Britain will likely be facing an autumn of strikes in emergency services as well. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) announced that 32,500 of its members across the UK would vote on strike action against a 2 percent offer. Over one hundred thousand members of Unite working for the NHS across England and Wales are being balloted. Unison will ballot 406,000 of its members who work for the NHS across England, Wales while balloting is already underway in Scotland. The ballots will include emergency services staff including nurses, paramedics, emergency call handlers and ambulance drivers.
Meanwhile, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), who recently changed their rule book to allow them the ability to strike, are also balloting for strikes throughout Scotland, England and Wales. The RCN’s general secretary says nurses will vote to strike not just for pay but against intolerable working conditions. Despite recent legislation allowing P&O-style strike-breaking by agency workers, during the successful strike in Northern Ireland, nursing agencies refused to scab. Cullen predicts that in England, Wales, and Scotland, nursing agencies would refuse to supply strike-breakers this time, too. The Royal College of Midwives are also set to be balloted over pay, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists are consulting members over taking action, and junior doctors in the British Medical Association look set to ballot in January 2023. A strike of this magnitude by nurses, doctors and other health workers would involve 750,000 workers and would be the largest in the NHS since the 1980s. This development would deepen the political crisis over the cost of living, NHS funding, and privatization, creating the potential for action in solidarity with health workers.
Why now?
Britain faces a productivity crisis as well a cost of living crisis. Average annual growth rates in Britain have roughly halved since the 1960s, from about 3.5 percent a year to less than 2 percent today. Since the reign of Margaret Thatcher, the Tories have not resolved these deep-seated problems. For example, Britain’s output-per-hour-worked remained at lower levels than Germany and France with no recovery since 1979. Productivity has stagnated further since the financial crisis.
In 2012, five Tory MP’s wrote a book called Britannia Unchained. It claimed, “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world,” and continued, “We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.” Two of those MPs were prime minister and chancellor in the Tory government that recently collapsed. Whatever the Tories may think, the reality is that workers in Britain work longer hours than those in Sweden, Germany. and France and do not retire any earlier.
But are British workers lazy? A set of large government-funded surveys conducted since the 1990s shows the share of people who say they work at “very high speed” for at least three-quarters of the work day rose from 23 percent to 45 percent between 1992 and 2017. In 1992, 71 percent of employees said they had “a great deal” of control over how hard they worked; by 2017 this had dropped to 46 percent. The Health and Safety Executive also shows that work-related stress, depression and anxiety are on the rise. As work intensity increases, so has the manager’s whip.
A better explanation for poor UK productivity is the lack of investment in new equipment and technology. Business investment has been weak in the UK by international standards and took a further hit after Brexit. The result is an economy poorly equipped to deal with both a financial crisis and a cost of living crisis.
Grinding poverty is the experience for the poorest in Britain. Following a decade of Tory austerity, and cuts to Universal Income a year ago, large swathes of the “working poor” are already being tipped over the edge as they can no longer manage to make ends meet. Wages have been squeezed since the financial crisis of 2008. Average real wages fell by nearly 7 percent between 2009 and 2014. The last decade has seen the longest peacetime squeeze in living standards since the Napoleonic wars, with household incomes shrinking by 2 percent. Despite the collapse in confidence in the Tories, Britain remains among the top thirty richest countries in the world. Levels of inequality in Britain today now surpass every country in the Western world outside of the US. The decline in collective bargaining coverage in Britain in recent decades is one of the main factors responsible for the increase in inequality. In 1979, prior to the election of Thatcher, Britain had a coverage of about 85 percent, making it one of the highest in Europe with the narrowest levels of inequality. Since then, coverage has declined to about 25 percent. Research from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that wealth inequality has accelerated since the financial crash and years of austerity. Britain was an outlier in OECD countries with a decline in real pay since 2007. For example, in 2007, the average household in Britain was 8 percent worse off than its peers in North Western Europe, but today this deficit is 20 percent.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a Tory creation, is predicting that the cost-of-living crisis will result in the worst hit to living standards since 1956. Truss, the ex-prime minister, said that high energy costs are a price worth paying for energy security. No doubt rising interest rates for homeowners are also “a price worth paying.” Despite the recent resignations, the Tories’ aim under new prime minister Rishi Sunak will be to reintroduce another round of Thatcherite austerity to shift the burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of workers. They are set to introduce further anti-trade union legislation as they hope to further discipline the labor movement and undermine workers’ right to strike. There are no guarantees that this agenda could work as they plan a second time around.