I am a former employee of a large Energy Transmission business in the UK; which I will be referring to as ‘Grid’. For reasons which will become obvious, I am submitting this article anonymously.

Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that in general workers at my former employer are in many ways extremely privileged. There are exceptions, but in terms of pay and conditions most of us are by no stretch of the imagination at the sharp end of the class struggle. However, workers at Grid are in a strategically significant position, especially when it comes to crucial questions such as: nationalistion, the climate catastrophe, and what should (or shouldn’t) be within the remit of a trade union.

Grid is a huge, privately owned business, with over 23,000 directly employed staff. Although there are now many appendages, the core of its work is maintenance of the UK’s energy transmission network (i.e. getting electricity across the country from generators to distributors). It has a large and complex corporate structure, which is continually reshaping itself through sales, acquisitions and expansion into new markets (roughly half the business now operates in the US). Ownership of this network means that Grid is essentially the definition of a natural monopoly, as the UK is one of only very few countries where private ownership is allowed. To mitigate the obvious lack of market competition within the UK’s ideological framework, it is a ‘regulated’ business, in an eternal shadow dance with the regulator, OFGEM. The business model of Grid seems to be to extract as much profit as possible from publicly built assets. There are candid talks to employees where senior managers brag about keeping machinery built in the 1950s running, or where they have managed to achieve the targets set by the regulator significantly under budget - and pocketed the difference. Unsurprisingly, it is a model which is working extremely well for them, with £12.3bn in profits over the past 5 years. These stacks of cash present an unusual combination of opportunities and challenges for organisers in the sector.

Grid does not appear to be oblivious to the fact its unique position is a double edged sword. Monopoly derived profits come with the price of enhanced public scrutiny and the looming threat of renationalisation; Grid has to present itself as being a paragon of ethics and efficiency to keep this spectre at bay. As such it is heavily invested in public relations, and in many ways excels at PR.

Grid consistently ranks as a top employer for women, for social mobility, and in the Ethnicity and LGBT+ awards. Though even a preliminary glance at the other top spots reveals the calibre of these awards. For example, its peers in the Ethnicity category include Lloyds bank, KPMG and BP (“an energy company with purpose”). Amongst the fluff, this posturing does come with some tangible benefits for employees. One potential positive is the Employee Resource Groups. They are voluntary and self-organised groups of, for example, women or LGBT+ employees, who are given the time and resources to ‘raise awareness’ through newsletters, events, and group discussions. Obviously, the overton window of what can be discussed is limited, and nothing radical can be achieved, but I suspect their mere existence is more progressive than most employers would contemplate. A darker side of this obsession with PR is how carefully it polices any public comments from their employees. If you present them in a negative light they will find a way to get rid of you.

Grid also definitely doesn’t want to be seen as a company at war with its unions, and this goes some way towards a constructive relationship, at least on fundamentals like pay. Strong unions are a fact which Grid has to tolerate, their presence was cemented during the public sector origins of the organisation. As such Grid has a collective bargaining agreement with the four major unions which organise within the company. Reps are involved in a host of different forums and consultations and are relatively unobstructed in getting on with representing members. Union negotiators do an excellent job at winning decent pay rises each year. This doesn’t mean the employer doesn’t take every opportunity to weaken and undermine the unions, only that they are limited to subtle methods.

The PR effort can also be seen in this light, as a charm offensive to win the loyalty of the staff. In fact, the PR is so effective that employees often do fall under its sway. Between the solid pay, consistent pay rises, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion (which in some ways genuinely advances beyond rhetoric), it is easy to adopt a rose tinted vision. This inevitably raises questions about why employees should bother joining a union in the first place. As an activist, it is clear that this is a complacent attitude which is fundamentally flawed. Most obviously, the decent pay and conditions are largely because of the strength of the unions. The mass fire and rehire which recently took place at British Gas goes to show how quickly this comfortable situation can be whipped away. But also, the hierarchical employment structure is continually used to restrict access to unionisation, collective bargaining, and employee benefits. The difference in treatment between categories makes it clear how all staff would all be treated if the employer could get away with it, and deserves exploration.

