Civil servants are the latest group of exasperated workers voting to strike rather than accept deep cuts in their living standards, in what appears likely to be the biggest wave of industrial action in the UK for decades. The backdrop to this latest vote is a dispiriting combination of long-term pay restraint, the challenges of working in overstretched public services, and the long shadow of the pandemic. Many of the workers backing strike action are those who kept public services running through the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 – perhaps fuelling their resentment at the prospect of real-terms pay cuts. With inflation running to double digits, it hasn’t helped that private sector pay growth has risen sharply in recent months, to above 6%, underlining the contrast with the straitened budgets of public sector employers. The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) only managed to get 100,000 of the 150,000 civil servants it balloted over the threshold to supporting action – but it was pleased with that result, given the strict legal constraints on public sector strikes, requiring 50% turnout in each individual workplace. Public sector workers have repeatedly borne the brunt of spending cuts over the past 12 years. George Osborne (now back in Downing Street as an adviser) imposed a pay freeze from 2011 to 2013, followed by a 1% pay cap for the four years after that. The cap was lifted in 2018 – only to be reimposed in 2020, as the cost of battling the Covid pandemic strained the public finances. Back in the summer, prompted by recommendations from the various independent pay review bodies, government departments made offers of about 5% for many public sector workers – 4% for nurses for example, and 5% to 9% for teachers, depending on seniority and region. Senior civil servants were offered 2%. But double-digit inflation means that this amounts to a significant real-terms cut – for a group of workers whose living standards have been consistently squeezed for more than a decade. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) pointed out before Kwasi Kwarteng’s catastrophic mini-budget that even these rises would be difficult to fund within existing departmental budgets – suggesting that mass layoffs, or deep spending cuts elsewhere, might be the result. There have been some early signs that the Rishi Sunak’s government is taking a less abrasive approach towards trade unions than its immediate predecessors. The health secretary’s “my door is open” approach to the nurses’ unions, for example, is in marked contrast to Grant Shapps performatively writing to Keir Starmer to urge him to stop the rail strikes, while refusing to meet workers’ representatives. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s plan for slashing an arbitrary 91,000 civil service jobs has also been abandoned. But whatever the mood music, the Treasury orthodoxy of austerity is now firmly in the ascendancy, after Liz Truss’s mauling at the hands of the markets. There is likely to be little appetite from Jeremy Hunt’s cost-cutting Treasury for easing the squeeze on public sector salaries – so a series of bruising confrontations appears all but inevitable. The question ministers will have to ask themselves is who voters are likely to blame as they watch teachers, nurses, university lecturers, civil servants, midwives – the list goes on – striking in their hundreds of thousands in the coming months. When rail workers first went on strike back in the summer, ministers relentlessly sought to blame the resulting disruption on greedy union “barons”, who bankroll the Labour party (though the RMT is not affiliated to Labour).
It is unclear whether that PR strategy worked – but it appears likely to have diminishing effectiveness as the army of workers taking industrial action continues to grow. Even if the public don’t warm to the cause of the workers disrupting their daily lives, the wave of industrial action about to break over a fragile economy may simply add to the mounting sense of a country in chaos.