'All in it together'

Drax Power Station is the biggest biomass power station in the world.  Its imposing cooling towers dominate the landscape along the river Ouse in North Yorkshire, with columns of water vapour billowing in the air like the smoke of sleeping dragons. 

It’s a place in which most people would dare not raise a challenge, but a group of mostly women workers were unfazed. Though their number is small – fewer than 20 – they took a remarkably big stand against the power giant and their outsourced employer, catering firm BaxterStorey, in their fight for fair pay last year.

And against all odds, they won.

The canteen staff took six weeks of strike action beginning in December 2023, with more strikes planned last May. Their efforts finally paid off, after their bravery forced BaxterStorey to come to the table with a serious deal.

All they’d wanted was a modest increase in pay and union recognition, which the company repeatedly refused. But just as the canteen staff stood ready to down tools again, their employer relented, offering workers the Real Living Wage plus an additional £1 per hour, backdated to January. This initial pay rise put their wages up by a whopping 19.2 per cent.

And now, just last week, the Drax women celebrate another milestone – the signing of their long-awaited recognition agreement between BaxterStorey and Unite, which means they’ll now have collective bargaining rights when it comes to pay and employment conditions.

This success comes alongside another inflation-busting pay rise of 5 per cent.

What this small group of women have achieved is extraordinary, but their path to victory was never assured.

It all began in 2023, when canteen staff became ever-more dispirited by their rock-bottom wages, only just above the legal minimum, while their work duties had spiralled out of control.

“We may not be the heart of the power station, but I like to say we are its stomach – and you cannot function without all parts working together,” said Unite rep Dianne Power.

Unite member Sandra Bovill (pictured below) described the pressures they face every day at work. Understaffed in the canteen, Sandra, like all her colleagues, had become a jack of all trades. 

“I do the milk round in the mornings – I ensure every single office is stocked with milk, tea and coffee,” she explained. “Then I check the coffee machines. Then I’ll come back and sort the hospitality – say if there’s a buffet needed. I also do all the baking for the buffets like cakes. Then I’ll see if any of the other girls need a hand with anything else. In reality, we’re juggling several jobs in one.”

Unite rep Debbie Leighton (pictured below), who’s worked at Drax for 15 years, revealed how complex and skilled their roles have become.

“There’s greater awareness around allergens, so we’ve got to do a lot more paperwork. If you make a mistake, it could cost someone their life. It’s a big responsibility.”

Despite their vital roles, the canteen team were struggling to make ends meet.

“I live on my own so I’ve got no one to share bills with,” Dianne explained. “I’ve had to cut back a lot just to make sure my basic needs like food are met. Everyone on the team was struggling. A lot of us started car sharing so that we could save on fuel.”

Sandra agreed.

“The prices of everything are going up – fuel, food, you name it. But our wages weren’t keeping up. We were working way more for way less.”

Meanwhile, both BaxterStorey and Drax were raking it in like never before.

BaxterStorey’s latest financial figures last year showed it had a turnover of £449m in 2022, with operating profits of £25m. Drax’s underlying profits nearly doubled in 2022, from £398m to £731m.

BaxterStorey liked to boast that it paid workers the real Living Wage (RLW), but Dianne and her colleagues were only paid the RLW six months after the Living Wage Foundation announced each year’s new wage rate.

“That meant that for six months out of the year, we were living below the poverty line,” Dianne told UniteLive.

After years of asking for a pay rise, last year, canteen staff decided they had to take matters into their own hands by joining Unite.

“At the time, I was one of the few Unite members,” explained Debbie. “I told all the girls – we’ve got a better chance at a pay rise if we’re all in the union.”

Canteen staff eagerly joined Unite, and in their first step with the union, they signed a collective grievance.

They were keen to work constructively with BaxterStorey and Drax – after all, they weren’t asking for the moon. But both their employer and Drax had blocked their modest demands at every turn.

For Dianne (pictured below), the last straw that spurred the women on to vote for strike action was an email from BaxterStorey management. It said that management’s decision to refuse to budge on pay was “final” and that there was “no right to appeal”.

“That was the turning point. We thought, ‘Actually, we do have the right to appeal and we are going to take it further,” Dianne said.

In the end, canteen staff – most of whom had never been in a union before – took six weeks of strike action and were prepared to stand their ground no matter how long it took. Despite their determination to win, they told UniteLive it wasn’t easy.

They highlighted the “brutal” weather out on the picket line in the winter and members having to further cut back on living expenses when they’ve downed tools. They noted too their employer’s hostile tactics, including handing out leaflets to dissuade other workers at the power station from supporting them.

BaxterStorey had also sent emails to other contractors on site, asking workers to refrain from speaking to the striking canteen workers or engaging with them in any way.

Just before their first win, UniteLive met with canteen staff and Unite regional officer Chris Rawlinson over the road from the power station, at the Drax Sports and Social Club, because they’d been banned from having union meetings on site. Chris had also been temporarily barred from site.

Chris (pictured below) explained how little it would have taken for the company to meet their demands, which made the company’s vindictiveness in the dispute all the more absurd.

“To completely resolve the dispute, it would have cost BaxterStorey just over £15,000 – that’s pocket change to them. To put it into context, I dealt with a Coca-Cola dispute last year – we settled that dispute before strike action, and that cost the company £1.2m.”

Speaking to the women of Drax, there was a real sense that, at its heart, theirs was a women’s fight – not least in the way they delighted in ganging up on their union officer Chris, subjecting him to a good-natured piss-take.

On a more serious note, Debbie and Dianne were explicit about the gendered nature of their struggle.

“We’re the only majority-women group at the power station, and we’re also the lowest paid,” Debbie noted.

“It’s the same everywhere – women are deemed as being ‘less’, Dianne added.

But they weren’t only fighting for women – they were standing up for the entire construction sector, too.

Though they may wear hairnets instead of hardhats, the Drax canteen women have more in common with their brothers and sisters in construction than you’d think. They’re all facing insecure work, a race to the bottom on pay and conditions, and bosses blindly pursuing profit at the expense of workers’ health and safety.

It is because of this shared struggle that Chris sees their win as a victory for the construction sector more broadly.

“Canteen staff sustain not only Drax contractors based on-site, but also hundreds who travel to site throughout the year as well,” he said. “These construction workers are put up in lodgings, away from their homes for weeks at a time, and often don’t have access to any hot meals if it weren’t for the canteen staff.

“Such canteen contracts are in place in construction sites across the UK – like at Drax, they’re mostly staffed by low-paid women, who are the hidden backbone of the construction sector. This is a win the whole sector can learn from and celebrate.”

“We won because we were all in it together,” Debbie added. “No matter what happened, we weren’t going to back down – that’s what made all the difference.”

By Hajera Blagg

Photos by Mark Harvey

Find out more about the Drax canteen staff’s recognition agreement and pay win here.