Strikes Sweep the U.K. as Workers Demand Better Pay

Given the company’s reported profit (£370 million last year), “it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth when they turn around and say they haven’t got the money,” said Hannah Carroll, a 29-year-old postal worker in East London, who said she had worked throughout pandemic lockdowns as the only earner in her household.

On a London picket line where staff members were flying the bright pink flags of the Communications Workers Union, many pointed to the £400 million returned to shareholders by Royal Mail in the fiscal year to March and disputed the company’s insistence that it couldn’t afford to pay significantly more. The company said the pandemic had upended its business and amid greater competition it lost £1 million a day in the first quarter; it also noted that Royal Mail employees make up many of its shareholders.

With so many vital public services being disrupted, bleak comparisons have been made to the late 1970s and Britain’s infamous Winter of Discontent. More than a million workers in 1979 went on strike to protest the government’s attempt to impose a public-sector pay ceiling to try to control soaring inflation. Trash piled up, schools closed, hospitals turned away nonemergency patients, some dead went unburied, and eventually the crisis forced out Labour lawmakers and ushered in a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher.

Dave Ward, the general secretary of the Communications Workers Union, believes today’s unrest will last longer than a wave of summertime strikes. “This is also signaling a complete break from the traditional ways that companies are being run,” he said. “And it’s potentially filling the vacuum that exists politically.”

Many of the issues at the heart of these strikes, such as the privatization of public services and weak pay growth, are long-running. But the spur to action may have been the pandemic lockdowns, which awoke many people to greater inequalities in and out of work and encouraged some to demand more from their employers as they struggle with the highest inflation rate in decades.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/business/uk-strikes-workers-walkout-rail.html