FIFTEEN years of stagnant pay have left British workers £11,000 worse off a year, the Resolution Foundation says.

The calculation — based on what we would be earning had wages risen in line with trends prior to the bankers’ crash — is staggering. The median UK income was £33,000 last year — so a typical worker has lost out on a full third of their annual income.

Britain’s workers have been punished, and savagely, for a crisis caused by reckless speculation in the financial sector.

The punishment has been direct — in the form of the longest pay squeeze since the Napoleonic wars — and indirect, because the “austerity” drive that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties imposed on the country following the crash has had a catastrophic effect on public services.

It is, ultimately, responsible for the huge staffing vacancies and waiting lists dogging our NHS.

It’s the reason our schools are so under-resourced. It has damaged a huge range of other arms and agencies of the British state: from the legal system through the Environment Agency to the Health and Safety Executive and many, many more.

By contrast the banks which caused the crisis have not been punished. The TUC revealed last year that bankers’ bonuses had in fact doubled since the 2008 crash — and that before the decision to abolish the upper limit on bankers’ bonuses in Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget, a decision which his successor Jeremy Hunt has quietly upheld.

The working class has been made to pay. The political justification was a conjuring trick that blamed public spending for a crisis with its roots in the private sector, and when Tory ministers say public-sector pay rises are unfair on “the taxpayer” we should never forget who bailed out who.

The cost-of-living crisis is hitting Britain so hard because of the years of pay erosion beforehand: millions were already living on the edge when Covid reopening, war in Ukraine and opportunistic corporate profiteering drove inflation through the roof.

So our movement must set its sights on redress. The strike wave that has swept our nations should be about taking back what we are owed, reversing the long-term trend.

Strikes have forced ministers to the table in key public-sector disputes, including the giant health and education sectors.

But as Unite cautions over the 5 per cent offer now being put to members in the NHS, it remains a significant real-terms pay cut. 

Union negotiators must be realistic about what they can secure — and will be acutely aware of the cost to their members of prolonged strike action. At the same time, settlements on these terms only slow the rate at which wages are falling.

Keir Starmer accused Hunt during last week’s Budget debate of managing decline. He has yet to demonstrate the ambition to do anything else himself, but the key question for our movement must be how to force a change of course, one toward rising real-terms pay.

Directors and economists lament Britain’s low productivity — something the Tories tend to blame on workers being lazy, though we work some of the longest hours in Europe.

But that low productivity is tied again to the culture at the top. The investment strike by big business — and corporate executives who rake in obscene rewards regardless of the performance of the companies they run.

Only by framing the question in class terms can we resolve the crisis in workers’ favour. 

The class war on us has robbed us of a third of our pay over 15 years and decimated the services we rely on, while the proportion of national product taken in profits has risen and a select few laugh all the way to the bank.

We have to confront the latter to address the former. There is no route to raising pay without challenging capital.