O’Grady: “We want fair pay, we want respect, and we want voice at work”

“We want that new deal for working people. We want fair pay, we want respect, and we want voice at work,” Frances O’Grady declares when I asked her about her priorities for her remaining time as TUC general secretary. Her successor Paul Nowak will become general secretary designate at TUC congress next week and officially assume the role from January 2023.

The TUC has published polling data today that shows strong support for boosting workers’ rights among voters across the political spectrum. 74% of respondents reported that they were in favour of ending ‘fire and rehire’, rising to 77% among Tory voters. 68% supported a ban on zero-hours contracts – including 66% of Conservative voters – while 77% said they were in favour of the introduction of ‘fair pay agreements’ across whole sectors, rising to 78% of Tory voters.

Commenting on the findings, O’Grady tells me: “We’re sending a big message to Liz Truss, which is: ‘Don’t be the Prime Minister for P&O.’  Slashing workers’ rights is not going to deliver growth. On the contrary, it will hurt the country and hurt working people.”

“We know that parts of the Conservative Party have long had precious rights, like limits on unsafe working hours, in their sights. They want to attack them, they want to attack the 48-hour a week maximum. They want to attack paid holidays and rights to rest breaks. And we’re saying hands off, because you’ll pay a heavy political price for making working lives worse,” she adds.

Asked what her expectations are for Truss’ premiership, O’Grady answers simply: “Low.” She says discussions about food banks running out of food and warm hubs being set up around the country is the “stuff of nightmares” for working families.

“The government has got to get a grip,” she tell me. “But when you’ve got Liz Truss in her campaign to become Prime Minister saying that it is fair to give rich people more money, tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy, I have to say it’s appalling, basically – or to coin a phrase, it’s a disgrace.” (A reference to the new Prime Minister’s infamous speech about cheese imports at the 2014 Conservative Party conference, which later went viral.)

O’Grady explains that she has no faith that the government is going to have a “road to Damascus conversion” on workers’ rights. “We’ll keep making the case because that’s what we do. Whoever’s in power, we make the case for a fairer Britain. But all the signs are that – just as we’re in the midst of the worst cost-of-living crisis in living memory – that this government is going to take us into an even worse place, and it’s ordinary people who suffer,” she says.

On the potential for a general strike, O’Grady is quick to tell me that no union has put the subject on the agenda at Congress, stressing: “We’re focused on the real-life ballots that we’ve got and how working people can support each other.” She argues that the strikes are “just a symptom… not the cause” and that workers are choosing to take industrial action because of further real-terms cuts to their pay. “Most people don’t take strike action lightly. It’s a difficult decision. They lose pay. And they have to have a really strong sense of injustice to put that cross on the ballot paper,” she adds.

I ask her what she thinks about Labour’s stance on strikes. She tells me her focus is on the government, its plans to introduce “yet another raft of attacks” on the right to strike and what can be done to push back. Pressed on what she thought of Keir Starmer’s decision earlier in the summer to ban frontbenchers from picket lines, O’Grady says: “I want to see support from politicians of any stripe, and every stripe. I think the least that working people are owed is a fair hearing.” She notes that there are different ways to support workers struggling with the cost of living, adding: “We want politicians to understand just how desperate and angry people are.”

O’Grady tells me she would like to hear Labour “bang the drum” louder for its new deal for workers, which she describes as a “good package that would make a real difference”. She says Labour “should take heart” from the findings of the TUC’s polling, declaring that the party should “go on the offensive” because its policy is popular.

Discussing Labour’s policy direction more generally, O’Grady says that Britain needs policy answers that “address the scale” of the challenge that the country is facing. “It’s clear Britain’s broken, and it’s been broken for some time now. When you see more and more children being pushed into poverty and most poor children having at least one parent in a job, often two or three jobs, and yet still, that family’s below the breadline, something has gone really wrong. When you see decent men and women – posties, gas engineers, teachers, healthcare workers – really, really struggling. When our NHS depends on huge amounts of unpaid overtime just to keep going. Something has gone badly wrong. It’s still the case that there is too much power and wealth in the hands of too few, and ordinary people are being mugged.”

The TUC published its affordable energy plan in July, which sets out how public ownership of energy companies could help alleviate the cost-of-living crisis. The union body said public ownership could reduce household energy bills through a combination of ending shareholder dividends, creating incentives to make homes more energy efficient and enabling pricing structures with lower costs for basic energy needs.

“We need more than a quick fix,” O’Grady tells me. “We need to look at an energy system that has failed to invest in insulating people’s homes, that has failed to invest in the skills of its own workforce and that is charging exorbitant prices at a time when people can least afford it. So we need a proper plan, and public ownership has to be part of that mix.”

The TUC’s plan is the first in a series of papers on reforming the energy system. It focuses on how public ownership of the energy retail market could help deliver a fairer energy market. I ask O’Grady whether the union body will look into other aspects of the industry in later papers, including the oil and gas companies that have announced record profits in recent months. She tells me they “certainly” will because “what shovels salt in the wounds of high energy bills is the fact that unbelievable profits are being made by the top five gas and oil companies”.

The TUC estimates that nationalising the ‘big five’ energy retail companies – British Gas, E.ON, EDF, Scottish Power and Ovo – would cost £2.85bn. Labour has been criticised for not advocating for public ownership in its own plan to support households with rising energy bills. Asked whether the party’s proposal to freeze energy bills goes far enough, O’Grady says the TUC “welcomed” the plan but added: “We’re focused on beyond this crisis – what’s the kind of system that will really deliver value for money for the people of this country. And we think, frankly, that privatisation in so many areas has turned out to be the biggest ripoff ever.”

O’Grady points to France as an example of the impact public ownership could have on bills: “They’ve managed to hold price cap increases to 4%, because they have the leverage to do that, because it is overwhelmingly publicly owned,” she tells me. “Whereas we’re at the whims of a free market that seems to stuff the pockets of the wealthy and leave customers and workers short.”

“People need to wise up that working people create the wealth of this country,” O’Grady tells me as our interview draws to a close. “They deserve a fair share of it, and they deserve a voice over what happens next. We have good ideas, as we proved with furlough during the pandemic. We can come up with good solutions. So we’re well worth a listen to.”