HALF a million workers will walk out on Wednesday in the biggest strike day to rock Britain in over a decade.
And if the number out on this particular day doesn’t match the pensions strike of November 30 2011 — the last action on a comparable scale — the momentum of the strike wave is far greater.
Education, transport and Civil Service strikes tomorrow are followed up by nurses and paramedics walking out on Monday, and many further strike days are planned.
Industrial action covers more sectors of the economy than it did then. It is not confined to the public sector, though each passing week sees it reach further across public services.
The firefighters — who have lost a staggering fifth of their workforce since 2010, one of so many indictments of a Tory austerity offensive that has wrecked services, undermined essential infrastructure and endangered lives — are the latest to swell the surging throng.
The mood of the public and the labour movement is also different. To be sure, public-sector workers were up in arms at the Tory-Lib Dem attack on their pensions in 2011.
But those were the early days of austerity, and Conservative propaganda about Labour having maxed out the nation’s credit card cut deep (not least because Labour connived at it).
Now there is no denying the ruinous impact of cuts. Services are on their knees. Workers have been on the sharp end of “pay restraint” for 12 long years; they can feel how much poorer they have become.
The sacrifices of the Covid lockdowns demonstrated the real worth of the jobs key workers do, while the steady stream of revelations around partying and corruption at the top has exploded the “all in it together” myth.
Nor can we ignore the impact of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn years in ending the conspiracy of silence around alternatives: public ownership and redistribution are back in the public consciousness as options, even if ones ministers and shadow ministers keep disowning.
That’s helped shape the combative attitude of many trade union leaders, who know they cannot risk these strikes petering out as the 2011 dispute did.
It also explains enormous popular support for the action being taken, especially when — as in hospitals and schools — striking workplaces form core parts of the community.
National Education Union joint general secretary Kevin Courtney has stressed the “social weight” of teachers — with 337,000 balloted teachers corresponding to well over 10 million parents, grandparents or guardians in regular contact with them.
These people are not hostile to teachers striking. A Mumsnet poll found 62 per cent of parents supportive. There is tremendous power in this popular feeling if it can be harnessed to the labour movement’s cause.
That does not just entail rooting for the strikes themselves on picket lines — though the support shown for pickets has been inspirational.
People whose instinct is to back striking workers — and the evidence suggests that is currently most people — need to be alerted to the extraordinary threat to our liberties that is the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, a Bill that will conscript workers and force them across picket lines on pain of summary dismissal. A Bill intended to outlaw effective strike action entirely.
The rallies and demos that take place on Wednesday, and will keep taking place as the strike wave builds, must also be rallies for trade union rights.
These must become a talking point in communities just as much as pay and cuts — because it is only through union action that we can defend ourselves from those.
The Tories’ Bill has passed its third reading in Parliament. It can only be beaten on the streets.
Every Tory politician, in every corner of the country, can be made to fear for their political future if they don’t back down — and any incoming government must know a strong and united labour movement is expecting immediate and total repeal.
