Workers in the UK are experiencing the longest pay squeeze in more than 200 years. They are earning on average £900 less a year in real terms than they were before the 2008 financial crisis, and the Resolution Foundation has forecast average wages are not set to return to 2008 levels until 2027.
But public sector workers have suffered the worst. TUC analysis shows that nurses, on average, are today paid £5,000 a year less in real terms than in 2010. For paramedics and midwives, that figure is £6,000 a year. Police officers and prison service officers have seen their real pay drop by 13% and 10.4% respectively since 2009. The pay of secondary school staff and primary school staff has fallen by 9.7% and 11.8%. And as inflation has spiked and energy prices have spiralled, it is public sector workers who are facing the deepest real pay cuts, with average nominal pay offers below the private sector average. This is the context in which many of them – from nurses to teachers to Border Force guards – will be going on strike in the coming weeks. Many of these workers are people who continued going out to work during the pandemic, putting their health and that of their families at risk to maintain the provision of essential services. Yet successive Conservative chancellors have effectively achieved cuts to public services over the last decade by forcing public sector workers to bear real-term pay cuts. The NHS is being cross-subsidised by docking nurses’ pay. Teachers are being paid less to keep spending on schools as low as possible.
For many lower-paid public sector workers, this is reaching a crunch point. First is their personal finances: data from the Trussell Trust shows that nurses are among those being forced to rely on food banks to feed their families. A quarter of NHS hospital trusts say they have set up such banks to help their staff get through the winter.
Second are the acute staff shortages being experienced in many public sector professions. One in 10 hospital posts is vacant, which damages patient safety and quality of services, and increases the pressure on other members of staff. Teacher vacancies are at their highest rate since national data was first collected in 2010. This is both as a result of experienced health and education staff leaving their professions due to burnout and low pay, and issues with recruitment as a result of low starting salaries. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has argued, low and falling public sector pay relative to the private sector is a huge recruitment and retention challenge. It is materially affecting the quality of hospitals and schools.
Third, in some sectors, such as rail, sub-inflation pay rises are also being made conditional on “modernisation”, which usually implies compulsory redundancies in a world where there are hardly any resources for people to draw on to retrain; this often means accepting being out of work or in much lower-paid work for the long term.
This is why many groups of public sector workers are balloting for and planning strike action that will cost them pay in the short term. The pay offers on the table represent further real-pay cuts and are not sustainable. They will “bake in” increased hardship among workers like nurses, teachers and paramedics, and further declines in the quality of public services.
The government has responded by arguing that many of the pay deals have been recommended by independent pay review bodies and that it cannot therefore interfere with them. This is disingenuous: it is the government itself that sets their remit and ministers have diverged from their recommendations before. Rishi Sunak and cabinet ministers are wrongly claiming it would cost an extra £1,000 per household to keep public sector pay flat in real terms, taking into account inflation of 11%.
Rather than meet unions and strike a deal, the government is threatening to introduce further legislation to curb the power of public sector workers to strike. The 2016 Trade Union Act has already introduced stringent conditions on strikes that eroded the power of workers to get a fair pay settlement. New proposals include legislating for minimum service levels in “critical” sectors, banning strikes by different unions in the same workplace within a set period, requiring fresh ballots for each bout of strike action and requiring super-majorities of union members to vote to support strike action.
Legal advice from Michael Ford KC, for the TUC, says many of these proposals would put the UK at risk of breaching its obligations under international law. It is anyway inconceivable that new legislative curbs could be passed by parliament and implemented in the next few weeks even if they did not put the government at risk of significant legal challenge.
The government must get round the table and negotiate with the unions to avoid the significant disruption that will be caused by strikes in the next few weeks. Low-paid public sector workers deserve not to be left materially worse off after a decade of real-term pay cuts. Trying to shift the blame to “union bosses” and fob off the public with vague promises to clamp down further on the power of nurses and teachers to strike will not cut it when voters can see with their own eyes the impact poor staffing levels are having in areas such as health and education. It is the government, not hard-pressed workers, who will be held accountable.
