At its annual conference yesterday, the leaders of the National Education Union (NEU) reported that the latest Tory pay offer was rejected by an overwhelming 98% of its members in a turnout of 66%.
191,000 teachers in England rejected an ‘insulting’ pay offer of a £1,000 one-off payment and a 4.5% pay increase for the coming year.
Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, joint general secretaries of the NEU, announced new strike dates in April and May adding: ‘The Education Secretary has united the profession in its outrage at this insulting pay offer.’
This, and all the similar wage-cutting pay offers the Tories are attempting to inflict on all the public services, is not just insulting but a deliberate drive to force the working class into having the crisis of capitalism dumped on their backs.
While workers are being told there is no money for wage increases that match inflation, every household in the country is being hit this month by a massive increase in the price of everything from water bills to council and car tax, as the Tories allow government departments and regulated companies to impose above-inflation increases.
Average council tax bills have increased by £99 from 1st April going above £2,000 a year for the first time ever. Last week it was revealed that supermarket price inflation in Britain shot up to a record high of 17.5%, pushing the average annual household grocery bill up by £837 to £5,617 a year.
This is on top of the headline inflation rate of 10.4%.
The low-paid workers are hit hardest by this crisis with millions struggling with energy bills, rent and feeding their children and now being hit by yet further increases.
This has certainly united not just teachers but the entire working class against a Tory government and capitalist system that can find unlimited billions of pounds for a war against Russia, allow water and sewerage companies to push up their prices way above inflation while at the same time pauperising the working class at home.
The unity of the working class in its increasing demands for real action against this Tory government has panicked the trade union bureaucracy which is desperate to call an end to the massive wave of strikes by forcing acceptance of ‘insulting’ pay offers.
In the NHS, the executives of every union – with the exception of Unite which is making no recommendation – are currently balloting nurses and NHS workers recommending they accept an equally derisory pay offer that comes nowhere near the claim of 19% for nurses.
If the Tories are relying at present on the trade union leaders to break the unity of workers, they are also preparing to completely smash the independence of the trade unions and turn them into nothing more than labour fronts whose role is to enforce the diktats of the government and bosses on the working class.
The Tories’ new anti-trade union legislation, currently in its final stages before becoming law, imposes minimum service levels that will ‘determine how far workers can lawfully exercise their freedom to strike’ according to legal experts.
It will impose the legal requirement on trade unions to force workers to cross picket lines and break strikes, as instructed by the employer, or be sacked on the spot.
The only response from the leadership of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has been to say they will fight the legislation in the courts.
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has recently issued a demand for the TUC to call a special conference to lead a campaign of ‘mass non-cooperation and non-compliance’ with the anti-union law.
But non-compliance is not enough to take on and defeat a Tory government determined to smash the unions as it drives to impose the massive crisis of capitalism on the working class.
The only demand that meets this crisis is the demand for the unions to force the TUC to convene a special Congress to immediately call an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
This is the only way forward.
