HUNDREDS of thousands of public sector workers from across the UK, joining the TUC demonstration through central London today, are furious that while rent, bills and food are spiralling, their pay is at poverty levels.
Working families are being driven to food banks to survive and many are forced to take out pay-day loans to avoid eviction.
Simultaneous demonstrations are taking place in Glasgow, Belfast and London.
TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: ‘While most are suffering continuing cuts in their living standards despite the recovery, boardroom pay just gets bigger and bigger every year. It is obscene that anyone needs to earn more than 2,000 times the living wage.’
TUC research looking at directors’ pay in Britain’s top 350 companies was published yesterday showing the obscene gap between the rich and poor in Britain.
It showed that Simon Peckham – Britain’s highest paid director in the financial year ending in April 2013 – received more than £31m (£31,157,399) or £119,836 a day. This is 2,238 times more than a worker on the living wage of £7.65 an hour who works 35 hours a week.
Dave Wiltshire, Secretary of the All Trade Unions Alliance, said: ‘There is not the slightest doubt that the current situation, of another threatening economic catastrophe on top of the savage austerity measures of the last five years, needs decisive action by the trade union movement to defend the basic interests of the working class, middle class and the youth of this country.
‘This means that the TUC must be made to call an indefinite general strike, to bring down the coalition and to bring in a workers government that will have a programme to resolve this crisis.
‘This will require the nationalisation of the banks and the major industries, including the drug companies, under workers control to establish a socialist planned economy.
‘This will enable a whole economy to be directed towards building millions of homes for working people to live in, to end the housing and the unaffordable rent crisis, to provide jobs and training for young people at trade union rates of pay and to put an end to the zero-hours contract practices that are driving the UK back to the Victorian era.
‘If the TUC leaders are not willing to lead this struggle they must be made to resign and a new leadership take over and lead the fight for socialism.’
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) said: ‘The RCM’s participation in the march comes in the same week that RCM members took strike action over NHS pay. This was the first strike action in the RCM’s 133-year history.’
Unite said: ‘1 in 5 working British families are struggling to afford life’s essentials. Food, shelter and even new school shoes for the kids are seeming like luxuries in today’s austerity Britain.
‘Coalition Britain is as bleak as it has ever been. Job insecurity, low pay and rising living costs are making day-to-day life for our most vulnerable harder than ever.’
Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary, said ‘People are currently facing the biggest squeeze on their incomes since Victorian times, and wages have fallen in real terms every year since 2010.’
Unison Scotland also launched a new report yesterday entitled ‘Austerity Economics Don’t Add Up’. It reveals that, ‘in 2012-13, a total of 480,000 working age adults in Scotland were living in relative poverty, more than half in homes where at least one adult was working (classed as in-work poverty).
‘Nearly one in five children – 180,000 – were in relative poverty, 59% in a home with at least one adult working.’
