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Working people are being ‘pushed to breaking point’

Latest labour figures show rise in unemployment and real weekly wages are down £19 per week

AUSTERITY-HIT working people are being “pushed to breaking point,” the TUC warned today after official figures showed rising unemployment and take-home pay down £19 a week amid 40-year high double-digit inflation.

The fact that the damning figures coincide with the biggest strike wave to sweep Britain since the 1980s comes as “little surprise,” the union body’s head Paul Nowak said, as he demanded Tory ministers act now to resolve national pay disputes and “put money in people’s pockets.”

Most economists had expected the jobless rate to remain unchanged in the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, which cover the first three months of the year, but it rose from 3.8 to 3.9 per cent.

The number of vacancies slumped by 55,000 compared to the same quarter last year amid “uncertainty across industries,” the ONS said, marking the 10th fall in a row and the lowest level in nearly two years. 

The total of those off work due to long-term sickness hit a new record high of a whopping 2.55 million, due in part to mounting NHS backlogs and the poorly understood impact of long Covid.

And despite another increase in average regular wage growth to 6.7 per cent, stubbornly high inflation meant take-home pay, excluding bonuses, plunged 3.1 per cent as the longest squeeze on real-terms salaries since the Napoleonic wars continues with no end in sight.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt conceded that families and businesses are struggling with rising prices and finding staff but claimed it is “encouraging that the unemployment rate remains historically low.”

But Mr Nowak said: “Workers have lost more than £1,000 from their pay over the last year.

“Real wages remain below where they were before the 2008 financial crash, and the already 15-year pay squeeze is set to last another three years, until 2026.

“It is little surprise that workers are having to take strike action to defend their living standards — they have been pushed to breaking point.”

In England, the NHS, schools, train operators and other sectors are bracing themselves for more walkouts, while in Wales nurses are due to take further industrial action after rejecting the latest salary offer from devolved Labour ministers.

And in Scotland, despite a deal to end teaching strikes, junior doctors represented by the British Medical Association have just joined their colleagues south of the border in dispute. 

Mr Nowak urged ministers to “focus on resolving all of the current pay disputes.

“And they must act now to put money in people’s pockets — starting with giving our public-sector workers a real pay rise, boosting the minimum wage to £15 per hour and ending their attack on the right to strike in the strikes Bill.”

Referring to the new record-high 1.13m people on widely condemned zero-hours contracts, he called for the “outdated and exploitative practice to be banned as it doesn’t belong in modern Britain.”

“The Conservatives promised to make Britain the best country in the world to work in,” Mr Nowak said.

“Instead, they have presided over a huge explosion in insecure jobs.”

Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth repeated his charge that the Tories are a “drag on Britain’s economy.”

The Leicester South MP claimed that his party, which has an average lead of about 15 per cent in national opinion polls, has “ambitious reform plans to open up jobcentres, support over-50s back into work and provide specialist job support for those with ill-health.”

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