NURSES returning to the picket lines on Wednesday are fighting for the future of the health service.
They can take courage from the huge vote by English teachers to strike revealed on Monday — following extensive strike action across Scottish schools.
The Tories have dug their heels in. The message being sent by union after union beating arbitrary participation thresholds, which were introduced precisely to stop strikes, is that workforces are seething — yet ministers continue to claim action is down to unions being unreasonable.
Instead of listening to the voices of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of workers, they see the strike votes as a case for introducing even more anti-strike laws, ones so severe they would outlaw effective action entirely and put workers who exercise the basic right to withdraw their labour at risk of summary dismissal.
The Tories are determined to force pay down. This explains their active role in preventing settlements in sectors like rail, when in private-sector workplaces less subject to ministerial interference big pay awards are being won by unions such as Unite.
To defeat their intransigence we need to continuously raise political pressure on decision-makers. And spreading the strikes across as many sectors as possible is the most effective way to do that.
The National Education Union’s ballot result is such good news because healthcare and education are two core pillars of public service in Britain, services nearly every family relies on.
Hospitals and schools can act as focal points for community mobilisation behind strikers and their demands. Unions should be clear that there will be consequences for local politicians who are not prepared to support striking workers.
Presently, Conservative councils and MPs are under less pressure than they ought to be because of a lack of political support for strikes from opposition parties, while there will be little comfort for nurses or teachers in a Labour election win if this does not deliver on pay and investment.
The National Education Union is particularly well placed to level this pressure because it has done it before.
One of its predecessor unions, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), pioneered the Stand Up for Education strategy mobilising communities against education funding cuts, and its School Cuts website — which allowed people to check how much their local school was due to lose under Conservative plans — was found to have shifted 750,000 votes to Labour in the 2017 election.
The NUT was not a Labour affiliate and it was not campaigning for Labour. It simply effectively communicated what the consequences of different policies on education would be, prompting huge numbers to change their vote.
Labour MPs should be in no doubt that such a strategy will not deliver Labour votes if there is little to no difference in their offer from that of the Tories.
Like nurses, teachers are sick of years of underfunding and real-terms pay cuts, contributing to unreasonable workloads.
With every ballot victory and even head teachers now voting on strike action, any pretence that industrial action is the work of an anti-social minority has become utterly implausible — the entire workforce is increasingly united around labour movement demands.
Ballooning fortunes for the super-rich are the other side of the coin. They make a nonsense of Labour claims that the country cannot afford major increases in public spending. They show that workers who “refuse to be poor any more” are really refusing to be deliberately impoverished.
Rising poverty is the direct consequence of the transfer of wealth upwards. Workers’ pay needs to rise and the money available to public services needs to increase: and we can pay for this by taxing profits and the rich.
The huge support we have seen on picket lines across 2022 must be ramped up even higher in 2023 to make it clear that the peoples of Britain will not accept anything less.
