Pay Disputes and Dirty Big Data Centres

Now I want to start with something which, you know, maybe by the time people listen to this will have been resolved, but I somehow doubt it.

The public sector pay dispute which led to a day of action last Wednesday and the potential for another day of action next Wednesday.

Although, would it be in the union's interest, do you think, Leo, to have another strike next Wednesday? They seem to have a lot of public support last Wednesday.

They do.

I saw in many places when I was walking around, including near the studio here, when people were out on picket lines, there were lots of cars beeping them, which is always taken as a sign of approval going past.

They've all reported a lot of goodwill.

But maybe you just get that for one day and don't get it necessarily on the second.

Yeah.

Look, their essential demand, as I understand it, is that their pay should increase to keep in line with inflation.

And that's not a pretty radical demand, quite frankly, coming from any set of workers.

There's been a lot of analysis done on this, but the best one I saw was the journal that I, you know, they do on their fact checks.

And there's all different ways to measure these things, but pretty much every outcome showed that in the last couple of years, public sector wages have not kept up with the cost of living.

So it's not unreasonable to be looking for pay increase, and I think they do have very strong public support.

I think the strike kind of had to happen.

You know, go back to April, the fuel protests, a group of people who, as you know, get a lot already in tax breaks and grants and subsidies, block the streets, block the ports, and are perceived to have got more as a result of that.

So I think it would have been very hard for the union leaders to get any ballot through their members if they didn't show a bit of toughness, show a bit of resolve.

show that they meant business and that's what what the strike was about fundamentally um I don't know if the second day will happen or not, but what I would expect to see, and this is the way these things often play out, is they get into very intensive talks and at a certain point on Tuesday, the day before the strike, they'll make a call as to whether sufficient progress has been made.

So that'll maximise the pressure on the government up until the last minute.

And you would hope that at some point on Tuesday or Tuesday evening that they'll be able to say sufficient progress has been made to call off the strike.

But of course, by then, lots of hospital appointments are cancelled, can't be rescheduled.

So there is negative impacts on the public.

Could they not, though, have decided last Tuesday to cancel the strike and go into talks? Jack Chambers seemed to buckle in the last couple of days.

First of all, you know, oh no, we can't make it a precondition that pay is top of the agenda.

Then in the days beforehand, oh look, everything can be spoken about.

And then finally on Tuesday evening, yeah, pay can be top of the agenda, which didn't look particularly good for Jack Chambers.