There are a number of categories of workers which are either excluded from collective bargaining, or from union membership entirely.

For one, Grid has an unusual relationship with its managers. Each manager is on an individual contract, eligible for union membership but not covered by collective bargaining. I don’t know the statistics, but it seems to be an extremely ‘top heavy’ organisation, at least within the office environment where I worked. My suspicion is that this is one route through which the bargaining agreement is undermined, and it results in peculiar outcomes. Teams in which every employee is somehow a manager, regardless of whether they are actually managing anyone, exist alongside people who aren’t on manager contracts leading whole teams. There are managers who are significantly out-earned by a small but substantial group of staff. In some areas you’ll even have managers significantly out-earned by the staff they themselves are managing, especially once overtime pay is considered (for which only staff are eligible). Not to mention the pay rises, where the unions negotiate raises through collective bargaining which are sometimes 3x higher for staff than for managers. This has led to growing discontent and interest in unionisation among some of the workers who you would expect to be most suspicious. Which in turn could present challenges around the composition of the union’s membership and potentially contradictory interests within it.

The second category are outsourced workers. Teams such as the facilities staff who keep the offices running are all outsourced, on far worse terms and conditions. Even benefits which are less direct are denied to them, such as being eligible to apply for roles on the internal job portal. This wasn’t always the case, in the past a job in catering or security, for example, could be seen as getting a foot in the door and opening up white collar opportunities. One of very few paths into this line of work which don’t involve at least one degree has thus been closed off.

Lastly, offshore workers are hired from ‘service providers’, such as Capgemini, Wipro, DXC, etc. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the majority of people I interacted with on an average workday at Grid were actually employed by these firms. But despite being some of my closest colleagues, they were conspicuously absent from team meetings and team building events. Far from their issues as structurally second-class employees within the business being granted an Employee Resource Group with guest speakers, they are instead given impossible deadlines and ridiculous working hours. If they can’t deliver, they can and will be replaced almost overnight.

With both outsourced and offshore workers, the demographics are disproportionately women and/or people of colour. If they were included in the diversity statistics for the company as a whole I imagine it would make a significant impact on the gender and ethnicity pay gap figures. This is in an industry which is already overwhelmingly dominated by white men, especially at the higher levels. One key difference between outsourced workers based in the UK and offshore contractors is that only the former are eligible for union membership, and union density is high in these areas. As for offshored staff, their conditions are an issue which taps into a legacy of imperial exploitation, but I honestly don’t know if the union movement has an adequate strategy for addressing it. Furthermore, It almost goes without saying that all of the employees in the US, who we often worked alongside as part of ‘global teams’, cannot join our UK trade unions. Any attempts to organise there would be starting entirely from scratch.

Three more corporate behaviours which must be overcome are restructures, the increasing fragmentation of the business, and control over entry into the company. These aren’t necessarily specifically directed against the trade unions, but they undoubtedly present challenges.

Grid seems to restructure around once every two years. This certainly held true for the time I worked there, and I have talked to several employees with over thirty years of experience who maintain that this has always been the case. This creates a climate of uncertainty among staff. At its best, this uncertainty encourages employees to turn to the union for support. But it also enables the employer opportunities to dispose of staff with a veil of plausible deniability. When the organisational structure is slimmed down (because restructure almost invariably means downsizing), who gets a place in the reduced number of available roles? The vocal defender of their colleagues’ interests, the outspoken critic of the senior management? It is much easier for them to say that someone’s interview performance was lacking than it is to find a legitimate reason for showing them the door.

