The Lewisham NALGO HAC strike of 1986

For those of you who just can't get enough of this Blog, you can now purchase my overlong and quite honestly fairly tedious memoirs for a purely nominal price online.

Here is an extract from those memoirs concerning the first strike action I took part in, more than 35 years ago, at the age of 22 and as a member of the Lewisham branch of NALGO;

After four years in Higher Education, and in spite of having secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to start my studies for a PhD in Industrial Relations, I applied for, and accepted, a job as a Temporary Policy Officer in the London Borough of Lewisham, one of seven such appointments made in the autumn of 1986 to prepare the Council for the anticipated election of a Labour Government.

I am afraid that the ratepayers of Lewisham didn’t get a lot of work out of me in what was my first paid employment (apart from the Saturday supermarket job from which I had been sacked four years before for taking too many days off to go on CND demonstrations). This was partly down to my lack of experience, partly due to the fact that it could take a quarter of an hour waiting for the switchboard to get a line and make a call, but mostly because I spent five weeks of my four months in Lewisham on strike.

I had joined the Lewisham branch of  the National and Local Government Officers Association (NALGO) when approached by the shop steward for the Policy Unit on my first or second day of employment, but the first NALGO meeting I attended was when the Convenor for the Chief Executive’s Department turned up to tell us that we were being called out on strike. The entire branch was called out, arising from previous decisions relating to a long running dispute concerning the presence (or rather the absence) of security screens in the Housing Advice Centre (HAC).

A couple of days into the strike a branch meeting took place at Catford Dog Track to ratify the strike call. To the best of my recollection there were about 1,400 people present and - in order to count the vote on the substantive motion from the Branch Committee to endorse the strike call, the Chair asked those in favour to walk in one direction and those against to walk in the other. The good news was that, when we had separated out, the strike call had been ratified by a sizeable margin. The bad news was that the “no” voters were considerably nearer the Town Hall than the “yes” voters - and many of them hurried back to work before those who had stood by the Union could get back to the building and mount a picket. This chequered beginning rather set the tone for the future of the dispute.

It was easier for me than for many of my colleagues to take strike action, for which we received only forty pounds a week strike pay (plus a pound a day for those who did picket duty) because I was - at the time - still living in the rented flat to which I had moved when I began studying at the LSE. I was impressed to see the commitment of many hundreds for whom the sacrifice was more significant and who stuck out the strike out of loyalty to NALGO, although we lacked support from the other unions, from a sizeable minority of our own members and - of course - from the Labour Councillors who had provoked the dispute. All told, the strike lasted five weeks before we returned to work, defeated.

For myself, I gained my first experience of daily picket duty, doing a late morning shift at the back of Catford Town Hall (with a cardboard box into which I invited anyone passing me to leave their self-respect as they crossed the picket line). I was still on strike when I went for an interview for a permanent job in Lambeth.