THE OFFICE for National Statistics (ONS) revealed yesterday that the number of days lost due to strikes last year was the highest since 1989.
In December alone, 843,000 working days were hit by strikes – the highest monthly figure in over ten years as NHS, rail and postal workers along with civil servants struck against the poverty level wages being demanded by the Tories and the bosses.
In all, over 2.4 million working days were lost in strike action in 2022 as workers across the public and private sector came out en masse after over 12 years of Tory austerity attacks to drive down wages.
The ONS also produced figures showing the extent of the damage inflicted on workers and their families.
In the three months to December last year real-terms pay fell by 3.6%; one of the biggest falls since records began in 2001.
The ONS figures showed that while public sector workers in particular were hit with a pay growth rate of 4.2% – while the headline inflation rate is officially at 10.1% – the City bankers and accountants experienced large wage increases in their salaries.
Their pay increases drove the overall pay growth for the private sector up to 7.3%.
In other words, the pay increases for a handful of bankers, accountants and chief executives were enough to drive up the overall private sector average wage increase – and this does not take into account the massive yearly bonuses the bosses and bankers regularly award themselves.
While the ruling class reap millions, workers are told by the Tories that capitalism simply can’t afford anything more than poverty-level wage increases.
No wonder that workers are declaring that they have had enough of being forced to endure pay cuts while the bosses and bankers live the high life, and are demanding that the trade unions take real action.
Paul Nowak, TUC general secretary, said: ‘It is little surprise that workers are having to take strike action to defend their living standards. They have been pushed to breaking point.’
It’s not the working class that is at breaking point but this bankrupt British capitalist system that has pushed the working class to the point of revolution.
Far from being broken, the statistics on strikes show a working class that is not only prepared but is eager to take on the Tories and the employers.
The Tories and bourgeois media have been astounded that workers are willing to lose pay during strikes in their determination not to be driven into poverty by a weak Tory government that is disintegrating by the day.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: ‘The latest record strike figures announced today are a warning to the government and employers’ and: ‘In the face of the cost-of-living crisis workers have no option but to fight for better wages.’
While the working class has no option, and indeed is eager, for a real fight, just warning the Tories and employers is a complete evasion of the struggle.
It is an evasion designed to exert yet more pressure to try to win concessions over pay from a Tory government that will not concede a penny to the working class but is determined that workers must pay for the capitalist crisis through super-austerity to rescue a bankrupt capitalist system.
There must be no more evasions by the TUC and trade union leaders.
Workers must force them to either mobilise the full strength of the working class or face being removed and replaced with a leadership prepared to get on with the real job of calling a general strike to bring down the Tories.
An indefinite general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will nationalise the banks and major industries under the management of the working class bringing in a planned socialist economy is the only way forward for workers.
Only the Workers Revolutionary Party and its youth section the Young Socialists are fighting for this policy and perspective.
We urge every worker and young person to join and build up the leadership required to organise the British Socialist Revolution that alone can provide any future for workers and youth.
