Fresh from HM Histories following Angus Menzies through another stretch of the respectable CV, Blog vs Behaviour gets to return to the other Angus archive: the one where Fungus writes things down himself. That distinction matters because most of this series requires comparison, chronology and occasionally a little translation from polished employment-law dialect into ordinary English. Angus remains the glorious exception. Give the reliably indiscreet little goblin a keyboard and eventually he will wander straight past the euphemism department, open the machinery and tell you what the fucking lever does.
His 25 November 2023 article “’TIS THE SEASON TO BE STRIKE-BUSTING” may be one of the purest examples yet. The subject was Government proposals to let employment businesses supply temporary workers to cover employees taking industrial action, after the previous attempt to remove the restriction had been quashed in judicial review proceedings. There were obvious legal questions, recruitment-sector concerns and political arguments available to an employment lawyer wanting to explain the proposal professionally.
Fungus found something more interesting.
He found disillusionment.
Fungus Does Not Need Translation
Most employer-side commentary on industrial action arrives wearing protective corporate clothing. You get business continuity, operational resilience, maintaining services, workforce planning and the importance of constructive employee relations. Nobody says break the workers’ leverage until they stop believing the leverage works because the HR director may spill a fucking herbal tea.
Angus, bless him, appears constitutionally incapable of leaving the casing on.
The Government consultation acknowledged that supplying agency workers to replace striking employees would reduce the effectiveness of industrial action. Angus inserted his own parenthetical response: “surely that’s the whole point?!” There it is. No forensic reconstruction required, no disputed email chain, no TCAP translation service and no need to summon three employment barristers to explain what the sentence might really mean in context.
The proposed measure would make strikes less effective.
Fungus looked at that and effectively said: yes, mate, that is the bastard point.
This is why Angus remains such a magnificent recurring character in Blog vs Behaviour. Other Horsfield Menzies writers occasionally leave a window open. Angus dismantles the fucking wall.
Then He Gets To The Human Consequence
The article becomes more revealing when Angus moves beyond whether employers could obtain temporary strike cover and starts thinking about what repeated ineffectiveness might do to the workers themselves. For some employers, he writes, the proposal could be exactly what they had been waiting for. If replacing strikers with temps weakened industrial action, some workforces might become “disillusioned with striking” as a way to improve conditions.
Read that carefully because the useful bit is not the law.
It is the behavioural mechanism.
The worker takes industrial action because ordinary bargaining has failed. The employer acquires a way to reduce the action’s operational impact. The worker watches the leverage diminish. Repetition teaches the workforce that striking may no longer achieve enough to justify the lost pay, conflict and inconvenience. Eventually the tool becomes less attractive because the employer has successfully reduced its usefulness.
Angus does not describe only business continuity.
He describes discouragement as an outcome.
That is a rather different fucking brochure.
Blunt The Tool, Change The Behaviour
Fungus then asks what the change might mean for trade unions if one of their principal tools for securing change becomes “blunted”. Again, there is almost no editorial excavation required. Angus identifies the industrial-relations weapon, describes a policy capable of weakening it and then wonders what becomes of the organisation whose leverage depends upon that weapon retaining some force.
You can dress that up in whatever management language makes lunch easier to digest. The basic physics remain gloriously simple. A strike works partly because withholding labour imposes a cost. Reduce that cost and you reduce leverage. Reduce leverage for long enough and employees may conclude that continuing to use the mechanism is pointless.
That is not TCAP accusing Angus of secretly understanding how pressure changes behaviour.
He wrote the fucking diagram.
What makes this such a good Fungus piece is the lack of embarrassment around the mechanism. There is no lengthy detour through harmonious workplaces before the employer advantage appears. He looks directly at the possibility that workers might become disillusioned once their action loses effectiveness and then asks whether this could somehow lead to closer cooperation and dialogue.
Of course it could, Angus.
A boxer also becomes considerably easier to negotiate with after somebody removes his fucking gloves.
Dialogue After The Leverage Goes Missing
That little rhetorical flourish about closer cooperation may be the darkest joke in the piece. Angus first imagines the workforce discovering that striking no longer works so well because temporary labour can reduce its impact. He then raises the prospect that this could encourage greater dialogue between employer and employees.
What a charming sequence.
First, weaken the bargaining instrument.
Then observe that the people holding it may stop using it.
