Lowri Griffiths on Watching the Labour Movement Walk Past Her Front Door and What She Actually Knows About Her Own Pay

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

By Lowri Griffiths | BigSmokeBroke.com

The May Day march came through a street near mine on Thursday and I stood at the junction and watched for about twenty minutes, which is roughly the amount of time available to someone who had a piece to file by midday and had not yet written the piece and was standing watching a march instead of writing it. This is how I encounter most political events in London: sideways, while doing something else, with a competing obligation that limits the depth of engagement available to me and produces the specific journalistic guilt of someone who covers London and its politics and is watching a significant annual expression of working-class solidarity from a pavement because the deadline is more immediate than the event.

What I Saw

The TUC-organised march was substantial — thousands of people, proper union contingents with banners representing different sectors of the economy, the specific mixture of organised labour and general sympathy that London May Day traditionally produces. There were teachers with placards about real-terms pay cuts that have been running for long enough to accumulate. There were healthcare workers, which is always the union contingent that makes me feel something specific because the NHS is the institution whose staffing conditions most directly reflect what a society thinks its workers are worth and Britain’s answer to that question has been, for the past fifteen years, “less than before.” There were delivery riders on their bikes, which is the new union contingent that I find the most politically significant: gig workers who do not have the traditional union structures riding alongside the traditional union structures and asserting that their work is work and their interests are labour interests even if the platform companies that employ them have decided the relevant legal category is “independent contractor.”

The signs were the usual mix: wage increase demands, cost of living references, specific sectoral grievances (a cluster of local authority workers with something pointed about their pension arrangements that I could not fully read as they passed), and the general assertion of dignity and collective presence that a march provides regardless of whether any specific demand is immediately met. I have been watching May Day marches since I first arrived in London fourteen years ago from Cardiff, where I grew up knowing about trade unions in the abstract and without the concrete connection to a local labour movement that London’s density eventually provides. Fourteen years of May Day marches, and I still find something moving about it that I struggle to articulate without sounding either sentimental or like the kind of journalist who uses the word “praxis.”

What I Don’t Know About My Own Wages

Watching the march, I found myself thinking about something I had been avoiding: I do not actually know, in detail, whether my own wage rate has kept pace with inflation over the past five years. I know what I earn. I know approximately what I earned five years ago. I have not sat down and run the numbers against the CPI data that the ONS publishes monthly, because running those numbers would produce either mild reassurance or mild distress and I am not sure which outcome I prefer. I suspect the answer is “slightly behind” because the answer for most people in media is “slightly behind,” and media is an industry that combines intellectual prestige with economic precarity in a ratio that looks like a decent deal when you are young and ambitious and looks like a different kind of deal when you are in your late thirties and calculating pension contributions.

The people on the march know their wage situation in detail. The teacher with the placard about real-terms pay cuts has done the arithmetic: they know what they earned in 2019 and what they earn now and what inflation has done to the gap between those numbers, because the deficit is large enough to be unmissable in a monthly budget and because their union has published the analysis repeatedly. The NHS worker has done the same calculation and arrived at the same conclusion: the nominal pay increase was below inflation and the real pay is lower than it was. This is the difference between people who are organised and people who are not: the organised people know their numbers and can articulate the specific grievance clearly, because the articulation is part of the advocacy. I know my numbers in a vague way that would not support a placard.

The London Wage Question

London’s Living Wage Foundation has published its updated London Living Wage — the rate required to meet basic living costs in the capital — and it is substantially above the national minimum wage and substantially above what many workers in London actually earn. The gap between the London Living Wage and the legal minimum wage is the gap that the march is, in part, about: the assertion that work in London should pay enough to live in London, which is a statement that sounds obvious and is apparently not obvious enough for legislative action to have fully addressed it. According to the Living Wage Foundation, accreditation of London employers as Living Wage employers has grown substantially, which is encouraging, and the proportion of London workers earning below the London Living Wage remains significant, which is the rest of the picture.

I stood on the pavement for twenty minutes. The march continued past. I went inside and wrote the piece due at midday, which was about something other than the march. This is journalism in London in 2026: things happen in the street, you observe them partially, you think about them partially, and you write about something else because the deadline is what it is and the march will happen again next year and the wages question will still be there. It is always still there. That is why they march every year.

Lowri Griffiths covers London life and politics from North London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.

For more London political observation, visit The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/