“Battered” into a climbdown over the abolition of the 10p tax rate, Gordon Brown was further “bruised” last Thursday by one of the biggest one-day strikes in years by public sector workers unhappy over this year’s below-inflation pay rises, said Nicholas Timmins in the FT.
Britain’s first national teachers’ strike for 21 years saw the closure of around 8,000 schools. Industrial action has also been taken by coastguards and public sector workers at driving test centres, job centres, and immigration offices. This was followed by this week’s 48-hour walkout at the privately owned Grangemouth refinery over proposed changes to employee pension schemes.
“The workers are getting restless,” said Peter Wilby in The New Statesman. Last year more than a million days were lost to strikes. Are we returning to the 1970s, when strikes were a part of everyday life? “Now as then, the prime minister had unexpectedly called off a general election. Now as then, the unions sense that a weak government, desperate for allies, might buy them off. Now as then, the government has a pay policy – in Gordon Brown’s case, a 2% cap on public sector pay rises. Now as then, prices are rising.”
In reality, the echoes of those days are faint. In 1979, 29 million days were lost to strikes. Union membership is down from more than 13 million in the 1970s to barely 7.5 million. Laws introduced by Margaret Thatcher have made it tougher to call strikes. Perhaps most importantly, globalisation has created a worldwide labour surplus. Workers no longer have the upper hand. Today’s strikes cause nothing like the inconvenience they did 30 years ago.
The public sector strikes, perhaps, said The Independent. The oil workers’ walkout is different. The Forties Pipeline, which provides 30% of the UK’s daily oil output from the North Sea, has been shut down because it relies on electricity and steam from Grangemouth. Supplies could be disrupted for a month. It’s costing the UK £50m a day, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph. It is “astonishing” that a small dispute over pensions was allowed to escalate into a “potential economic disaster”.
The current situation was entirely predictable, said Daniel Hannan, also in The Daily Telegraph. “There comes a moment, under every Labour government, when the money runs out.” For 11 years, Labour sucked revenue from the productive part of the economy (raising a scarcely credible extra £1,229,100,000,000 in tax) to “engorge the unproductive part”. This money mostly “disappeared into pay packets without raising productivity”. But it’s too late to demand payback.
True, said Peter Wilby. Past bounty doesn’t make public sector workers willing to accept losses in real wages now. “There is a sense that pay policies aren’t being applied consistently or fairly. Why, teachers ask, is their pay being held down when ‘superheads’ are being paid £200,000 a year?” According to Alex Flynn of the Public and Commercial Services Union, more than a quarter of the civil service earns less than £16,000 a year. No wonder these low-paid workers, hit worst by rising food and energy costs, are starting to feel “drastically worse off”.
“Compared with the mass walkouts of the 1970s, today’s protests are more like a sickie than a strike,” said Nick Cohen in The Observer. But now the economy is taking a turn for the worse, Gordon Brown is losing friends fast. He used to be able to “please the editor of the Telegraph and the general secretary of the TUC. He must now be wondering whether he can please either.”