Wednesdays strike (UK)

In My Humble Opinion
1

Any Opinions?

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about.

Recently the trade unions for people who work for local government authorities (from refuse collectors to cooks to Housing officers) refused a 3% payrise for it’s members. They then held a ballot and decided to strike.

Last Wednesday the strike took place, with between 1/2 and 3/4 million people taking part (depending on who you ask).

3% is more than double the rate of inflation, but the unions argue that local authorities workers earn less than the equivalent positions in the private sector and similar positions in other public sector organisations (eg. nurses) They argue that members cannot afford to buy their own houses and that many are leaving their jobs to work in the private sector for money.

They also highlight the number of people currently earning less than £5 an hour, often trying to support families on this wage.

The spokespeople for the authorities say they don’t have any more money to offer and that if they were to increase salaries either jobs would be lost or taxes would increase by around £80 per household. They neglect to mention that local councillors have been given 30% to 60% rises (At least this is what the union tells me.)

I work in Housing for a Local Authority in the West Midlands, I took part in the strike on Wednesday, although mainly because my office was closed. There were very few picket lines and at a rally in London only a few hundred people turned up.

Although I took part in the strike I don’t think it will have the desired effect. In the 1979 winter of discontent council employees striked (stroke?) for 6 weeks and at the end many lost theirs jobs or went back to pay cuts.

more recently in 1989 the authorities gave in to demands when cashiers went on strike and for about six weeks and as a result the council coffers ran dry.

Any opinions?

2

To add to mix, myself being a public servant.

Many of those public servants are refuse collectors, school dinner ladies, street cleaners and the like, in fact these types of workers form the majority of public sector workers.

Over a couple of decades pay rises have been decided on percentages rather than money.

This leads to ever widening pay gaps, what many of those workers want is not 2% or 3%, but an actual money value of lets say around £10, which would mean that the highest paid staff would recieve a smaller % rise than the lowest paid, who surely need the money most.

The actual total of cash to be paid would be the same, just distributed differantly.

Public sector workers have seen many of their jobs put out to private companies who take those same staff who were doing the job previously, but on worse temrs, such as fewer holidays, worse pensions, much lower sick pay, whilst the bosses of the same companies have awarded themselves ever larger bonuses.

Many hospital staff and school service providers simply left, and numbers were cut to such levels that standards fell, so seriously in fact that large numbers of such contracts have been termunated and the workforce taken back into public service, hoever oftentimes their terms and conditions are only slightly better than they were under private ownership.

There are plans to ensure that ‘key workers’ in the public sector, like nurses and teachers and the like can borrow money at advantagous rates so that they can get into the housing market, but to me this will simpky stoke up house prices further, and justr who would a key worker be ?
No hospital can work without cleaners, porters, and a myriad number of other mess than glamerous workers, yet most of them are not classed as key workers.

Voters have made it plain that any government that has plans to increase taxes to pay for such staff will find their electoral hopes dashed.

S

3

Thanks for the extra info casdave

4

So THAT’s what that was all about.

The software company I work for has many UK public libraries as customers, and I spent parts of Thursday and Froday of this week making adjustments to their systems to account for them being unexpectedly closed on Wednesday due to an “industrial action.” I didn’t ask what they meant by that, since they were talking about it in such a way that led me to believe it was a sore subject.

I don’t know anything firsthand about the position of library workers in the UK, but if they are anything like their counterparts here in the US, the professional librarians are grossly underpaid, and the non-professional staff (like the ones at the Circ Desk, and the pages) are even worse off.

I am conflicted about strikes, with my opinions changing often, so I won’t comment about that.