Finally, invite everybody back to the table for a lovely constructive chat now that one side has misplaced the thing that made the other side listen.
That is not cooperation arriving naturally because relations improved. It is cooperation contemplated after the power balance may have changed. The tea tastes considerably more consensual once somebody has quietly removed the fucking kettle from the union side.
And this is why Angus needs no translator. He tells you not merely that a legal reform might help employers. He follows the advantage through to the human consequence and speculates about how the workers’ behaviour may change once they experience enough failure.
Fungus always wants to know what happens after the pressure works.
The Temps Get Their Own Squeeze
The article is even richer because Angus also notices that the replacement workers could face pressure of their own. Agency temps could refuse strike-cover assignments, he explains, but regular rejection of offered work might lead to fewer offers in future.
That sentence deserves more attention than it probably received in 2023.
The striking workforce risks seeing its leverage weakened because somebody else can perform the work. The temporary worker technically retains a choice about crossing that industrial dispute, but declining assignments may affect future opportunities. Recruitment businesses themselves worry about reputational damage if they supply strike-breaking labour, while also fearing that competitors prepared to do so could take their contracts.
Everybody has a lever attached to somebody else.
The employer can blunt the strike.
The agency can worry about losing the client.
The temp can worry about losing future work.
The striker can worry that withholding labour no longer achieves enough to justify the sacrifice.
Angus surveys this magnificent little pressure network and somehow still manages to wonder whether the destination could be closer cooperation.
Fucking hell.
He Actually Calls It Strike-Busting
There is another reason this article belongs in the Fungus canon. Angus does not even hide behind delicate terminology in the title. He calls the thing strike-busting.
That choice matters because it eliminates much of the polite ambiguity usually available to professional commentary. He understands the cultural and industrial meaning of supplying replacement labour during a strike. He acknowledges the reputational concern among agencies. He recognises the difficult position of temporary workers. He identifies the weakening of union leverage and the possibility of employees becoming disillusioned.
Then he carries on.
This is not somebody accidentally wandering into the consequences of the policy while concentrating on an obscure statutory amendment. Angus sees the whole bargaining table. He can identify who gains leverage, who loses it, which participant might feel pressure and what behavioural change could follow.
Fungus is not confused.
That would be much less interesting.
Surely That’s The Whole Fucking Point?!
The parenthesis is what turns a useful employment-law article into a Blog vs Behaviour collector’s item.
The Government consultation acknowledges that agency strike cover would reduce the effectiveness of industrial action. A conventional adviser could have left that observation alone, explained the competing arguments and moved to the next paragraph.
Angus cannot help himself.
“I know – surely that’s the whole point?!”
There are sentences that require interpretation, and then there are sentences that arrive carrying their own fucking subtitles.
He is not merely recording an effect. The aside treats the effect as obvious to the point of comedy. Of course the proposal reduces the effectiveness of strikes. Why else would an employer want the ability to replace the people withholding their labour?
That little burst of candour is the Angus Menzies signature.
Most people close the bonnet before the customer arrives.
Fungus starts revving the bastard.
The Angus Menzies Extended Universe
TCAP readers have seen this before because Angus repeatedly writes past the respectable surface question and arrives at the mechanism underneath it. “What a Relief!” gave us a brutally useful description of claimant attrition, including the practical reality that litigation can become expensive and exhausting enough for people to abandon or compromise claims before the merits ever receive a final determination.
“To Postpone Or Not To Postpone” wandered into another pressure point, this time around participation and what happens when a person cannot continue conventionally through proceedings. “Attribution For Dummies” supplied yet another example of Fungus explaining how the apparent decision-maker may not represent the whole decision-making story.
Now we have industrial action.
Different legal subject.
Different actors.
Same curious Angus instinct.
Do not stop at the formal rule. Follow the pressure through the system and ask what it makes the human being do.
That is why Fungus is becoming less a Blog vs Behaviour defendant than its unpaid technical consultant.
HM Histories Has The CV, Blog vs Behaviour Has The Mouth
The timing is particularly funny after the latest HM Histories trip through Angus’s professional past. That series follows the institutional route: the firms, the career progression, the respectable names accumulated along the way and the professional ecosystem from which Horsfield Menzies eventually emerged.
Blog vs Behaviour gets the complementary archive.
The mouth.