More recently, there is a concerning trend developing within these restructures: ‘global teams’. Bringing US and UK colleagues into a single resource pool with shared work and responsibilities. In particular, where this results in UK staff reporting to US managers who have not been trained on our employment rights, and who often have an extremely hostile perspective on union organising. Global teams usually also come with increased workloads and the expectation that you will work late to join meetings during US working hours. Over time this tendency could considerably shift the working culture of the organisation, and threaten the current equilibrium between the employer and the unions.

Under public ownership, the full end-to-end energy network was under democratic oversight and ultimately accountable to the public: gas and electricity, transmission and distribution. But since privatisation it has become increasingly fragmented by a game of shifting investor portfolios and ditching areas which may be less profitable or more challenging in future. This dynamic has been playing out at Grid in recent years. First, Gas distribution was split off and sold, more recently Gas Transmission has also been sold, and now the Electricity System Operator is being split off and renationalised. This means that it is no longer sufficient to have a majority of union members across the business as a whole, there must be majorities in each area. Branches have to deal with maintaining multiple recognition agreements, and diverging terms and conditions. Or otherwise, to split out to mirror the new organisational structures, leading to duplicated committees, organising efforts, and paperwork. Employees are increasingly segregated from their former colleagues. The email and instant messaging systems are being separated, and they are even cut off from people in the same office building by swipe card gates.

This fragmentation compounds the existing challenge of the extreme geographical distribution of Grid staff (and former staff in the divested businesses). As a nationwide network, it has sites and offices from the North of Scotland to the South coast of England. Not to mention all of the staff who never visit a central office and instead drive about the country resolving incidents. Our approach as union organisers was mostly to organise digitally through online meetings and events. If we ever had any kind of in-person meeting there would always have been someone excluded, which would be difficult to justify. But obviously online meetings disadvantage field based workers, or facilities staff, who don’t have work devices which they regularly log into. A lot of effort goes into getting reps together in person a few times each year, which is costly but extremely beneficial for the branch. But it is difficult to see how this could be replicated across the broader membership, the costs would be prohibitive. Ultimately this means that the unions have good density in the main sites and offices, but it is much more sporadic further afield.

Like most corporations, Grid has a high degree of control over entry into its ranks. Only a handful of graduates are admitted each year; the competition for each place on the scheme is fierce. Candidates can expect to face (at a minimum) online testing, a video interview, and an assessment centre. There are plenty of opportunities for the company to identify and deselect potential ‘trouble makers’. Even if someone did make it through, after the considerable effort and luck which went into winning their place, they are unlikely to rock the boat. Any external hires would only be considered with experience at similar companies (for example, the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms), and would have gone through comparable selection processes themselves.

However, unlike many corporations, Grid also recruits a large number of apprentices into their technical and field-based roles (out fixing pylons and working on substations and such). Many of these apprentices would have been recruited straight out of school, but by no means all of them. The paternalistic treatment of these employees is in some ways even more startling. They can expect to spend most of their first three years of employment living full time at a training site, usually out in the middle of nowhere. While in residence, apprentices aren’t even allowed to use their own licensed vehicles due to ‘safety concerns’ (this may have changed now, but if so it was only very recently). This is especially galling for apprentices who join later in life: there were a few people each year who had been driving for years before attending the training scheme. While on site the apprentices can spend their time between lessons playing one of the dozen or so available board games, or drinking at the onsite bar. They need to be cautious when they do though, because consumption of more than a few drinks will not go unnoticed by security, and they can expect a ‘random’ alcohol test the next morning. I wonder if this surprisingly heavy handed treatment does more harm or good to employee morale. Perhaps Grid are more concerned about reputational damage from the apprentice’s exploits than the potential of them organising out of resentment?

