This week, the government announced that it is considering legislation on strikes that in my view is so anti-union it would make Thatcher blush.
Intended, at least according to Rishi Sunak, to ensure a balance between the right to strike and the right of the public to avoid disruption, the bill could introduce a new ‘minimum service level’ to sectors such as public healthcare and education.
In other words, regardless of whether individual teachers or train drivers or nurses are strike-supporting union members or not, their employers could have the right to force them to work to maintain a ‘minimum level’ of service and keep things running as close to normal as possible.
The problem is, this is entirely self-defeating, and risks pushing sectors that are already badly struggling further into a state of crisis.
On the surface, this may sound reasonable to many people. Who isn’t concerned about the impact of strikes on lifeline services such as the NHS, which is already on its knees?
But here’s the thing. Unions across the board make it abundantly clear that striking is a last resort.
Strikes are never a trigger reaction: they always come after months of attempts at negotiation, in this case with a government who consistently fails to pay workers fairly.
Taking industrial action isn’t easy – public service workers don’t find it simple to walk out, and not just because they lose pay.
Plus, minimum service legislations only seek to demonise professions like teaching and nurses who have the care of the public at their core.
Unions already have contingency plans in place to ensure that their entire sector doesn’t grind to an abrupt halt on strike days.
Nurses who have dedicated their entire lives to the care of their patients aren’t suddenly going to leave those same patients to die on a strike day.
For example, the Royal College of Nursing made it clear during December strikes that maternity and emergency services would be unaffected.
Likewise, teachers like me aren’t going to simply let vulnerable students go without the security, food, warmth and shelter that a school can provide for children who need it most.
The government knows this full well, and is using the public’s fear of being left without crucial services to try and pit key workers against the rest of the nation.
This is where we cannot let the Conservatives, with their long-held anti-union sentiments, dominate the conversation around industrial action for their own political gain.
Let us not forget: throughout the pandemic, who was it who kept the country afloat?
Without the invaluable and irreplaceable work of public sector workers all across the nation, our society would have ceased to function, working in difficult and even dangerous conditions.
They did that in the spirit of public service to teach our children, drive our trains and collect our rubbish – to deliver our babies and keep our streets clean and bring medical care to our homes when we are most ill.
Whether in a pandemic or not, during a normal service day or a strike day – we must always ask ourselves: Without these vital workers, where would we be?
We take their services for granted because they have always been there – at least for most of our lifetimes – but behind these lifeline services are real people with families to feed and bills to pay.
Real people whose wages have stagnated, failing to rise in line with inflation or even scratch the service on the cost of living. According to Nuffield Trust, typical salaries for nurses alone have fallen 5.9% in real terms compared to 2010/11 levels.
The more we take workers in these vital sectors for granted, the more we risk they won’t be there for us.
One in 9 nurses in England left the profession between 2021 and 2022.
This problem is echoed elsewhere, too. A third of teachers who qualified in the last decade are reported to have left the profession.
It is an unfortunate but unavoidable reality that, by design, strikes are intended to disrupt the everyday running of the country – it’s the only way the true value of these key workers and the irreplaceable contribution they make can be highlighted.
Unless we see what happens when we don’t have paramedics to call in an emergency or trains running to get us to work, then we can never truly understand how important it is to pay them fairly
And, crucially, the government will be unable comprehend the reality of what will happen if nurses, teachers and paramedics continue to leave their professions in droves due to poor conditions and meagre pay, until they see firsthand what happens when we don’t have their labour to rely on, to keep the cogs of the country and the economy churning.
In times like these, when more and more people are languishing on the breadline and facing the brutal reality of poverty, we need to think of the bigger picture.
Yes, on strike days, your plans might be disrupted. But it benefits us all to have health, education and transport systems that function smoothly and are run by well-paid, experienced, supported staff who are able to do their job better because they aren’t worrying about how they’ll feed their children that day.
This is not just about public-sector workers, private companies, or even the unions. This is about us all.
And if you really want to be angry at someone over that empty classroom, that absent ambulance, or that late train, aim your anger at the government who could have stopped these strikes before they happened.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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