
What trade unionism? A transport strike case study
rs21 members in passenger transport •rs21 members in passenger transport present a case study of a dispute which illustrates the impact of different models of trade unionism and some of the challenges facing workplace activists. It involved UNISON and Unite members at Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM), West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) and West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) and won concessions on pay, callout pay, family policies and equality.
Though the strike wave is over, strikes remain above the previous level and new patterns are emerging since the election of Starmer’s Labour government. The article starts by situating the dispute in the context of current strike activity and explaining the landscape of organisation and bargaining. It then follows the campaign chronologically from its beginnings, though winning ballots to settlements, before suggesting some lessons, including for those in multi-employer bargaining units and in relation to union reform.
Current strike activity
In comparison to the levels of activity seen during the strike wave of 2022 and 2023, official strike figures across all sectors have show a significant drop, but remain higher than in the preceding period:

Underneath the headline figures, a more complex pattern emerges. The low point in the last year of data was the 17,000 strike days ‘lost’ in April 2024. Setting aside the period from February 2020 to December 2021 when no official strike statistics were gathered, that is still higher than the low-point in any year since 1993. Since the election of the Starmer government in July, both Labour and union leaderships have been keen to settle and avoid major disputes. Instead, we are seeing quite a lot of smaller disputes, with a noticeable clump in parts of the public services that are outside the giant bargaining units, for example due to outsourcing, arms length organisations, or the fragmentation of services; or local disputes within big bargaining units. Recent examples fitting this description include Livv Housing in Knowsley; NHS Manchester mental health; PCS Newcastle HMRC; Hertfordshire NHS clinical support workers; traffic wardens, parking and environmental officers in several London boroughs; PCS Office for National Statistics; PCS G4S at job centres and various government departments; Southampton NHS porters; UVW at London museums; Lancashire Social Care Support Officers; Unite Haringey housing; UNISON Swansea Bay hospital; GMB ISS staff at South London hospitals; GMB Royal Liverpool Hospital; Unite Birmingham bins; and RMT Avanti West Coast. Many of these groups did not take action during the strike wave. The list is almost certainly incomplete – and disputes continue outside public services, such as at Princes Foods and Safehouse Habitats Dundee.
This article covers a dispute that fits this pattern, involving a small public sector bargaining unit involving 3-4000 workers, mainly in public transport.
The organisational and bargaining landscape
Workers and employers across a number of Passenger Transport Executives (PTEs) in major urban areas used to bargain through the Passenger Transport Forum (PTF). Employers have gradually broken from the bargaining element of this, leaving only TfGM, WMCA and WYCA. In the West Midlands and West Yorkshire the Combined Authorities grew out of their respective regional transport authorities, with transport continuing to make up the bulk of the jobs. In Greater Manchester the Combined Authority remains separate but shares a Chief Executive with TfGM.
The workers involved are in a wide range of jobs including staff who operate bus stations, monitor service performance and usage out in the transport network, update information on bus stops, sell tickets, staff call centres, deal with passenger enquiries, prepare customer information, plan services, plan engineering work, manage contracts with the companies that operate buses, trams, cycle hire etc, and more. They do not include the staff who operate the buses, trams, trains etc. In West Midlands and West Yorkshire there are also some non-transport staff who work with the regional Mayors, largely in project management, support and delivery functions, covering themes like housing, net zero and local (mostly private) enterprise.
The bargaining unit includes UNISON and Unite members at all three employers. The Unite membership is overwhelmingly concentrated at TfGM, but it is still the minority union there. Each employer has over 1000 employees, with only a minority unionised – as is the case in many public sector bargaining units. The approximate figures at the time of the strike ballots were TfGM: 300 UNISON plus 200 Unite, WYCA: 350 UNISON; and WYCA: 200 UNISON. UNISON at both WMCA and WYCA adopted an approach to trade unionism closer to the partnership model than an organising model, with neither having branch members’ meetings beyond their AGM, until the WMCA branch started some in early 2024. The UNISON branch at TfGM has been left-led for many years while the branch at WYCA has been right-led, but none of them had high levels of member engagement and participation. In 2023 this began to change at TfGM, with UNISON running campaigns against some attacks on terms and conditions, membership starting to increase and the growth of a new and more diverse group of activists.
In addition to higher membership density and local leadership with a more radical approach to trade unionism, workers at TfGM had another advantage. TfGM staff had taken on lots of extra responsibility to deliver Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s project of bringing buses under public control for the first time since deregulation in 1986, stoking anger about years of falling real wages. Staff knew they had extra bargaining leverage because the final stage of this was due to complete on 5 January 2025. The differences across the bargaining unit were to shape the dispute, so much of this article focuses on developments at TfGM.
