SECTORAL collective bargaining and restoring the right to take solidarity strike action are the two most important issues facing unions, RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey believes.

These are the missing ingredients in the Employment Rights Bill that would stop another P&O style fire-and-replace scandal — where the ferry operator sacked nearly 800 staff by video, had them marched off their ships and brought in foreign labour on lower pay and worse conditions back in 2022.

The rogue company’s delayed 2023 accounts recently hit headlines, revealing its CEO Peter Hebblethwaite — who admitted before a parliamentary committee that he consciously broke the law with the mass sacking and would do so again — was richly rewarded for his law-breaking, raking in £683,000. Dempsey then slammed an “astronomical 172 per cent pay award” that was “a slap in the face to seafarers and communities in Dover, Hull and Larne, direct from Dubai” (where P&O’s owner DP World is based).

The Labour government plans improvements to seafarers’ rights both through the Employment Rights Bill and the Seafarers’ Charter. “What’s being proposed is that workers who work on vessels in and out of British ports a certain number of times, 120 times is the figure being used at the minute, would be entitled for the first time to collective consultation on redundancy situations.

RMT says the government should go further towards the model used by France, where workers are entitled not just to collective consultation on redundancy but to the broader range of employment rights enjoyed by the domestic workforce.

“We think it should mean collective bargaining agreements, and all the rights domestic workers have which currently seafarers haven’t. My understanding is that at the moment the British government sees that as too complicated or difficult — they’re probably listening to the shipping industry — but this is absolute nonsense; the French model shows you can use the same framework if you want to deliver the full suite of employment rights to seafarers — which they badly need.

“It wasn’t really the right to collective consultation which would have prevented the sackings at P&O. It would have delayed it: but that was the law that was broken by P&O without consequence.

“The way you would defend against that is, first, by bringing in sectoral collective bargaining.

“Give us the ability to negotiate with a sector and restore our ability to take solidarity strike action — if we had those two weapons at our disposal, we would never have another P&O.” Sector-wide terms and conditions would stop P&O driving down pay, while operators in the sector would police each other, knowing solidarity action could shut down the industry if a bad actor tried to attack its workforce.

“There are really important steps taken in the Employment Rights Bill to improve rights at work, but it doesn’t go far enough.

“The removal of workers’ ability to bargain collectively for their share of the wealth in Britain is one of the core reasons why wages have stagnated over 40 years in real terms.

“People’s wages have only risen by about half a per cent over the last 15 or 20 years. There’s a reason why if you work for a living you can’t afford to buy a house or take a holiday on an average wage, when 40 years ago you could have done.

“And that’s because the power of labour relative to the power of big employers and capital has been destroyed through political choices.

“The Bill doesn’t repeal all the anti-trade union legislation; it repeals and replaces.

“I don’t think the Labour Party should have got so embroiled in individual workers’ rights.

“They need to restore collective rights to workers and the way to do that is to bring in sectoral collective bargaining. By doing that, you allow us in — the experts if you like.

“It’s the only thing I want the Labour Party to outsource! Let us deal with workers’ rights, let us deal with wages and rogue employers through sectoral collective bargaining and solidarity strike action.

“We will see change and improvement in people’s lives — but not just that.

“Britain feels divided. A lot of communities feel chaotic, unsafe. The role of trade unions has always been to bring people together, we’re part of the fabric of society, the foundations of community.

“If you want to reintegrate people, rebuild a sense of community and fairness, the first thing you can do is bring in sectoral bargaining, and we’ll get back into those areas that have been deindustrialised, where there is high unemployment, underemployment and social problems. We will bring people together and restore dignity to people’s lives.

“That’s absolutely critical. In the last period political parties have pulled up the roots of our movement, and they’ve got to be put back.”

Sectoral bargaining would also end the incentive of employers to outsource, a major problem across the transport industry. As we met at the Durham Miners’ Gala, RMT had just published a survey exposing the devastating impact of outsourcing Tyne & Wear Metro cleaners to contractor Churchill.

“The rail industry is absolutely addicted to outsourcing,” Dempsey says. “We’ve got outsourced cleaners right across train operations, metro services, catering and on the infrastructure side.

“We reckon there are at least 44,000 workers outsourced on labour-only supplier contracts. We estimate for a piece of work done by Network Rail, looking at their supply chain in the Southern region, at least nine in 10 of those workers are on zero-hours contracts as well.

“Having a just-in-time army of labour means the industry doesn’t have to effectively plan, and the results of that are very costly: we estimate that £350-400 million is going out the door in commercial fees and profits to some of these companies.

“If you take the example of London Overground, which is outsourced, about £7m goes in the form of dividends every year; if they took that into public ownership tomorrow that £7m extra would come in the door in the form of income.”

The outsourcing model depends on cutting corners and lowering wages to maximise profits while pitching themselves to those commissioning their services as the cheapest option.

It also entrenches racial division. “Our research has shown we’re operating apartheid systems in a lot of these outsourced contracts.

“You look at who works directly for one of the railway companies or metro services, and who works for one of the cleaning contractors, and can see the disparity — a 10-20 per cent black and minority ethnic workforce for the companies, closer to 50-60 per cent on the outsourced contracts, and a much greater proportion of women.

“People in the industry give each other awards at investor events celebrating what they do for diversity, but they refuse to consider these outsourced contracts.

“Labour says we’re going to have the biggest wave of in-sourcing in a generation. We haven’t seen that yet.”

Unless unions put aside sectional differences and concentrate on forcing Labour’s hand on sectoral bargaining and solidarity action, Dempsey fears for the movement’s future.

“We need to pull together and make these the core demands. We’re still a vital movement in many ways, there are trade unionists acting on behalf of their members in a meaningful way.

“We are an active, fighting, campaigning union ourselves, and we’re growing. But most unions are in decline.

“Most of the sectors in which we were based have been destroyed. There was a time when we were 12-and-a-half million members; now we are six million. In 20 years there could be two million of us, or one million, and we become just a monument to things we did in the past.”

Does he see a role in this rebuilding for the new left party associated with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, currently the talk of much of the left?

“We do need change in politics, we do need to see change in society, and one reason we’ve seen people drift away from our movement is that Labour, over many years, has drifted away from the working class. In some cases, I think the trade unions are in danger of following in that past.”

As for the new party, “we haven’t seen it yet. We don’t affiliate to any political party, we support people to stand for Parliament when they support us. We have active groups of representatives in our parliamentary groups at Westminster, the Welsh and Scottish parliaments.

“We rely first of all on our industrial organisation and our ability to fight on the ground for our members. We will try to bring maximum political pressure to bear on whoever is in Parliament to make decisions in favour of our class, and our people.”