The Right to Strike

The right to remove your labour is a fundamental right that all workers have but few actually use in the UK for a wide variety of reasons, mostly these reasons are that compromise has been reached and common ground found, but a lot of times it is because of zero trade union recognition or fear of losing your job. It was one of Thatcher’s great victories in the 1980’s, she broke the trade union movement and encouraged people to become home owners by buying their council houses, both groups becoming weaker in the process for different reasons.

the current pay offer of £850 a year would only amount to an extra £6.50 a week, after tax and National Insurance.

RMT Rail Workers are being offered 4.7% as a pay rise this year, NHS staff are being offered 4%, Teachers and most other local authority worker are being offered 2%. Inflation currently sits at 3.2% so for most workers this offer represents yet another pay cut to add to the many since 2010 when most local authority workers saw a pay freeze until 2013 and then a 1% pay cap until 2017 and since then below inflation pay awards year on year which in effect are yearly pay cuts.

Now not everyone will agree with strike action, employers certainly won’t, but much of the public won’t welcome them either. However we have to accept that in the UK Working households comprised 37% of those below the official poverty line in 1994–95 and 58% in 2017–18. Compare that to the world’s billionaires who  “did extremely well” during the coronavirus pandemic, growing their already-huge fortunes to a record high of $10.2tn (£7.8tn). We are not all in it together are we and while many, certainly COSLA, will say that there is no money to pay what unions and workers are asking for there was money to waste billions on apps that don’t work and to award contracts worth billions to cronies of Tories during this Covid-19 Pandemic.

The UK is the sweat shop of Europe and not just in textiles. As staff numbers have reduced in local authorities increasing demands have been placed on the remaining workers to pick up the so called slack resulting in high rates of sickness and depression amongst the workforce and we have also seen a high number of workers go to work when they are ill for fear of losing their jobs, that is breadline Britain at work in all of it’s glory. We also have the lowest pensions in the industrialised world and lowest sick pay. The reality is, and I see it every time I pay a bill or go shopping, is that prices in Tory Britain are rising and rising fast, most of us have less money now to pay the bills and get through the month. That is not good for working families and it is not good for the economy as people have less money to spend in their local communities, while the recent cuts to Universal Credit just make the situation worse to the extent that this winter Christmas is going to be a miserable event for many as the choices will be eat or heat with no doubt an increase in personal debt as many people feel the pressure of the season.

So for those who are arguing that to strike in Scotland during COP26 puts Scotland in a bad light I would ask when is the right time, when is enough enough, when do we stand up and fight for the terms and conditions that many of our European workers take for granted. The UK cannot be allowed to become an even bigger sweat box than it is now, that is the Tory agenda, that allows the Tories to continue what Thatcher started, a race to the bottom. I voted for strike action recently in the Unite ballot because it is time to take a stand.

Our politicians in Holyrood are protected from the blight of poverty and of the daily struggle to live any kind of decent life, recently we saw the joke that was Douglas Ross, Scottish Conservative Branch Manager, and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon trying to out working class each other, the very fact they had that debate should shame the both of them and shows a complete detachment from day to day life in Scotland for the many. While they are playing politics with comments like Labour transport spokesman Neil Bibby said it was “an embarrassment to Scotland that the SNP can’t even keep the trains running when the world’s eyes are upon us” and Scottish Tory transport spokesman Graham Simpson said: “This is major embarrassment for the SNP. Ministers should have resolved this dispute months ago. They are all missing the reality of the situation because as Chris Mitchell of the GMB Unions says –

“We were called Covid heroes and essential workers.

“This is when low-paid workers take a stand against Cosla and say enough is enough, because these heroes here deserve a pay rise.

“Stand with us, not against us.”

If we don’t take a stand now then we are going down a road that will actually kill off our aspirations for our families, even for independence, because the struggle will be to just survive and to thrive will become a distant dream as we see poverty increase while life expectancy decreases for the many who have the gall to be poor, we will then find ourselves in a modern Victorian Age where the work house is reintroduced and every gain made by our great grand parents to give us a better life will be lost due to our own cowardice.