For years PTF employers generally followed whatever pay deal local authorities did, leading to resentment amongst workers that they got no real say over their pay and conditions while having pay rises delayed for many months. Through the cost of living crisis anger about this gradually built up, but no action was taken. In 2023 the reps on the PTF didn’t make any recommendation to accept or reject the pay offer which unions were campaigning against in local authorities. It was narrowly accepted across the PTF as a whole despite UNISON members at TfGM voting heavily to reject it.
The inability of local authority unions to overcome the ballot turnout thresholds in the anti-union legislation left them unable to take lawful action even when workers voted to strike, so it was unappealing for workers in the PTF to continue accepting what local authority workers had been forced to swallow.
From campaign launch to strike mandate
Early in 2024, UNISON and Unite reps at TfGM agreed to run a joint pay campaign. They set up the stopthedrop.uk website for it, with content approved by reps from both branches. It included a facility for people to opt in to updates on the campaign, irrespective of union membership, as a way to build the campaign and union membership. At the time, this was merely conceived as a way of doing local campaigning as part of the national bargaining, but it also enabled TfGM reps to make information public and was accessed by members at WMCA and WYCA, who often struggled to find out what was going on.
The employers were playing the usual waiting game, with negotiations not having even started by the time pay rises were due on 1 April. On 11 April UNISON and Unite at TfGM held a joint online members’ meeting which highlighted to members that the employers were dragging their heels. Various leaflets, posters and intranet social media posts got the campaign going and advertised the Stop the Drop website to workers. UNISON got stickers made which people could wear on the back of ID passes and launched an online and paper petition demanding a prompt pay offer. The petition also allowed staff to opt-in to updates on the campaign, building the mailing list. Throughout the campaign this helped reach beyond the existing union membership to build the campaign, to undercut employer propaganda and to recruit.
In July, the employers finally made an offer, copying that made by local authority employers two months earlier. This amounted to £1290 or 2.5 per cent, whichever was the higher – at a time when inflation was running at over 3 per cent. While all the local authority unions campaigned for a rejection of the pay offer, the majority of union reps on the PTF chose not to make any recommendation. Despite this, union members in the PTF rejected the offer by 71.9 per cent. The Stop the Drop campaign at TfGM undoubtedly contributed to this result.
It appears that the employers assumed that the PTF unions would be as unable to pass the industrial action ballot turnout thresholds as their local authority colleagues, as they refused to reopen negotiations at this stage, so the unions pressed on with industrial action ballots.
The law makes industrial action ballots painfully slow, but UNISON’s unnecessarily bureaucratic internal processes made it even slower. It took from 8 August when the unions notified the employers of their intention to ballot for industrial action until 12 December for action to start, despite a voting period of just three weeks and a further three weeks being required for notice to employers of the ballot and of action. The left majority on UNISON’s National Executive Council (NEC) has made progress in making the union more fighting fit, but there is a long way to go. If they can retain a left majority in the 2025 elections and Andrea Egan’s bid for UNISON General Secretary is successful, there is hope that UNISON processes can be benchmarked against other unions and improved. Support for ballots also needs to be improved. For example, UNISON has a ‘Movement’ tool for calling and texting members, but none of the branches were able to access this.
When the industrial action ballot results came, they were better than anticipated:

The two unions at TfGM had sailed past the turnout threshold, and WMCA and WYCA had passed by a whisker (literally one or two votes) so all four had a strike mandate. The Stop the Drop campaign at TfGM played a big part in the difference, but it wasn’t the only factor. UNISON at TfGM ran an effective ‘Get Out The Vote’ campaign which included sharing photos of members posting off ballot papers on intranet social media, leafleting and stickering outside the biggest workplace and systematically reminding individual members to vote. It had also become apparent that ‘family friendly’ policies at TfGM, one of the issues in the dispute, were also much worse than at the other two employers.
Strike vote to local settlements at WMCA & WYCA
After many months with no progress, the ballot results produced rapid movement from the employers. It had taken more than three months after pay rises were due for employers to make their first offer, then no negotiations had taken place for three and a half months. In one month the employers were to make five new offers.
Reflecting the greater pressure they were under, on 22 November TfGM senior management briefed reps locally that they wanted to make an improved offer which included more pay for the first time. They then persuaded the other employers to match the offer, which was presented to unions on 25 November.
