British workers are on course to suffer two decades of lost wage growth, the head of the UK’s trade union movement will say on Tuesday, while warning the government not to attack the right to strike.
Frances O’Grady, speaking in Brighton at the annual gathering of the Trades Union Congress, will accuse the Conservatives of overseeing the “longest squeeze on real wages since Napoleonic times”, with living standards unlikely on current trends to regain their 2008 level until 2028.
Based on official data and recent Bank of England forecasts for inflation and wage growth, the union body calculates the average worker has lost a total of £24,000 in real terms since 2008 as a result of pay growth lagging inflation, and is set to lose a further £4,000 during the next three years.
“Under the Conservatives, working people have got poorer, while shareholders have got richer . . . If ministers and employers keep hammering pay packets at the same rate, UK workers are on course to suffer two decades — 20 years — of lost living standards,” O’Grady will say in her last speech to the TUC Congress before stepping down as general secretary at the end of the year.
Her address to union members comes against a backdrop of worsening industrial relations across the UK, with strikes already disrupting rail networks, ports and postal services, and big walkouts threatened in many parts of the public sector.
Unison, the UK’s biggest union, has warned that the largest strike action by NHS workers since the early 1980s could hit health services this winter, as it prepares to ballot more than 400,000 members across the country. Ballots are already under way at unions representing nurses and ambulance workers.
The National Education Union will this week start balloting members at sixth-form colleges and has announced dates for separate ballots of schoolteachers and support staff.
Meanwhile, the RMT transport union has confirmed it will ask rail workers to back a further six months of industrial action, with no sign of a breakthrough in its dispute with Network Rail and train operators.
O’Grady will tell the congress that this wave of discontent reflects the fact that workers “have been pushed to breaking point”, while asserting that the Conservative party cannot be trusted to run the economy.
Unions have drawn little comfort from new chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s move to reverse parts of the “mini”-Budget to restore confidence in the UK’s fiscal position, given his signal that there will be fresh cuts to public spending and a revision of the household energy support scheme from next April.
O’Grady will also warn that unions will fight any attempt by ministers to curb the right to strike.
One measure in the government’s “mini”-Budget that has not yet been scrapped is the pledge of legislation requiring unions to put pay offers to a member vote, along with an obligation for transport companies to maintain a minimum level of service during industrial action.
The TUC has already launched legal action challenging regulations passed earlier in the summer, which allow agency workers to fill in for striking workers.
O’Grady will describe the clampdown as “a cynical effort to distract from the mess the government has caused”, saying: “If ministers cross the road to pick a fight with us, then we will meet them halfway . . . We will see you in court.”
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