Pay demands: a summer of discontent
This “summer of discontent” is starting to get silly, said Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. The railways are already in chaos; British Airways staff are threatening walkouts during the school holidays, over a 10% pay cut introduced during the pandemic; doctors are calling for a 30% pay rise over five years; teaching unions have threatened to ballot their members in support of “inflation-plus” pay rises; and this week, even barristers got in on the action, downing wigs in demand of a hike in legal aid payments. At this rate, the whole country will be on strike before long.
We may well be facing a wave of industrial action, said The Independent, which will add to the general sense of “malaise” gripping the country. But don’t put it down to a “sudden outbreak of Marxism”; what we have here is more a matter of supply and demand. There are currently more vacancies than there are jobseekers; and in “a tight labour market”, people are less likely to accept below-inflation pay rises. Private sector bosses are already giving in to the pressure, said The Sunday Times. Average pay growth there has been 8% over the past year. By contrast, public sector pay is up 1.5%. It’s unrealistic for unions to seek parity with the private sector, not least because public sector workers tend to enjoy more generous pensions; but ministers may struggle to keep pay rises in the 2-3% range they’d envisaged. All the more reason not to accede to RMT boss Mick Lynch, said Gerald Warner on Reaction. Rail workers are better paid than most; if these relative “fat cats” get the 7% they want, it will open a floodgate of demand from teachers and nurses who’ve had real-terms pay cuts in the past decade.
There has been a lot of misleading talk about rail workers’ pay, said Hannah Fearn on The Independent. People point to train drivers on £60K a year; but it’s not drivers who are on strike. The RMT doesn’t represent them; it represents skilled workers such as engineers and also low-paid cleaners and others who have not had a raise for three years. It suits ministers to depict the railworkers as greedy and selfish, said Kenan Malik in The Observer, and their union leaders as overmighty barons. In fact, the right to strike has been heavily curtailed in the past 40 years, and corporations now have far “more leverage than unions could ever muster”. The withdrawal of labour is about the only means workers have “of restoring a modicum of balance in a highly unequal relationship”. In other words, for people at the bottom, unions represent their best hope of “levelling up”.