Despite these challenges, my former branch is, in many ways, thriving. They are good at recruiting and have been gaining members at the same time other areas of the movement are stagnant or shrinking. They have a solid distribution of reps across the business and are adept at representation. All in spite of the lack of any formal release time. Many reps and staff alike see individual representation as the ‘bread and butter’ of what a union should be doing. Their competent, technical approach integrates them well into the corporate environment in which they operate. However, I have concerns that it could limit them in their ability or ambitions to fundamentally challenge the employer. In my opinion they operate in a ‘servicing model’ where the focus is on providing a sort of insurance product to members. In fact union membership is often promoted as ‘workplace insurance’ on branch recruitment stalls and advertising. My problem with this approach is that instead of building collective power and democratic structures, you train a layer of voluntary legal experts who spend considerable time and effort helping individuals win compromises that ultimately no one is particularly satisfied by. The worst excesses against specific staff are averted, but as a movement I worry that when more intense struggles are encountered there may be difficulty in rising to the occasion. When times get tough, unions may not have positioned themselves as part of the solution, but rather as an insurance payment that can easily be cut from a tight budget.

This tension between servicing and organising reflects the deeper question of what the primary purpose of trade unions actually is: the protection of our members’ interests, or building a better world? For me, there are two interlinked issues where this contradiction plays out: nationalisation and the climate catastrophe.

As mentioned, Grid was formerly publicly owned, and in most countries in the world comparable organisations are under some kind of democratic control. It is my position, and the union’s official position, that renationalisation would be best for the public and for employees. The enormous profits could be reinvested into future-proofing, reduced bills, and better working conditions, instead of lining the pockets of shareholders. Some level of democratic oversight could let us define, as a society, what kind of network we want to possess: which energy sources are prioritised, in whose interests are difficult decisions made. Though as much as I’d like to think otherwise, employees at Grid seem to be generally anti-nationalisation, including reps and even some union staff. Perhaps understandably, many are concerned about their pay and conditions. They see the struggles of, for example, workers in the NHS, and the unwillingness of the government to invest or negotiate pay rises. They profit from their share options, which would inevitably be lost under public ownership.

Unless we as trade unionists can paint a compelling and optimistic vision of public ownership, this tension between the public good, the political project of the overall trade union, and the material interests of individual members will continue to fester. While this has been largely hypothetical, simmering under the surface, two developments have brought the debate back into the spotlight.

During the 2019 election when public ownership was on the agenda for the opposition, we were given talks by senior management at conferences (attendance compulsory) decrying nationalisation as unfeasible and dangerous - ‘only we can decarbonise the grid’. In a sense, they were effectively holding decarbonisation hostage. Skipping forward to the present day, five years later, the only thing that seems to have been decarbonised is the investors’ portfolio. The major challenge of carbon emissions in energy transmission is far and away the gas network. To avoid tackling this problem, as soon as the threat of nationalisation receded, Grid promptly sold Gas Transmission to an Australian investment firm. So much for being the only people capable of the task.

Ironically, it has recently been decided that private ownership of the Electricity System Operator crosses a line in terms of conflicts of interest, even for the current Tory government. It is now being renationalised. There will be intense focus on the union relationships and worker compensation within the new publicly owned body. Only time will tell if it will be a scare story or a window into new possibilities.

For me, nationalisation and the climate catastrophe are intrinsically linked. In my opinion, decarbonisation cannot be contingent on maintaining profits for shareholders, and at this late stage, the level of investment required can only be provided by the government. Anticipating this position, Grid is proactive in publicising its recent historic levels of investment to achieve its ‘Net Zero ambition’. Given the nature of the crisis, it is possible for investment to be both ‘historic’ but also utterly insufficient. This is especially true given the aforementioned incentives to invest as little as possible in order to maximise dividends. One example which seems to confirm this suspicion is a recent study, funded by the company itself, which found that the industry needed to recruit an additional 400,000 workers between now and 2050 to stand a chance of achieving its targets. So where are these new recruits? Where are the mass training initiatives? Far from an enormous recruitment and training drive, all we ever seem to see is the perpetual cycle of restructures and redundancies.

