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Matt speaks to The Guardian
1 May 2025
Matt spoke to The Guardian to challenge the smears that have been spread about him by Michael Gove and Damian Green.
Matt said: “I’ve never met Michael Gove in my life, but he seems to not like me. Damian Green, he seems to not like me. There seems to be quite a determined effort to portray me in a certain way, which I think is because I am an effective trade unionist.
“In 2022 the fire service was one of the few bits of the public sector that did not take action and achieved a pay settlement without a strike, through collective bargaining. So the idea that I simply want strikes is ludicrous and, frankly, a bit daft.”
Matt was awarded the Ron Todd Foundation award for work on equality
8 March 2025
Matt is proud to accept the Ron Todd award recognising the work he has done on equalities issues across the trade union movement.
Matt is particularly proud to accept this because it commemorates the incredible work and legacy of Ron Todd who served as the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.
About Matt
Matt Wrack served as the president of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) from 2023 to 2024 and was elected Fire Brigades Union general secretary, a post he held from 2005 until January 2025. Matt was born in Manchester and began working for the London Fire Brigade in 1983. He quickly became an FBU branch secretary in the preceding year and spent 20 years at the grassroots of the union helping to organise on issues of redundancy, health and safety and funding.
When elected general secretary in 2005, he faced a crisis in the fire service. The Labour government sought to ‘modernise’ the service and began a series of attacks on pay, pensions and jobs, along with restructuring and fragmenting the service.
Matt led the FBU throughout these attacks and despite the experiences of fragmentation managed to maintain UK-wide collective bargaining, improved pay and conditions and defeated the government over age discrimination in pensions.
Matt has served the trade union movement for over a quarter of a century.
In 2022, Matt’s industrial strategy delivered a 76 per cent turnout in the FBU’s strike ballot over pay with a 96 per cent YES vote for strike action. Matt and the FBU team managed to negotiate a 16 per cent pay rise across three years without the need for any strike action.
Since then, Matt has successfully campaigned against the Minimum Service Levels Act and has championed the employment rights bill. In January 2025, Matt was unsuccessful in seeking re-election to the post of FBU general secretary.
In February 2025, in recognition of his decades fighting for workers’ rights and equality, Matt was awarded the Ron Todd Award for Equality by the Ron Todd Foundation.
Matt now speaks up regularly on a series of issues facing trade unions and writes a newsletter that explains his analysis of the issues facing the labour movement.
In 2017, FBU members were called to the worst fire since the second world war. Matt’s response was unequivocal - the firefighters that responded to the blaze and risked their lives were heroes that were facing appalling attacks in the media. But Matt was also prepared to place the responsibility for what happened at the feet of the many governments of all colours that have failed over many years to keep proper regulation in place. Grenfell was the fault of the companies that profited from endangering lives and the London Fire Brigade’s poor management that failed to prepare for the disaster.
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Matt speaks up
