Britain grinds to a halt
Most of Britain’s rail network have ground to a halt as members of the RMT union kickstarted a fresh wave of strikes.
The rail industry says only 20 per cent of services are running, and none at all in much of rural England, Scotland and Wales.
Any last-minute hope of halting the industrial action was extinguished last night after RMT members, demanding inflation-busting pay rises, voted to reject the “substandard” new pay offer made by National Rail of a 5 per cent wage rise this year and 4 per cent in 2023.
Today’s strike is the first of eight planned days of disruption, with the chaos set to ensue for almost a month. Given the knock-on disruption on non-strike days and the Christmas holidays, the next normal day of service won’t be until 9 January.
Rail workers aren’t the only ones taking to the picket line this week. On Friday and Saturday, baggage handlers, along with rail, bus, and highway workers will all be striking at once.
October 2022 saw the highest level of strike action in over a decade, according to ONS data, with 417,000 working days lost due to labour disputes. December will top this, with over one million working days forecast to be lost, making it the worst month for strike disruption since July 1989.
The only thing that warring rail parties seem to agree on is that there is no end to the dispute in sight.
Number 10 isn’t budging. Rishi Sunak insisted today that the government has been “fair and reasonable” in “agreeing the independent pay review bodies’ recommendations for public sector pay rises”, while the Transport Secretary, Mark Harper, noted he was disappointed that the RMT rejected yesterday’s pay offer, since there isn’t a “bottomless pit of money”.
RMT General Secretary, Mick Lynch, hit back, accusing the government of “refusing to lift a finger to prevent these strikes.” When asked if the public can expect further strikes to be announced in 2023, he said: “We hope not. We want to get a deal but, at the moment, there is no deal in sight.”
Network Rail chief executive, Andrew Haines, is similarly gloomy about the prospect of a deal materialising any time soon between rail companies and the union representing rail employees. “I have to say that with the level of disruption the RMT are imposing, the way forward isn’t obvious,” said Haines today.
There is no news about when the government’s so-called anti-strike legislation will come into force. Even the Transport Secretary has admitted that the Transport Strikes Bill – requiring a minimum rail service to be provided even on strike days – is “not a solution to dealing with the industrial action we see at the moment” because of the time the legislation will take to pass through Parliament.
Fresh ONS data is likely to embolden striking workers further. While 2022 has been the worst year for real wage growth in nearly half a century, the burden has not been evenly spread. Average regular pay growth for the private sector was 6.9 per cent in August to October 2022, and just 2.7 per cent for the public sector.
Public sector pay falling behind isn’t a new issue – it is the continuation of a trend throughout the last decade. Yet this most recent disparity in pay between the two is one of the biggest on record.
Even if the unions do soften their demands, it’s in the government’s interest to close this gap. Pay incentives are vital for tackling worker shortages in key public sector industries.
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