Tin-eared Liz Truss is obsessed by tax cuts, so why shouldn’t NHS nurses strike?

theguardian.com:

Stop all the strikes, delay the nurses’ ballot, abandon this year’s pivotal TUC annual conference in mourning for the Queen. You might note this respect for the late monarch from workers facing gigantic pay cuts was not matched by the London Stock Exchange, which has missed not a nanosecond of trading in shares, including among those companies profiteering from high energy prices. Imagine the outrage at lese-majesty from the Mail and other papers had Mick Lynch done the same.

Before long, strikes will resume among ever more unlikely “militants”; Daily Express journalists, criminal barristers and postal workers will be striking. So will refuse collectors, firefighters, Felixstowe dockworkers and a gathering storm of other workers who cannot absorb huge pay cuts on top of the lowest wage growth in the G7.

So far, public opinion backs them, as pollster James Frayne of Public First recently told Politico. “There’s a lot of public sympathy for strikers. Most people think, well, if I was facing a 10 or 20 percent pay cut, and was in a job where I could strike … I would do it,” he said. The pay of public sector workers has been hit hard by freezes and cuts, so it has fallen well behind the private sector. People know that unions speak for them. If the minority who belong to unions are successful, it will pull up everyone’s pay – in an economy that currently has more than one million vacancies.

It’s impossible to know how far sympathy for strikes will stretch if they are seriously disruptive, but Liz Truss’s ill-judged threats of even tougher anti-strike laws, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s bonfire of working rights or the likes of MP Tobias Ellwood calling rail workers “Putin’s friend” will probably only stir up more support.

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