strike, although exact figures may be less.

Just to recap. Earlier this year, BT announced that they planned to award workers a £1,500 consolidated pay increase to their annual salaries (up from an original offer of £1,200). The operator said this would be the “largest [pay rise] … in over 20-years” for 58,000 of their UK frontline and Team Member colleagues – representing an increase of up to 8% for some colleagues and more than 3% for even the highest paid frontline workers.

However, the Deputy General Secretary (Telecoms and Financial Services) of the CWU, Andy Kerr, who had previously called for a pay rise of 10% (for the c. 40,000 workers they represent) to recognise the “contribution our members have made to the business“, rejected BT’s offer and warned that, given the surging level of inflation, it would have represented a “relative pay cut“.

In the end, the CWU balloted on strike action, which last week returned a vote in favour from staff at both BT and Openreach (here), while EE’s workers fell short of the government’s ballot threshold by just 8 votes and will not be included. The union then gave BT one last opportunity to return to the negotiating table before formally serving notice, but the operator declined, and formal notice has today been served.

Dave Ward, CWU General Secretary, said:

“For the first time since 1987, strike action will now commence at BT Group.

This is not a case of an employer refusing to meet a union’s demands – this is about an employer refusing to meet us whatsoever. The serious disruption this strike may cause is entirely down to Philip Jansen and his friends, who have chosen to stick two fingers up to their own workforce.

These are the same workers who kept the country connected during the pandemic. Without CWU members in BT Group, there would have been no home-working revolution, and vital technical infrastructure may have malfunctioned or been broken when our country most needed it.

Our members worked under great difficulty, and got a real-terms pay cut as a reward. Meanwhile, Jansen gifted himself a £3.5 million pay package – a 32% pay increase. BT’s Chief Financial Officer was handed £2.2 million – a 25% increase. This isn’t including the £700 million being paid out to shareholders.

The reason for the strike is simple: workers will not accept a massive deterioration in their living standards.

We won’t have bosses using Swiss banks while workers are using food banks.

BT Group workers are saying: enough is enough. We are not going to stop until we win.”

A BT Group spokesperson said:

“At the start of this year, we were in exhaustive discussions with the CWU that lasted for two months, trying hard to reach an agreement on pay. When it became clear that we were not going to reach an accord, we took the decision to go ahead with awarding our team member and frontline colleagues the highest pay award in more than 20 years, effective 1st April.

We have confirmed to the CWU that we won’t be re-opening the 2022 pay review, having already made the best award we could. We’re balancing the complex and competing demands of our stakeholders and that includes making once-in-a-generation investments to upgrade the country’s broadband and mobile networks, vital for the UK economy and for BT Group’s future – including our people.

While we respect the choice of our colleagues who are CWU members to strike, we will work to minimise any disruption and keep our customers and the country connected. We have tried and tested processes for large scale colleague absences to minimise any disruption for our customers and these were proved during the pandemic.”

BT now faces the prospect of its first national strike in 35 years (since 1987), and the first national call centre workers strike, although it’s currently unclear precisely how many of the ‘up to’ 38,000 or so unionised workers will actually go on strike. Not all of those eligible to vote actually voted in favour, and the CWU cannot compel members to strike.

Nevertheless, tens of thousands of works do look set to strike and that is significant, as well as being very costly and disruptive for BT. But the operator will no doubt be concerned about future economic hits – linked to the precedent of agreeing to such a pay increase. Not to mention the knock-on impact for the UK economy as the threat of a wage-price spiral grows (i.e. a vicious circle that could make inflation worse and keep it high for longer).

In terms of the impact. The operator already has dedicated business continuity and resilience teams, which they claim will be able to keep any disruption from the strike to a minimum. However, no commercial broadband and mobile operator can completely cover for strike action of this scale and magnitude, no matter what the PR folk may say.

The impact from this is thus likely to be similar to the initial outbreak of COVID-19, before sophisticated home working systems were introduced, albeit only lasting few a few days. In short, the operator’s services will continue to function, but we’d expect essential account and network repair tasks to take priority. Naturally, trying to contact and get a resolution from BT’s support team may also be a much harder and slower task than usual.

As for Openreach, the biggest impact will no doubt be felt in terms of delays to new service provisions (installations), which typically affects hundreds of UK communication providers (ISPs etc.) – catching everything from consumer broadband services to high capacity Ethernet lines and Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA). Any planned but non-essential engineering work will also be postponed.

Such delays can be very costly, although the network access provider may not provide compensation to ISPs for this as it would be deemed a matter “beyond our control” (there’s usually a catch in contracts about such things).