With the striking – apologies for the pun – exception of Mitie officers working on the Eurostar contract at the rail firm’s depot in east London and at St Pancras International, security officers have not been part of the high-profile wave of strikes in the UK during the cost of living crisis. The reasons, Mark Rowe writes, go way back in the history of the security guarding sector and trade unions alike.
In their Christmas message to the industry, Security Industry Authority chair Heather Baily and chief exec Michelle Russell acknowledged that the ‘cost-of-living crisis will continue to test the resolve of both individuals and businesses in 2023’. And as they noted, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the SIA regime.
Going into more detail about guard recruitment and retention, an SIA ‘sector profile’ document noted late last year that ‘pay is not rising at a rate that helps to attract and retain staff’. Officer pay rates, it went on, are ‘usually the National Living Wage’; the sector has seen some increase in pay rates since 2007, ‘when our research indicated pay rates for security guards were between £5 and £8 per hour. This is mainly due to the rise in the minimum wage over the last few years’. In other words, the increase in pay is mainly due to general governmental changes to national minimum wage norms, and not due to anything done by, to or for the security industry (including the SIA badging and approved contractor regime).
The Eurostar strike is by security officer-members of the RMT union, over pay and conditions; likewise, RMT member cleaners who work for other facilities management (FM) contract companies have been on strike in 2022, seeking £15 an hour, company sick pay, ‘decent holidays and good pensions’, in the words of the RMT. In short, security officers like others in the service sector have cause to strike; why then are those working on railway contracts, and outsourced security staff at University College London (UCL) from the IWGB union who voted for strike action last year over pay and union recognition, exceptions?
The strikes from 2022 in the UK have noticeably been concentrated on the railways, the Royal Mail and others in the public sector, such as nurses and teachers. Put another way, sectors long unionised, going back to before and after the First World War, when the ‘big three’ unionised sectors were the railways, the docks and mines. The story of union decline since a peak in the 1970s is not so much about those highly unionised sectors and politically strong unions losing ground – though as the UK’s mines are more or less closed, that is evidently part of the story – but it’s about unions not recruiting in the rising service sectors, such as FM and IT, and warehousing.
Why then aren’t security officers at least unionised in places where unions have always been strongest, such as docks, and car and other big factories. Partly, it’s about social geography – guards, typically on duty at night and weekends, are harder to reach for union reps than the rank and file on the factory floor. There’s a forgotten, further reason. As contract guarding took off in the 1960s onwards, the labour movement (and the Labour Party) was suspicious of private security, and private investigators in particular, fearing that it was an arm of employers. That this had some foundation came out (eventually) in the data protection regulator the ICO’s prosecution of The Consulting Association, that kept a ‘black list’ of construction workers who got listed for such things as raising health and safety concerns on building sites and similar matters of concern to unions.
An undated Securicor brochure, in a file kept at the National Archives at Kew, throws further light on why the labour movement would keep private security at arm’s length. The brochure is titled ‘Four practical steps to meet one of your major problems’. It’s noteworthy that the guarding firm – from the 1960s one of the main players in security guarding, taken over by Group 4 in the 2000s and becoming the S in G4S – was marketing itself as ‘expert security at a saving’. The saving came from replacing the night watchman or caretaker typically employed by a business, with Securicor. That might involve the guard firm taking on the watchman; or not, as the brochure explained.
The brochure termed ‘old retainers, injured employees, aged pensions etc’ given the job of night watch as the ‘problem’. As the brochure put it, businesses said they would like to hire Securicor, ‘but what are we going to do with old Tom, Uncle Ben etc’ – that is, the long-standing worker, kept ‘on the job’, as a way of giving an old-timer some pocket-money, or rewarding someone unable to work on the factory floor due to an industrial injury.
Securicor offered four ways to solve the ‘problem’. If no pension was in the way, Securicor would take over the assignment completely within a week – that is, sack the watch man and Securicor (not the business) took the responsibility. Or the business transferred their watchman to a similar job, while Securicor brought in some trained and supervised. Or, Securicor would take on the employment of the watch man; and in most cases, according to the brochure, ‘our experience has shown that it is best to transfer them to some other Securicor assignment in the area. This has been the most practical solution in many situations.’ Lastly, ‘gradual replacement’, if the client had several guards; as they retired or (seeing which way the wind was blowing) resigned, Securicor would replace them with their own guards, even if it took several years; and could ‘make a start by putting in relief guards over week ends, holidays’.
What the brochure did not spell out was why a business might want to be rid of ‘old Tom’; because the night watch might be ineffective in preventing trespassers or internal theft – goods ‘walking out the door’ – or might even be compromised by their fellow workers. By hiring Securicor (or one of the other rising private security firms of the era), businesses could seek to stem internal losses. That would end any fellow feeling between the watch men (‘old Tom’) and the rank and file at the works. Security officers by taking up employ at the gatehouse had historically become physically separate from the unionised dock, factory or other unionised workforce. As contract guarding arose, those at the gatehouse became yet more agents of the employers; ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’.
Image; from file Work 19/1365 at the National Archives.
