21 August 2022
BT Openreach engineer working at a street cabinet, keeping phone lines and broadband working. Photo Peter_Fleming/Shutterstock.
Around 40,000 BT Group and Openreach telecoms workers will hold their second two-day strike on 30 and 31 August. They are fighting against below inflation pay increases – in effect, wage cuts. This follows the employer’s failure to take up the union’s offer of serious talks to end the dispute.
On 12 August – two weeks to the day after the first national strike in BT since 1987 – the Communications Workers Union (CWU) served formal legal notice of the two consecutive days of industrial action.
Affordable
The union said that the company can afford to pay frontline workers a cost of living pay rise. It made a £1.3 billion profit last year and paid out £750 million dividends, with the CEO pocketing a 32 per cent pay rise.
CWU deputy general secretary Andy Kerr concluded, “we were as solid as we could have been in the first industrial action – and I have no doubt that will be repeated…We’re still hoping to get BT back round the table for serious negotiations, but as things stand it has sadly become clear that simply isn’t going to happen unless we take further action…so that’s precisely what we’re going to do.”