The different approaches to trade unionism from the different branches were reflected in the level of member-engagement, democracy and accountability. Between April to December there were just three all-member meetings at WMCA and WYCA in addition to two PTF-wide webinars with limited participation. In the same period at TfGM there were four joint UNISON-Unite all member or open meetings, five Unite all-member meetings and six UNISON all-member meetings. Once the ballot result came out, the meetings at TfGM were almost every week and were huge. The meetings were held on Teams and one by-product was the creation of Teams chats with hundreds of members in, constantly asking questions and discussing the dispute.
By 28 November the employers had made three offers, all rejected by the reps on the PTF, and the unions served notice of industrial action. UNISON at TfGM had called seven strike days in December and fourteen in January around the bus franchising launch. Unite at TfGM announced its action in batches rather than all at once, but called eight days in December. UNISON at WMCA and WYCA called strikes for 12 December and UNISON at WYCA called strikes for 5-6 January. All the UNISON branches also called continuous Action Short Of Strike.
UNISON reps at TfGM attempted to set up a strike committee involving a wider layer of members before the action was called, but this got little traction, possibly because members weren’t clear what was being asked of them. Later on, they had more success involving members when they created four teams covering Negotiations, Communications & Campaigning, Finance and Logistics. Each was led by a rep and the Logistics and Communications and Campaigning teams involved members beyond the existing reps. This seemed effective in sharing the workload. At WMCA the branch set up an Action Group – a subcommittee of reps responsible for evaluating and choosing between options for industrial action.
The day after action was called, the employers made a fourth offer. Compared to the original local authority offer (the higher of £1290 or 2.5 per cent), the fourth offer added:
- Bands 2-4: £500 pay rise and a £350 non-consolidated one-off lump sum
- Bands 5-6: £500 pay rise and a £250 non-consolidated one-off lump sum
- Bands 7-8: £250 non-consolidated one-off lump sum
This offer was in itself a significant achievement resulting from the threat of action – forcing the employers to offer more on pay than the local authority deal. Some had opposed even asking for this, arguing that it was unrealistic.
The TfGM unions held a huge members’ meeting and ran an anonymous poll on how to respond with 86 per cent voting to reject the offer and continue negotiations rather than spending time on a formal ballot. This caused consternation from the employers (and some in UNISON beyond TfGM) who wanted the unions to pause any action to ballot members on offers which would not be accepted. TfGM members saw this as dangerous time-wasting, as their maximum leverage was from the pre-Christmas period when public transport is particularly busy, and from potential impact on the final stage of bus franchising.
TfGM unions held a majority of votes on the PTF staff side, which voted to press ahead with action plans while continuing negotiations for a better offer rather than pausing for a formal ballot, but reps from WMCA and WYCA didn’t agree with this approach. It was agreed that UNISON at WMCA and WYCA would ballot members on the offer while the TfGM unions negotiated locally.
When they were balloted on the improved offer, WMCA and WYCA members were given no recommendation to accept or reject and were not told that TfGM members had already decided to reject it and were pressing ahead with action. On 10 December UNISON members at WMCA and WYCA narrowly voted to accept the offer (56.8 per cent at WYCA, 52.9 per cent at WMCA), so their action never went ahead. For WMCA staff, the acceptance meant the increase and back pay could be included in pre-Christmas pay packets.
Given the views of TfGM members, it seems almost certain that had the whole PTF balloted on the offer it would have been rejected, particularly as this would have been with a recommendation to reject. While this would have lost a week of pressure during which TfGM made further concessions, it could have piled even more pressure on the employers once the result was known, with all three facing action. However, negotiations with all three employers would likely have been slower than with TfGM alone.
TfGM strikes and settles
On 12 December the strikes at TfGM began with pickets at the headquarters and a number of bus stations across Greater Manchester, followed by a march and rally outside a meeting of the Bee Network Committee, normally attended by Andy Burnham alongside councillors and TfGM senior management. Speakers at the rally included UNISON President Steve North, NEC member Andrea Egan, and John Mulligan, a Unite striker from the Manchester NHS mental health dispute – along with a number of TfGM strikers, most notably young women angry about inadequate maternity pay.
This was the first strike at TfGM since the public sector pensions strike on 30 November 2011, and the first pay strike ever. Participation was extremely high, with around 250 joining the march and rally. The participation of young workers and women was particularly noticeable, partly fed by anger over TfGM’s dreadful policies on maternity pay and other family issues. One said
I have found a passion about transport in Greater Manchester, and I’m proud to be providing transport to Greater Manchester. But I will not pick my job over starting a family. Don’t force out young women from the northern transport sector.


