The British suddenly are so strike-happy

Around 40,000 junior doctors in the United Kingdom began a three-day walkout on Monday that is expected to be even more disruptive to the country’s healthcare system than recent industrial action by nurses and ambulance staff. A wave of strikes has disrupted life in Britain as workers react to decades-high inflation that reached 11.1% in October 2022.

In recent months, public transport staff, teachers, postal workers, and border staff have all walked off the job to demand higher pay and better working conditions. Until a short while ago, many Britons would sneer at French or German workers, believing that their continental counterparts were “always on strike,” and that such walkouts were bad for business. But as the UK emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of Brexit began to kick in, the country’s economic malaise was plain to see.

Years of austerity following the 2008 financial crisis weakened public services to the point that they are often struggling to provide basic levels of support. The National Health Service (NHS) is buckling under the strain of an aging and increasingly unhealthy population as well as a huge backlog of treatments that were delayed during the pandemic.

Striking workers complain of an obsession by successive Conservative governments with efficiencies that they say has led to years of underinvestment and left them with unreasonable workloads and falling real incomes. Worst still, the full economic effects of Brexit have yet to be felt. “Over the last 12 years, Britain has experienced the longest phase of real wage stagnation since the early 19th century,” Scott Lavery, a lecturer in politics at the University of Sheffield, told DW. “Since the financial crisis, we’ve seen sustained real wage decline.”

Real incomes — after accounting for inflation — have fallen 5.1% since December 2007, according to UK government figures. This coupled with the inflation crisis, which Lavery said was “eroding living standards dramatically,” has left British workers struggling to stay afloat. French workers have also hit the streets recently over soaring inflation. But their main priority is to oppose planned reforms to the country’s generous pension system that allows retirement at 62. German unions, meanwhile, have succeeded in negotiating several inflation-busting pay deals, including one with Deutsche Post last weekend that favours the lower paid and even includes trainees. “In France, there is a sense of defending an existing standard of living, while in the UK, people feel that whatever used to exist has gone,” Sam Moorecroft, vice president of the Trades Union Council in the city of Sheffield, told DW.

Moorecroft believes the seeds of today’s misery were sown in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher took office as prime minister and proceeded to crush the trade union movement. She blamed generous pro-union laws introduced by the Labour Party for allowing widespread strike action to bring the country to its knees.

“When Thatcher defeated the miners’ in the 1980s, many believed that the trade union movement had been completely defeated. But now, there is a move to return to the same level of union participation as the past,” Moorecroft added.

That ambition is yet to be seen in the statistics. Union membership peaked in 1979 and by 2021 had more than halved to 23.1% of the workforce or 6.44 million people. Union members tend to be over 35 and almost half have been working for the same company for a decade or more, but that is changing.