FIVE-HUNDRED St Mungo’s homelessness charity workers – now into the second week of their month-long strike – are going from strength to strength in their fight for a living wage.
Today they are holding a midday rally outside Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall in London.
On Monday, over 100 strikers and their supporters rallied outside City Hall in Docklands, demanding Sadiq Khan, Labour Mayor of London, put the arm on St Mungo’s CEO to pay up, considering the London taxpayers are providing the charity with millions of pounds to address the shocking level of homelessness in the capital.
The St Mungo’s CEO, who was paid just under £200,000 per year, initially offered the hard-working staff a 1.75% ‘slap in the face’ pay increase, raising it to 2.5% after the strike vote.
The charity’s website states: ‘We’re here for the long haul, helping people to learn new skills, find jobs and reconnect. Last year we ran 1,317 projects managed by 180 services, supporting almost 25,000 people.
‘On any given night our work means almost 3,000 people have a bed, and somewhere safe and warm to stay. We’re here to end homelessness. Help us always be there.’
St Mungo’s worker Jack Dowell, who chaired Monday’s rally, works in a hostel in Hammersmith and Fulham. He said: ‘We are striking because our work deserves a higher wage.
‘We do such a difficult job, working with some of the most vulnerable people in the country. St Mungo’s staff are using food banks themselves, as well as our clients, and that says it all. It just is not on.
‘St Mungo’s CEO has said that our strike is “disproportionate and unprecedented”, but her pay of £189,000 a year is what is “disproportionate and unprecedented” for a homelessness charity.
‘The housing crisis in this country is caused by the greed for profit. These big property developers are building million pound flats in London, where the “affordable” housing quota is small, and is really not that “affordable”.
‘The twist is that having a quota of affordable housing, means there is also a quota of unaffordable housing. Surely all housing should affordable.
‘And rogue landlords – St Mungo’s do actually deal with a great many landlords in the private sector whose properties are not fit for people to live in.
‘I used to live in Germany for a bit, where renters rights are so much better than here.
‘Once you have a property it is yours until you relinquish it. There are no ends on the contracts.
‘There is a case for nationalising the housing industry in Britain, certainly the private rented section. But whether Labour will do that? They will probably be better than the Tories. But is it Labour as we know it? Is Kier Starmer a proper Labour leader? I am not so sure.’
Jared Woods, transport union RMT London Regional Organiser, said: ‘I bring solidarity of 20,000 RMT members working under the TfL umbrella – London Underground, TfL, the Elizabeth Line, Docklands Light Railway, who also are fighting for a decent pay rise.
‘It is a sad state of affairs to be here at City Hall, calling on a Labour mayor to convince a housing charity, not to force its own workers into a state of homelessness through low wages and poor conditions at work. What a situation!
‘We see increasingly now, that political organisations and not-for-profit organisations who should defend the most vulnerable people in society, the low paid, are actually at the forefront of imposing conditions which cause poverty in the first place.
‘Our boss is the Mayor of London. He runs TfL who employ directly or indirectly all of our members. They are trying to implement Tory-dictated cuts in the transport budget – 10% of station staff have been done away with in the last few months, causing absolute chaos.
‘Hundreds of stations a month are having to close, not because of any operational incident or a fire alert, but because they haven’t enough station staff to keep them open.
‘It is the same trick on the trains. Reduce 10% of train drivers, so there will be no spare staff, meaning more delays, more cancellations.
‘They want to attack our pension, move from the TfL fund into the Local Government Pension Fund. Over 80% of our members have to retire before the age of 65, because you just can’t keep doing the round-the-clock of shifts and type of work on London Underground up until 65.
‘This move will reduce pensions by 30%, along with casualising work, short notice on changes of duty. It’s completely inexcusable.
‘The so-called financial crisis on London Underground is fictitious. If you use the same measure of London Underground’s finances as in the past 20 years, they now make a surplus out of fare revenues from London’s commercial activity.
‘That is why we have taken seven days of strike action in the last year and a half and why inevitably more strike action is coming. And yet there is money swimming around in the City of London.
‘Look over there at Canary Wharf, the banks, the buildings the housing. All the profits are back. Dividends are being paid out again. Huge million pound bonuses to bankers. Three individual banks paid out more salary to themselves than the deficit for the whole of London Transport.
‘There is plenty of money in society to pay people to carry out essential services like the ones that you provide. There is even quite a bit of housing.
‘So many flats owned by foreign investors who never live in them and won’t even bother renting them out, its just investing and speculating.
‘So instead of housing being used as a social good it’s become yet another arm of financial service industry, of no use to the people who need it, just making money for the rich and powerful.
‘So we have to say to the Mayor of London, you’d better decide which side you are on.
‘Are you going to make cuts, are you going to be responsible for the managed decline of public transport, see people working in housing charities forced into homelessness themselves.
‘Are you going to do some thing and refuse to pass these cuts on and demand that the people you are funding treat their workers with respect?
‘We have to demand this and come together to do it, Nothing frightens the bosses more than when workers come together and take generalised strike action.
‘My union’s in favour of that, I think yours is as well. We have got to just make that happen now.
‘There are a lot more of us than them. Nothing happens in this city unless we do it. Nothing happens unless workers provide services and move goods. Bankers can all clear-off tomorrow, who would notice the difference?
‘So, victory to the St Mungo’s workers and victory to the London Underground workers!’
Donna Guthrie, the Unite union NE128 Branch Chair, said: ‘A lot of these organisations have surpluses of millions of pounds and St Mungo’s is one of them.
‘The funds they have accumulated in the “not for profit” sector, where they are not supposed to be making profit – they are hoarding money.
‘We know how it is working for an organisation that’s not doing the right thing for its own low-paid workers.
‘Your four week strike is an inspiration to other workers. These services that you provide should really be provided by councils. Social housing is a right.
‘These charity organisations should be in-sourced so that the services are provided by the government.
‘As the RMT said, it is important for all of us to take strike action now. If not now, when? We need to take a stand.’
Anna Athow, British Medical Association member speaking in a personal capacity brought greetings from The News Line and Workers’ Revolutionary Party.
She said that doctors and nurses ‘have a mandate for strike action over the next few months because this government will not relent. And the 5% pay offer with inflation and food prices going up is a massive pay a cut.
‘Doctors are not going to accept it. Any more than rail workers are going to accept 4% this year, and future cuts to terms and conditions, redundancies and no safety.
‘I noted that the RMT speaker, Woods said: “the RMT are in favour of generalised strike action”, and I have to say a lot us working in the NHS also feel that we need “generalised” strike action.
‘To be honest, this government has to go. They are not interested in keeping the NHS as a public service. They are privatising it.
‘When I listen to the jobs that you are doing, you are looking after patients with addiction, alcohol, mental health and homelessness problems, but most of this work used to be done by our public health service, who have experienced an 80% cut to their funding.
‘The services you provide should be provided to people by right, by state services and you are being asked to provide this work for a pittance. You are absolutely right to stand-up and say you can’t live on the money, so, congratulations!
‘But what we need is a General Strike to bring down this Tory government because they are bust now.’