The strike was boosted by counterproductive interventions from TfGM senior management and Andy Burnham, who got into rows with workers on Twitter/X before the strike. Press coverage based on TfGM statements suggested the strikes would have no impact other than some bus station toilets and ticket offices being closed. Workers felt they were being treated with contempt and wanted to demonstrate the value of their work by not doing it.
Burnham’s public intervention against the strikers made visible how political the dispute was, despite it being seen by strikers as about core industrial issues around pay, benefits and equality. The UNISON national apparatus seemed reluctant to make any noise about the strike, perhaps for fear of upsetting Burnham, until the dispute was settled. Unite had no such qualms and put out several press releases about the dispute, including quotes from the General Secretary. Both unions ignored or downplayed the role of the other, and so understated the scale of the action, leading to press coverage which was less favourable to the strikers than it could have been.
The visibility of young women in the strike had a real impact in highlighting TfGM’s ‘family friendly’ policies which included maternity pay amongst the worst in the public and transport sectors. It challenged the employer and media narrative that the dispute was about greedy workers on over £50,000 wanting more and put senior management on the back foot.
Once the strike began, many strikers no longer had access to the Teams chats that had become such an important forum for discussion. UNISON at TfGM set up a WhatsApp chat to organise pickets at the headquarters, which nearly 100 members joined and which took on some of this role.
With the strike under way, Burnham finally met the strikers on Friday 13 December. On the evening of 13 December, the second strike day, a joint social event raised £313 for the TfGM strike, the Manchester NHS mental health strike and NEU 6th form strike.
The meeting with Burnham led to an improved sixth offer. On top of the local authority deal, this added:
- For bands 2-5.1: £750 pay rise and a £100 non-consolidated lump sum (up from £500 and £350 in the fourth offer)
- For bands 5.2-6: £750 pay rise (up from £500 and a £250 non-consolidated lump sum in the fourth offer)
- For bands 7-8: £400 non-consolidated lump sum (up from £250 in the fourth offer)
- A review of role profiles for pay points below £14 per hour by 1 April 2025
- Doubling standby and callout payments, backdated to 1 April 2024
- Some commitments on equal pay gaps
- Some improvements in maternity and paternity pay from 1 January 2025
- Adoption pay to match maternity pay and time off with pay for key meetings
- A commitment to review family policies by 1 April 2025 to make them cover all the relevant issues
The offer reflected the rhetoric from Burnham and senior management who claimed they were prioritising the lowest paid (while being unwilling to commit to eradicating pay below £14 an hour). This spin helped justify minimising costs for bands 7-9, which include the biggest numbers of TfGM staff, many of whom were offered pay ‘increases’ below inflation.
Reps from both TfGM unions agreed to pause action for just over a week while this was put to members without a recommendation to accept or reject. TfGM reps didn’t see cancelling the strikes scheduled for 20-23 December as giving up much leverage because the initial strike had established the credibility of the strike threat and the ‘nuclear option’ January strikes were still scheduled.
The news that UNISON had agreed to increase strike pay from the standard £50 per day to match Unite’s £70 per day came part way through the ballot. Speeding up the process for such decisions would help future disputes. TfGM members voted to accept the offer by 58 per cent (UNISON) and 70 per cent (Unite), making an overall acceptance by 62.5 per cent.
The TfGM unions’ Stop the Drop website explains:
the substantial vote to reject despite the risk that substantial action would be needed shows that many members wanted more, particularly on pay for bands 7 and above and on family policies. Everyone will be watching TfGM closely on their implementation of the family commitments. Initial meetings have been pencilled in for 10 and 24 January.
The larger rejection by UNISON members is probably explained by the fact that the offer was more favourable for staff on lower pay bands, where Unite’s membership is more concentrated, and the fact that UNISON has more women and young members for whom family policies were a higher priority.
In the short term, the deal levels up between two bad maternity policies – those of TfGM and Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). The next three months will be critical to win major further improvements on all the family friendly policies.
Conclusions
Workers across all three employers voting for action forced the employers to negotiate rather than simply copying local government – and won better deals. It seems unlikely that members will be willing to tolerate such long delays in 2025. How TfGM handles the discussions on family friendly policies in the next few months will have a big impact on future industrial relations, including the context for the 2025 pay campaign which should be starting soon.
