Up to a half a million public sector workers are striking in mass
in the United Kingdom today over anti labor legislation and
refusals to raise wages amidst record inflation.
Now it's the largest strike the United Kingdom has seen in over a decade.
And among those striking are, I mean, the numbers will blow your mind, especially if
you live in the United States, you don't really see action like this.
300,000 teachers, 100,000 civil servants across more than 100 departments including
driving instructors, coastguards, and Department of Work and Pensions staff.
100,000 train and bus drivers,
70,000 university workers including lecturers and security staff.
And that's not all.
We should hear more about the catalyst for these strikes.
I mentioned inflation and wages.
You're gonna hear more about that now.
>> What we're hearing from the multiple unions which have called for
these strikes to take place, not just today, but over the next month,
is that they are still demanding that increase to those pay rises in line with
inflation that we're seeing in the UK at an eye watering rate.
But also of course, to combat the cost of living crisis,
which is only deepening that today.
Of course, we are seeing teachers going on strike, transport workers and
civil servants.
And this is set to cause widespread disruption across the country.
But this is all part of a long running standoff between the trade unions and
the government.
They say over the last few weeks, negotiations have stalled and
the government isn't budging on calls for that pay rise.
>> Well, unfortunately, the government is led by conservatives, the Tory Party.
And there seems to be absolutely no empathy whatsoever for
these workers whose wages not only have failed to keep up with inflation,
but things got much worse once inflation took off.
And of course, as always, anytime there's inflation, the immediate assumption
is it has everything to do with workers making too much money, even though wages
were not keeping up with inflation prior to inflation really blowing up.
It's just insane, but let me give you more details.
Average pay excluding bonuses rose by just 2.7% in the public sector
between August and October as inflation rose above 10%.
That compared with a 6.9% pay increase in the private sector,
according to national statistics, but
don't think that they're doing real well in the private sector.
While inflation has begun to cool slightly, it remains at historic highs.
Grocery price inflation hit a record 16.7% in the four weeks to January 22nd.
As we've talked about on the show a million times before, Covid and
all of the supply chain disruptions, all of the general disruptions that came along
with Covid have definitely contributed to inflation in certain sectors.
The idea that workers getting paid a little bit more is the problem here is
crazy, but that is what conservatives and some corporate democrats by the way here
in the United States, people like Paul Krugman are arguing.
The National Education Union,
Britain's largest education Union says that teachers
have experienced at least a 23% real term pay cut.
So what that means is you can't just say, someone got a raise, right?
You take a look at their pay,
they made $5,000 more this year as opposed to last year.
You have to look at real wages that actually take inflation into account.
The government allegedly offered its members a 5% pay raise,
which the NEU, again, the largest union for
educators, says, equated to a pay cut thanks to inflation.
Thousands of schools will fully or
partially close across the UK as teachers hit the picket lines.
And as these teachers explain, there's a good reason for it.
Let's hear from them.
>> Wednesday, Debra Piper won't be here.
She'll be on the picket line calling for better conditions for teachers and
a pay rise funded by the government,
not taken from her school's budget as it was last year.
>> That comes out of the children's pockets.
That comes out of the children's books.
So they put us in a very precarious situation where we feel really guilty
taking the bare minimum as we have and
putting schools in such dire straight with budgets.
So there are two really good reasons that actually, I want to go on the march and
be counted and say enough.
>> I think if you were to ask the majority of teachers in this country,
they would say they were striking for pay, but more importantly for funding for
schools, because they are at the frontline seeing the cuts and
what they're having to deal with without enough money to do it.
>> So many parallels to what we're experiencing here in the United States.
But what makes us different is our lack of labor power,
the dwindling of unionized work in this country, really beginning in the 1970s,
and now it's just a small percentage of jobs in this country are unionized.
So when workers want to strike, when workers want to speak out and
demand better working conditions or better pay,
it's a lot more difficult to do it without the protection of a union or
without a union negotiating your wages on your behalf which is what you see in
Scandinavian countries, what you see with some sectors of the UK's economy.
Now, as for university workers,
their union joined the strike after a dispute over pay.
They say that they had a pay raise of about 3% this year,
following over a decade of below inflation pay awards.
Now, rail workers are also striking following a long running dispute over pay,
job security, and also working conditions.
As you guys all know, our rail workers are also unhappy because they're penalized if
they need to take time off due to some sort of emergency, medical emergency,
family emergency.
But Congress and the White House did step in on behalf of the rail worker,
not not on behalf of the rail workers, on behalf of their employers,
when our government could have stepped in and
just demanded that the rail employers provide some time off for the workers.
But of course they didn't do that.
Now, there are some more strikes planned throughout February and also into March.
This next video has some more information on that.
>> The nurses are going on strike again.
That's very rare.
Even rarer, on February 6th, nurses and
ambulance workers will strike on the same day.
That is the first time that has ever happened in this country.
And it may be the biggest ever industrial action to hit the health care system in
the United Kingdom.
We're also expecting more strikes from teachers, rail workers and
others, including physiotherapists and bus drivers.
>> Good, good.
They have something that we don't have here in the United States.
I'm envious of that.
This is how you flex your power as a worker.
You make your absence felt within the economy,
because I think people forget how important these jobs are,
how important these workers are, and
how they deserve to be fairly compensated for the work they do.
There's more, I want to talk about public opinion in regard to these strikes because
the results of these polls have been mixed.
If you look at Ipsos, they found that a slight majority do support the strategy of
multiple unions striking on the same day.
So if you take a look at this, you'll see that about 40% strongly agree with
the strikes, they support the strikes.
18% are kind of neutral, neither support nor oppose.
And 38% strongly oppose the strikes, which is pretty depressing.
Among 2019 Conservative voters, this is not surprising,
21% support the strike, 59% are against it.
Among Labour voters, though,
65% support the strikers and only 20% are against them.
And so that public support is incredibly important.
But again, when these strikes happen,
the absence of these workers within the economy is felt and
those who tend to get reminded of the importance of labor are the employers.
This is the only real power workers have, getting organized and
threatening to strike if they don't have better working conditions in some cases,
but in this case we're talking about wages.
Now, fewer than 1 in 5, 17% think that the UK government led by Rishi Sunak,
of the Tory Party of course, is doing a good job negotiating with
trade unions to prevent strikes, with 31% of Britons expecting
a Labour government led by Keir Starmer would do a better job.
Nonetheless, the government seems to be holding firm so far.
Sunak is not interested in conceding at all to the workers here.
Despite ongoing pressure from workers over pay, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
has said his government will not consider increasing wages.
He warned of what he called a wage price spiral,
where consumer prices rise in response to higher wages creating further inflation.
So just think about how screwed up the system is where for decades,
workers still were not getting paid enough to keep up with inflation.
Okay, now inflation has really taken off and
the workers are like yo, this is untenable.
We need to get paid a little more to be able to handle the high cost of things
that we need, like groceries for instance.
But the argument here based on what Sunak says is yeah, but the thing is
in order for some people living in the UK to be able to afford their groceries, we
got to make sure that another portion of the UK is really struggling and destitute.
That's how the system works.
It's the best system in the world, ain't it?
It's just pathetic, absolutely pathetic.
And we're seeing similar talking points here in the United States where the head
of the Federal Reserve just openly and transparently says man,
we've really gotta increase unemployment to get inflation under control.