TODAY 115,000 postal workers will take their second day of action in the biggest strike of the summer. Some 40,000 BT Group workers, NUJ members at Reach, Unite council workers in Scotland, staff at the University of Dundee, refuse workers at Newham Council, GMB leisure workers in Wigan and UCU members at Richmond-upon-Thames College and barristers will also be on the picket lines.
This paper stands 100 per cent with those striking for better pay — for a greater share of the wealth they create, the majority of which ends up in the pockets of fat cat shareholders.
These strikes and the hot summer of action of which they are a part, are a response not just to growing inflation and a massive cost-of-living crisis but to growing inequality and poverty in our society. With energy prices reaching record highs, many workers are looking at an autumn in which they will be forced to choose between eating and heating their homes, between clothing their children and keeping them warm.
With one in three children in Britain living in poverty, it is not just the present that is affected but future generations. Schools face a massive funding crisis due to government funding cuts, which have left them unable to pay spiralling energy costs without cutting staff and leaving children in overcrowded classes. Those same children will be coming into school from homes that may not be heated, often not having eaten anything.
As NEU president Daniel Kebede said yesterday, “There have never been rising educational outcomes for young people whilst there have been rising levels of poverty.”
The myth that education is an opportunity to escape from your circumstances or can alone correct society’s ills is a nonsense. Education reflects society as much as it has the power to change it — and a society which won’t invest in education and in reducing child poverty is failing a generation.
That is one major reason why teachers will be joining the ranks of those balloting for strike action this September. Both the NEU and the NASUWT have pledged to ballot their members for action over the pay cut proposed by government.
Not only are their members expected to accept an estimated 7 per cent pay cut, unions say, but the fact this is unfunded will mean further cuts to school budgets long term, leading to job losses and a decline in quality of education for students already failed by the system.
But it is impossible to tackle child poverty without tackling the poverty of their parents. That means raising wages, it means capping prices and it means dealing with the outrageous profits the super-rich make at the expense of working people.
Ultimately it means ending a system based on exploitation in which poverty is a necessary tool to keep wages down and profits high.
As a movement, it is our job to link these struggles together, to get out to those picket lines and to show striking workers that they are not fighting alone.
Every Morning Star reader should be engaging with campaigns like strikemap.co.uk which links together workers in struggle and builds the bonds of solidarity that strengthen our movement.
As we see the confidence and militancy of the movement growing, we must also build its unity, tying together workplace and community campaigns and building a new generation of militant shop stewards and community activists to lead this struggle in the future.
In the end, we must raise our sights from simply winning on pay, our immediate priority, to smashing the system that holds us in poverty.