Had WMCA and WYCA stuck with the PTF majority and rejected the fourth offer without a ballot, it seems likely they would have won more, as their TfGM colleagues did. On the other hand, had the TfGM unions paused action to ballot alongside WMCA and WYCA, that offer would almost certainly have been rejected and the three employers would all have faced action. This may have produced a better outcome than TfGM achieved alone, but negotiations would likely have been slower and therefore have required more action.
The TfGM unions’ Stop the Drop website explains some of the less tangible gains from the dispute, alongside the improved offer:
Members proved they were willing to take industrial action, the unions worked effectively together, staff disproved claims that TfGM could only offer what local government got, membership grew rapidly, many more people got involved in the unions, and the workforce became much better informed on family issues which are also now in the public eye due to members’ action.
TfGM workers have come out of the dispute considerably strengthened. Both unions at TfGM have recruited rapidly from the campaign – UNISON’s membership grew by 50 per cent in the last 18 months. Workers have established the credibility of their strike threat, radically increased membership involvement, and the size and diversity of the activist-base has improved a lot. But there is still a long way to go to build on what’s been won. In future fights TfGM staff won’t have the additional leverage offered by bus franchising and minority membership limits the impact of action and therefore what can be won. Continuing to grow and establishing majority membership will be vital to build on what workers have won.
The dispute was a political education for many TfGM staff who went into the dispute expecting Andy Burnham to be an ally and were shocked to find him acting as the enemy.
WMCA and WYCA workers won an improved pay offer without having to take any industrial action at all, on the strength of their own strike votes and the indirect pressure from TfGM colleagues. The dispute broke the idea that workers in the PTF have no choice but accept whatever local government get and proved that voting for action can win a better deal. However, it will be harder for these workers to build from the dispute than for their TfGM colleagues. Firstly, workers haven’t been through the uplifting experience of taking action together, getting a glimpse of their own collective power and winning concessions. Secondly, the lack of information, engagement and democratic debate in these branches means members’ understanding of the choices made during the dispute and how much more TfGM staff won is limited. However, the sizeable votes to reject at WMCA and WYCA show the potential for those advocating a more robust trade unionism to win support.
The dispute illustrates some of the advantages of smaller bargaining units for workers trying to make advances, compared to giant bargaining units like local government or health. It’s not just that the ballot turnout thresholds are easier to overcome in a smaller workforce because of numbers. Member engagement is easier when workers can talk directly to colleagues involved in negotiations. It is easier for reps to consult members, which gives them greater confidence to be tactically agile and helps rank-and-file workers retain control over a dispute.
This dispute is among many recent and current public service disputes outside the big bargaining units or in small parts of them. Activists in the big bargaining units should be looking for local campaigns and disputes to build up their power. There are also lessons from the relationship between the campaign at TfGM and the PTF as a whole. The decision by UNISON and Unite reps at TfGM to run the joint ‘Stop the Drop’ campaign and set up a website and other communication channels for it had a big positive impact. As well as encouraging closer cooperation between the unions and identifying and engaging with sympathetic potential members, it provided a channel for information which turned out to be helpful for members at WMCA and WYCA as well, as their branch leaderships were not as open. Even in disputes across huge bargaining units, there is nothing to stop branches running local campaigns to supplement what is done centrally. Activists within the PTF will have to consider how to build on the success of the Stop the Drop campaign and support those trying to strengthen and democratise the unions across all the employers.
The future of bargaining through the PTF hangs in the balance. In 2024 all three employers reached local agreements. All the employers say they want to leave PTF bargaining, but none have given notice to quit, so the April 2025 pay round will be through the PTF. Even ignoring its previous ineffectiveness on pay, it hadn’t been working well for workers. Its main agreement, the Green Book, has not been kept up to date. WYCA locally negotiated alternative pay structures without informing the PTF that they had left the Green Book. It is rare to have such a small multi-employer bargaining unit, which makes any differences on either the employer or staff side very significant. There is a consultation element of the PTF which includes more employers, but that doesn’t seem to have been effective either. Can PTF bargaining be made effective, and if not, what would serve the workers better?
Alongside the need for strong, diverse organisation, independent from the employers, in every workplace, the dispute highlighted the need for change in both UNISON and Unite. In UNISON, the key issues were reducing bureaucratic obstacles to effective action and increasing independence from Labour politicians. Specifically, tools for member communication during disputes need to be made available to branches, the industrial action process needs to be benchmarked to simplify and accelerate it, and the process should enable earlier decisions on strike pay. Both unions should put workers’ interests and inter-union cooperation above narrow self-promotion.
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