Today will be the biggest day of strike action across the country in over a decade, with hundreds of thousands of workers from nearly every sector walking out demanding pay increases that match spiralling inflation.
It is a massive demonstration of the determination of the working class not to be driven into poverty by a British capitalist system plunging into recession.
100,000 teachers across England and Wales are walking out on a day of national action following the breakdown of any last-minute deal on pay between the Tories and the National Education Union (NEU), with further strike days organised in February and March over a 10% pay demand.
Teachers will be joining 100,000 members of the PCS union representing civil servants throughout Whitehall and the public sector who are on strike today over the Tories’ measly 2% pay offer.
With inflation over 10% the PCS said: ‘We can’t afford not to win this dispute’ and the union will be calling ‘hard-hitting, targeted action over long periods to put real industrial pressure on the government.’
Over 70,000 university staff, represented by the University College Union (UCU), at 150 universities will also be striking after rejecting an pay offer of 4% and in support of the union’s demand for a ‘meaningful pay rise to deal with the cost-of-living crisis and to end the use of insecure contracts’.
RMT members from 14 different train operators are also on picket lines today as part of the long-running fight over pay and working conditions after rejecting Network Rail’s recent offer of a derisory 5% wage increase, while Aslef train drivers are mounting picket lines at railway stations across the country, and some 1,900 London bus drivers are out after rejecting two miserable pay offers from the Abellio bus company.
Today’s mass national strike action, along with the entire wave of strikes by NHS workers, postal workers and others in the past few weeks – strikes that are set to be joined by firefighters and junior doctors – demonstrates conclusively that the working class is in no mood to be driven into the gutter.
Workers are seeing clearly that one-day national strikes, no matter how powerful, do not resolve the issue and that all talk of limited strikes to ‘pressurise’ the Tories into conceding pay increases that match inflation and compensate for 12 years of savage Tory austerity cuts are inadequate in defeating a Tory government determined to make workers pay for the economic crisis of British capitalism.
British capitalism is bankrupt. Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) produced figures showing that the UK economy is contracting faster than any other ‘advanced’ capitalist economy.
Russia, despite all the imperialist sanctions, has a positive growth rate while Britain is collapsing under the weight of a £2.4 trillion national debt, massive inflation and an economic recession not seen since the 1930s.
The Tories aren’t preparing to make concessions. Instead, they are preparing for a war to smash trade unions and end the right to strike.
On Monday, the Tory Minimum Services Bill passed in the Commons and is now headed to the Lords before it becomes law.
This bill hands employers the legal means to break strikes, sack workers who refuse to work as instructed, and opens the way for trade unions to be fined if they don’t obey any demands placed on them.
But while the Tories are preparing for a war, the TUC has gone into hiding.
After designating today as a ‘day of protest’ against the Tory union-busting bill the TUC has organised absolutely nothing – not even one march or demonstration today.
The hundreds of thousands of workers on strike today, along with the millions more behind them prepared and eager to fight this rabble of a Tory government, are demanding real action from the TUC.
They are demanding an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories.
The working class is the most powerful force in the country. It must demand that the unions recall the TUC to sack the current leaders and call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a Workers Government and a socialist planned economy.
This is the way forward for the working class.