A CV tells you where somebody worked. Angus’s articles occasionally tell you how he appears to think about the mechanics of employer-side power. One archive contains firms and dates. The other contains “surely that’s the whole point?!”
You can decide which one is more fucking illuminating.
There is no need to claim that every view expressed in a newsletter describes every instruction Angus has ever given a client. That would miss the much better point. The article shows what consequences he notices and considers worth discussing.
In this one, he notices workers becoming disillusioned when their leverage stops working.
That is an extraordinary detail to volunteer.
Then Came Collaboration Angus
The comedy improves further when we move forward to August 2024. In a later Horsfield Menzies article co-written with Georgina Middleton about Labour’s planned repeal of minimum service legislation, the language becomes rather more wholesome. Employers and unions would need to “negotiate and collaborate more”, and organisations should think about good employee relations in the changing legal landscape.
Lovely stuff.
Nothing objectionable there whatsoever.
But once you have read 2023 Angus, you cannot unknow him.
This is the same writer who had already contemplated a world in which reduced strike effectiveness might leave workforces disillusioned and a union’s principal tool blunted. Suddenly the softer language about collaboration comes with an earlier director’s commentary explaining what the bargaining machinery looks like when employer leverage increases.
Again, Fungus saves TCAP the trouble.
He supplies both editions.
From Disillusionment To Cooperation
There is a particular kind of corporate thinking that treats the disappearance of resistance as evidence that relations have improved. Employees stop striking, so perhaps everyone has become more cooperative. Complaints decrease, so perhaps management solved the underlying problem. Litigation ends, so perhaps justice prevailed.
Or perhaps one side got tired, poor, frightened, outgunned or convinced that continuing would achieve fuck-all.
That distinction matters.
Angus’s own article identifies it more clearly than most management consultants ever would. If industrial action becomes less effective, workers may become disillusioned with using it. That is not reconciliation. It is a prediction about what happens when resistance stops producing results.
Whether someone regards that as commercially desirable, politically offensive or simply an inevitable consequence of policy is a separate argument.
The fascinating thing is that Fungus identifies the mechanism without blinking.
No Translation Required
This series usually takes polished professional advice and holds it beside the record until the contradiction becomes visible. With Angus, that format keeps malfunctioning because the man repeatedly reaches the uncomfortable conclusion before we do.
TCAP says legal and procedural power can exhaust people.
Fungus has written about claimant attrition.
TCAP says pressure can redirect behaviour.
Fungus has now written about workers becoming disillusioned once industrial action loses effectiveness.
TCAP says institutional mechanisms matter because outcomes are not produced solely by nice clean rules on paper.
Angus keeps describing the fucking mechanisms.
He is becoming impossible to parody because parody normally requires exaggeration. How do you exaggerate “surely that’s the whole point?!” immediately before an article contemplates workers eventually becoming disillusioned with striking?
You leave the sentence alone.
You frame it.
You thank the author.
The Little Goblin Says The Quiet Part
This is ultimately why Angus Menzies remains TCAP’s favourite Horsfield Menzies author. Not because he invariably writes the worst advice. Quite often, he writes perceptive analysis.
That is the problem.
Fungus sees the pressure points.
He understands leverage.
He notices attrition.
He follows apparently technical legal changes through to their human consequences.
And every so often he becomes sufficiently comfortable with the audience that he simply fucking says it.
Let employers reduce the effectiveness of industrial action and some workers may become disillusioned with striking. Blunt one of the unions’ principal tools and the bargaining landscape changes. Perhaps everyone then becomes more cooperative.
There is your mechanism.
There is your outcome.
There is your Horsfield Menzies partner explaining it himself.
No whistleblower required.
No leaked memo.
No anonymous source hiding behind a voice changer.
No elaborate TCAP inference.
Just Angus Menzies, sitting at a keyboard with the guard down and apparently wondering why everyone else needs so many fucking euphemisms.
At this rate, TCAP still does not need to expose Fungus.
We just need to keep letting the little cunt publish.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies: ’Tis The Season To Be Strike-Busting
- Horsfield Menzies: Controversial Strikes Law To Be Struck Out
- TCAP : Angus Menzies – He Wrote The Fucking Playbook
- TCAP : Angus Menzies – Every Time Fungus Writes, The Mask Fucking Slips
- TCAP : Angus Menzies – McGrigors, KPMG And Pinsent History