 As capitalism goes from crisis to crisis, bosses have gone on the offensive against paying conditions across the UK, but workers are responding to these attacks with increasingly militant fightbacks of their own. A strong example of this is the workers of St Mungo's Housing and Homeless Charity who have recently forced into indefinite strike action against their employers. We headed down to the picket lines and rallies to find out more about their struggle, asking the question, how did these events develop? Our pay dispute has been going on for 18 months. I think it's important to say that this is not about pay, this is about working conditions and this is ultimately about the safety of our clients. We've been asking for a 10% pay rise, which at this point is quite out of date. We've had inflation that's been over 12% and in real terms we've actually lost 30% as frontline workers over the last 10 years while senior management has increased their salaries by over 385% in the same time period. So you have this massive pay inequality in the organisation. I think we're trying to address that. We're trying to negotiate. We've come up against a real diligence for senior management who have constantly said it's financially unviable despite the fact they clearly find the money for senior managers. We said enough is enough, we're going on strike. We announced some definite action recently, just because senior management still refused to come to the table. Things that they might be changing a bit now. But yeah, we also said well as long as we're not getting a decent pay off of we're going to keep going. After 18 months of struggle and a decade of worsening conditions the workers finally decided that enough was enough. For me for example when I entered so I get 25 days annual leave but before that was 28, before we would have two night workers in my service now people are alone working at night. Also really really important, our teams have been like stripped apart so we would have specialist workers, we would have mental health workers, we would have substance use workers, we would have activity workers and none of that exists anymore. We cannot keep duty workers, they're the ones who run the building. The building has been falling apart. It's well known, it's a really old building, it's an old workhouse and we've had leaks in the kitchen that have lasted for months because we go through duty workers so quickly. These leaks and other issues, smashed windows, broken doors they take months to fix sometimes and it's really frustrating because the duty worker that's the lowest paid role in our service so we can't keep hold of them. A lot of them have left in sort of anger, some of them have moved over to other jobs because they just need more money to get by. It was only after senior management's refusal to negotiate and their belligerent tactics attempt to break the strikes that forced the workers to take the drastic measure to taking definite action and start making the radical demands to open up the books. I work for an organisation that pays their CEO more than the Prime Minister and senior management has increased their salaries significantly so obviously the money is there, it's just distributed in a very specific way and if I look at the developments over the last years that means just a road in frontline services and we're supposed to be a frontline organisation so I think it's absolutely crucial that we step up at workers at this point this is not about pay, this is about saving what we can of these frontline services. So from the start of the negotiation I think one of the key demands has been that some mongos show their accounts the last accounts we can see, say there's 22 million in reserves if what we're being told by senior managers is that there's only 11 million, 10 million left something serious has happened and we can't see any explanation of what's happened we can't move forward with negotiations unless they're going to be open so we have to force their hand because whether or not there's the money there to pay us we need to know if there's not something very serious has happened and we need to know as well so it's just as important that we keep demanding to see those accounts. Our reps had a meeting with our CEO two days ago and had to leave after 20 minutes because continuously from the beginning throughout there were verbally abused this is not a way to have negotiations. You know they're going to sort of try and divide us and you get this a lot in the charity sector I suppose they'll try and sort of use you know people sort of own goodwill against them so they'll say you know your clients are going to suffer because of this it's going to cause a lot of disruption and we've always been really clear that you know what causes clients disruption in the long term is the high tone over it's the fact that you know every sort of client has experienced all the instability of their key worker having to leave because they're kind of full of their bills but you know they're not getting enough pay their work loads are too high and so clients have been incredibly supportive clients know we're striking they understand that we're not just striking for us but we're striking for them as well because we want to be able to sort of stay and do the work they're all passionate about we want to be able to help our clients and so we've seen an amazing amount of support in the big line in stark contrast to what senior management have tried to sort of say is that we don't care about our clients and it's just completely nonsense. It's clear that this is not purely a dispute about pay but about bigger trend of conditions for all frontline workers suffering while bosses find more and more money for themselves It's all part of the bigger trend of sort of you know resources just being and susceptible to kind of the central bureaucracy and away from frontline services yeah it's for the heart of the organisation is what we've always said it's for pay but it's for make sure it sort of remains you know what it was set up for to help sort of homeless people not sort of to you know to pack the pockets of senior managers It's really really important to emphasise that if we want the services to continue public services to be provided workers need to be paid properly a lot of people say they can't afford to do this job they love this job but they can't afford to do it because they can't pay their bills and I want this to change and I know we can change it As bosses continue to belligerently protect their profits during periods of economic crisis and with no solidarity for workers being found across the pillars of the political establishment more and more layers of the working class will be dragged into these disputes but the workers of St. Munger's are showing the way forward strong organisation, militant demands and definite action and resolve