But even if they somehow achieved their government mandated target of Net Zero by 2050, would that really be enough? As I understand it, global warming is related to the absolute quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and not to the balance of emissions and carbon capture within any particular year. Therefore, it is entirely possible to meet the targets while still exceeding 2C of warming and heralding even more catastrophic environmental effects. To the extent that ‘Net Zero by 2050’ is useful at all, it is when it applies to global emissions, as originally intended. Taking the same target and uncritically applying it to the low-hanging fruit of decarbonisation of the electricity network in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, seems to be completely missing the point.

To solve this crisis, we must be able to put people first and not profit. Union members are uniquely positioned in this struggle, only we have the expertise and leverage required to effectively challenge business as usual. Any just and effective path forward must involve our insights and labour. At Grid, this would mean using the union branches’ solid foundations to go beyond pay and conditions and to achieve political aims. With the full backing of the union movement to develop the understanding and political will required, I believe it is possible.

Unfortunately, this is not a vision that the ‘Green network’ within the wider union seems to share. Their green ambition ignores the fact that they have decent union density in branches like Grid, which potentially have significant leverage over 20-40%+ of all UK CO2 emissions (depending on how you count it). Instead of viewing this as an opportunity, Energy members are more usually seen as an obstacle or a conservative element on green issues.

This is a challenge to unpick: what is a sober assessment by a technical expert, versus a solution prioritising job security over efficacy? How can we protect against uncritically adopting the framing of our employers?

Recently this dynamic flared up in a motion passed regarding nuclear power at a union Energy conference. Formerly the union’s position was to decommission all nuclear power stations, with the passing of the new motion this has been amended to allow existing stations to live out their useful life without constructing more. But even this is a compromise for some in the Energy sector, who would happily see more investment and construction take place.

Members in Energy (i.e. working in the Energy Sector) point out that, given the paucity of large scale energy storage technologies, for a safe and reliable energy system a small section of the energy supply must be continuous to smooth out peaks and troughs. Currently this role is mostly filled by fossil fuels; nuclear energy would be a far greener option. But there is a powerful anti-nuclear sentiment in significant parts of the left. I think to a large extent this reflects the influence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as perhaps a tendency to veer away from centralised power structures - in this case both metaphorical and literal. Whether I myself have just been caught up by the arguments for self-preservation of a cornered industry, I can’t tell.

Even more ambiguous is the debate over hydrogen. The idea being we can repurpose our existing gas network with ‘green’ hydrogen produced by electrolysis, introduce hydrogen boilers into homes, and pragmatically leverage existing skills and infrastructure to decarbonise relatively quickly. But I’ve heard these suggestions emphatically rejected as greenwashing. I find it extremely difficult to know what to believe, I struggle to find the time or energy to deep dive into the technical and political dynamics.

Unless members in the Energy Sector and wider union can come into a constructive dialogue and tackle issues such as these, we will fail to hold our employers to account.
The stakes are incredibly high, and the latent potential is substantial. One recent example of trade union solidarity highlights our power, and the leverage we could wield. In the weeks immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian ships were still arriving at Grid’s import terminal with supplies of liquid natural gas. Both the company and the government were happy to discreetly allow this situation to continue. But our members at the import terminal downed tools and refused to offload the ships - which had to be turned away.

The appetite for solidarity, for taking action in defence of interests which go beyond individuals’ employment rights exists and is ready to be mobilised. The concessions which could be won by threatening strike action in the energy transmission network have the potential to be revolutionary.

Even in their weakened state, trade unions have genuine power, and wherever power exists its purpose will be disputed. Tensions between the defence of specific members’ interests and the collective goals of the movement are inherent in trade union organising. Which factor takes precedence is a defining question of our movement. But given the multiple crises crashing down around us, we don’t have long to decide what our answer will be.

Subscribe to Notes from Below

Subscribe now to Notes from Below, and get our print issues sent to your front door three times a year. For every subscriber, we’re also able to print a load of free copies to hand out in workplaces, neighbourhoods, prisons and picket lines. Can you subscribe now and support us in spreading Marxist ideas in the workplace?