Cost of living crisis
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For instance (from bbc website):
Has anyone managed to get big pay rises?
A number of disputes have been resolved this year, with some workers being awarded pay rises of 10% or more.
Criminal barristers in England and Wales accepted a 15% pay rise in October, after a strike which began in June.
Refuse workers in Eastbourne, negotiated a deal worth over 11% in January after going on strike.
Train drivers in Scotland agreed a 5% pay deal in June.
2000 bus drivers in North London won an 11% pay deal after threatening a strike.
480 bus drivers in Kent won a pay deal worth nearly 14% after six days of strike action.
In July BA staff at Heathrow accepted a pay deal worth 13% after threatening to strike.It’s a bit of trick to call them ‘pay rises’ though! I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these still represented a real terms pay cut when rises in the cost of living are subtracted.
Would be nice if the “Money Saving Expert” Martin Lewis advised people to join and be active in their trades union!!
Let’s face it getting a a 15% pay rise is better that getting £10 back from your bank for changing accounts!
Mick Lynch was in Ealing, London, yesterday evening so I went to hear him. He expounded his plan for a “new workers movement” based on the trade unions but bringing in identity groups and climate change activists. It is to be a broad church (he was as dismissive of the Trotskyist paper sellers at the door as he was sceptical about the Labour Party). The strategy seems to be to built up this movement and that will bring the Labour Party to take it and its demands into account.
He said that he and some other union leaders are trying to get the TUC to coordinate action on a single day of all unions in dispute with their employers or the government. In effect, a stealth general strike. Why not? It might work. If you don’t test what the labour market will bear, you will never know. But of course it would be defensive trade union action.
Although none of the speakers (he wasn’t the only one) thought much of the Labour Party, the enemy was seen as “the Tories” and “the Establishment”. One of the speakers, from the teachers’ union, called them “bastards”. He also claimed, to widespread applause, that austerity was a political choice not an economic necessity, implying that it could be avoided if there was a different government.
But could it? If a Labour government is elected it will have to preside over the operation of the capitalist economy and prioritise profits and profit-making, including limiting spending on education, health and other public services let alone not paying public sector too much. Then he can call them “bastards” instead of realising that capitalism cannot offer anything to the wage-working class.
The problem is not the Tories, it’s capitalism.
Interesting refutation of the price/wage spiral myth, from Thatcher’s favourite economist:
Will Dont Pay be calling this a “victory” and calling off their 1 December “strike”:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/20446961/energy-bills-capped-april-autumn-budget/amp/
The fight goes on. 256,735 people have now pledged to strike on December 1st.
Fair enough but you said that the “strike” was being called because the Sunak government had said it was to end the energy price cap from April next year (though they had they were going to replace it with something targetted on just the poorest).
They have extended it, for everyone not just the poorest, but have raised the cap by £500 to £3000 until April 2024.
I am not a Don’t Pay strategist but I would have thought that would undermine to some extent potential support for the “strike”. When you go on a proper strike you don’t necessarily expect to get all you initially say you want.
Anyway, we will see what happens on 1 December. Do it if you want to. I wouldn’t want to stop you or anyone else, even though I can’t see how it can achieve much.
“Do it if you want to. I wouldn’t want to stop you or anyone else, even though I can’t see how it can achieve much.”
Thanks – that’s very magnanimous of you!
There’s more than an even chance it’ll achieve more than you guys have in 118 years.
What exactly is it that you want to achieve? Is it to get the government to do more to reduce the amount of money you personally have to pay for light and heating (to what it was in April this year)? If it’s that and you think you have a 50/50 chance of getting it then it’s you who are living in cloud cuckoo land.
The British people ‘just got a lot poorer’, says IFS thinktank
“In a separate assessment, the Resolution Foundation said the outlook for living standards was “truly grim”. The weak forecast for pay and high inflation, means that wages “will not return to their 2008 level until 2027”.
Had wages grown at the same rate as before the great financial crisis in 2008, they would be £15,000 a year higher. There has been a “19-year pay downturn” the thinktank said.”
also this
next-two-years-will-be-challenging-says-chancellor-as-disposable-incomes-head-for-biggest-fall-on-recordThey call it “Don’t Pay”
But that’s bollocks, what they should really call themselves:
“We’ll pay, just not as much as you want us to”
They describe their movement thus:
Don’t Pay is a grassroots movement demanding a fair price for energy for everyone.
Yet can’t see the irony of their description.
If any movement should describe themselves as “Don’t Pay” is us.
Twas the Great Baaaard who sai…no it wasn’t, it was Oscar Wilde. And what he said was: …a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him…As for the virtuous poor…one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.
Sixty six pounds to be precise.
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