Unions warn of strikes by workers who feel betrayed
STRIKES, protests and industrial unrest will follow Rishi Sunak’s ‘shameful’ decision to freeze the pay of most public sector workers next year, the government was warned.
Unions said the chancellor’s block on an across-the-board rise signalled the return of austerity and ‘insulted’ those who have played a vital role during the pandemic.
Firefighters, teachers, the armed forces, police, civil servants and other key workers who had ‘risked everything’ to keep society going would ‘continue to see their wages fall in real terms’, they added.
Labour’s Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor, told MPs: ‘Earlier this year, the chancellor stood on his doorstep and clapped for key workers. Today his government institutes a pay freeze for many of them. In contrast, there has been a bonanza for those who have won contracts from this government, which has wasted and mismanaged public finances on an industrial scale... £130million to a Conservative donor for testing kits that were unsafe, £150million for face masks and £700million on coveralls that couldn’t be used.’
Ms Dodds warned that the pay freeze would be a ‘sledgehammer to consumer confidence’, leaving millions of workers with less cash to spend on the high street.
She also accused Mr Sunak of making ‘too many grand promises amounting to nothing’ – singling out the ‘starter home’ scheme, which she said had cost £200million with not a single property built so far.
Rehana Azam, of the GMB union, said the freeze would put the chancellor ‘on a collision course with public service workers’, warning: ‘ He should know that we fought the public sector pay cap before and we busted it.’
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said its members would feel a ‘deep sense of betrayal’ amid an ‘increased likelihood of industrial unrest’.
And Mick Cash, leader of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, said workers will have ‘ no hesitation’ in taking strike action to ‘deliver pay justice’. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said: ‘This is austerity, plain and simple. A decade of spending cuts left public services exposed when Covid came calling. The government is making the same disastrous mistake again.’
John Apter, chair of the Police Federation, said the freeze was a ‘kick in the teeth’ for officers.
Critics also called the decision to give an extra £250 to the lowestpaid public sector staff a ‘sop’. Unite assistant general secretary Gail Cartmail said, for the 2million public sector workers earning under £24,000, ‘it is insulting and compares badly with the inflated sums the government has wasted on PPE contracts for those with links to the Tory establishment’.