Badge - Pay 1984 Reject the Offer

Object

Badge

Production date

1984

Object number

2024.367

Physical Description

Circular card badge, green background with white text.

Object history

This badge was made by the Society of Civil and Public Servants and is linked to a 1984 strike for civil servant pay. It belonged to Hackney based civil servants and union activists Mary Pimm and Nik Wood.

Personal experiences

Experience shared by Nik Wood and Mary Pimm, Hackney based civil servants and union activists:

We had another pay strike in 1984 that was nowhere near as substantial as the long one in 1981. There was always an offer which was basically: "we will let inflation take this much off your wages, and pretend that we're going to give you some of it back."

Picketing Whitehall is very difficult because nobody lives there, so there's very few people to do the picketing so it’s quite hard going. We used to reckon we needed a thousand people for Whitehall-Westminster. If we had a thousand pickets we could cope okay. We had to be prepared for tourists coming up to us asking us why we were on strike, and then we had to tell them where Buckingham Palace was and where the changing of the guards was.

We covered every entrance to every office. Some of them like the Scottish Office and the Welsh office were very small back in the day so we just used to leave placards up outside. Once I was putting the placards on the front of the Scottish office and the post van arrives. So I go “This is an official Trade Union site –“ “Yeah, you’re all right” he said “I’m going over there next.” And points across the road at the Welsh office. So I grab my placards, scoot across the road. And he has to drive up around the island so by the time he comes I’m picketing. Yeah, that was great.

Associated Organisation

Society of Civil and Public Servants

Associated Person

Mary Pimm (Owner)
Nik Wood (Owner)

Associated Place

Westminster (Place)

Material

Metal

Card

Dimension

Circumference: 51mm

On display?

Inscription

scps
NO WAGE
CUTS
PAY 1984
REJECT THE
OFFER