Company intransigence over pay means that October will see some 40,000 telecoms engineers, call-centre staff and others being joined by critical-service workers…

“We intend to serve notice on BT Group today for four days of strike action during October,” CWU deputy general secretary Andy Kerr told this morning’s national meeting of branch delegates in central London. “And we intend to up the ante – so we’ll remove all emergency cover and pull out 999 operators.”

With four all-out national strikes having taken place at the end of July and during August in response to the company’s imposition of a flat-rate £1,500 pay deal, there was now a need to increase the impact of the action on the business, he explained. While there had been meetings with BT, the individuals on its negotiating team had refused to move on pay and had declined, in their words, to ‘re-open 2022 pay’.

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