MOMENTUM is building for a truly massive strike on July 10 after yesterday’s news that local government workers in Britain’s biggest public-sector union are walking out.

These workers — who, as Unison general secretary Dave Prentis says, are mostly low-paid women — have rejected an insulting 1 per cent pay offer which lags behind inflation after three years of frozen wages.

The “offer” is a shocking snub to people who carry out vital work cleaning our streets, looking after the elderly and feeding our schoolchildren. People whose exhausting labour keeps our communities alive but who earn barely more than the legal minimum.

It is hard to say who in Britain is “baring the brunt” of austerity, since the Con-Dem coalition’s list of victims is so extensive — the disabled, the unemployed, the young — but women in the public sector are certainly at the sharp end of government cuts.

Not only has the Treasury put the squeeze on local authorities, resulting in hundreds of thousands of job losses, but the decimation of public services has a disproportionate impact on women as they are more likely to require access to them — they are much more likely to be primary carers, either as single parents or caring for elderly or disabled relatives, and they are also more likely to be victims of domestic or sexual violence, meaning cuts to legal aid have hit them hard.

Those who have managed to retain jobs in local government are increasingly victims of an outsourcing frenzy which sees jobs transferred to privateers hell-bent on attacking wages and conditions in order to increase their profits.

Combined with the ever-growing use of zero-hours contracts by unscrupulous employers — already rife in the cleaning sector, among others — we should hardly be surprised that local government workers are now ready to fight for a pay rise which reflects the value of the essential work they do.

The Local Government Association (LGA) itself acknowledged yesterday that “local government staff have worked wonders,” but pleads poverty due to government cuts and then attempts to blackmail staff into strike-breaking by claiming those who take industrial action will lose pay for nothing, since it intends to maintain its bone-headed refusal to negotiate.

Certainly it takes courage for workers on the breadline to go on strike, but yesterday’s ballot result proves Unison’s members in the sector have fire in their bellies. 

They are well aware that only withdrawing their labour will force their employers to treat them with respect. And employers will always claim their position is final until confronted with the power of organised labour.

Following on from the NUT’s announcement of a July 10 walkout last week, with other unions engaged in balloting their members on action for the same day, this strike has the potential to do more than change the LGA’s mind.

A huge walkout by millions of public-sector workers next month will throw down the gauntlet to the axe-wielders in Whitehall and warn them that the labour movement is coming for them.

It would also be a powerful demonstration of the scale of public anger at attacks on our jobs, pay, pensions and services, putting pressure on a timorous and vacillating Labour Party leadership to show some leadership — or get out of the way.