United Kingdom: The English “summer of discontent” that Europe watches out of the corner of its eye | International

On the first day of the UK railways strike, which brought the country to a near standstill, the presenter of good morning britainlaunched point-blank at his interviewee, Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT union, planted in front of one of the information pickets, an allegedly provocative question: “Are you or are you not a Marxist, as some Conservative MPs say?”

– “Richard, sometimes you come out with the greatest stupidity,” replied Lynch.

Richard Madeley had also fallen into the cliché, like much of the media, of trying to compare the current social unrest that is germinating in the United Kingdom – and in much of Europe – with the historic “winter of discontent” at the end of of 1978 and the beginning of 1979. The British unions, with a power that today would be unimaginable, then put the country in check. They also demanded wage increases in those days, in the public and private sectors, and the Government of James Callaghan also resisted, for fear of an inflation spiral. The result was the arrival of Margaret Thatcher and her neoliberal program, which cracked the working class organizations.

Memory is lazy, and it is easier to rebaptize current problems with the Shakespearean formula, the “summer of discontent”, than to delve into the concrete reasons for this particular concern.

“It is very likely that we are heading towards a mini-summer of discontent, because the reality is that the trade union centers are much less powerful than in the seventies,” Alan Manning, professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. “We will see strikes above all in those sectors where trade unionism is still strong: in the railways, in the airlines… in the public sector in general. The private economy no longer has the capacity to deliver an immediate blow like a strike,” says Manning.

To understand what is happening, and the potential for chaos that it entails, we must focus on an extraordinary phenomenon and two specific sectors. The phenomenon is a global pandemic that turned the world upside down, at the end of which many things changed forever. The two sectors are the airline industry and the public services sector.

The former laid off about 2.3 million workers during the long hibernation of the coronavirus, according to the Air Transport Action Group, which brings together hundreds of companies in the airline industry. When social restrictions were lifted and people were able to travel again, what experts have called “revenge tourism” took place, which has completely exceeded expectations. Everyone rushed to retrieve lost travel plans. Many of the people who worked in maintenance, as airport personnel or in other types of services in the sector, have resisted returning to their jobs. And those who remain are not willing to put up with an overload of work with low and frozen wages for many years, and runaway inflation.

“With inflation further fueled by soaring energy and food costs, the poorest households are bearing the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis, with their own inflation rate already in the double digits. ”, explains Jack Lesley, economist senior of the British think tank Resolution Foundation.

In the UK, the CPI figure is already at 9.1%, with the Bank of England forecasting it to hit 11% by the end of the year. In the euro zone, in mid-May, average inflation was 8.1%.

Throughout the spring, labor shortages and strikes have caused major traffic jams and serious disruptions at airports in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Frankfurt. For the summer season, the 700 British Airways workers at London’s Heathrow airport have called a series of strikes that will considerably alter the vacation plans of many Britons. Spanish Ryanair staff have also announced several strike days for the end of June. The low-cost company EasyJet has already canceled hundreds of flights so far this year, unable to respond to reservations that, however, it had no qualms about selling. Heathrow authorities last week had to ask some airlines to suspend their flights because a large part of the checked bags were piling up, without distributing. Again, lack of staff.

against inflation

Last Monday’s strike in Belgium revealed the discontent that exists in a country where the rate of union membership is well above that of other European countries and the mobilization capacity of the centrals is contrasted. The strike was accompanied by a demonstration that brought together more than 70,000 people. They asked that the legal limits that exist in the country be eliminated to avoid salary increases above neighboring countries and, thus, not lose competitiveness. In other words, what is behind the protest is the loss of purchasing power in a country where inflation has reached 13.4%.

In the Netherlands, the week has been full of strikes and protests. To the mobilizations of the farmers for the demand to reduce the levels of nitrogen, the protests have been added for the salaries of the cleaning workers in airports, in public transport and health personnel. Once again, the prices pour gasoline on these responses, an IPC in May at 10.2%, put wages and their negotiations on the ropes, reports Manuel V. Gomez from Brussels.

The end of the applause

Thousands of people, in London, Madrid, Paris or Rome, came out to their balconies or to the doors of their houses to applaud the essential workers who were still at the foot of the canyon during the pandemic. Most were part of the public sector, and they hope that the affection of those days translates now into support for their requests for a salary increase. Galloping inflation has cornered them.

At the gates of Victoria Station, in London, an informational picket of the RMT (Railways, Maritime and Transport) union, which has managed to get 40,000 workers from the public company NetworkRail and other 13 private operators financed with the budgets support the strike, speak and allow themselves to be photographed in exchange for not giving names. There are things that do not change, such as distrust in these situations. “We all have to feed our families, and many of our colleagues need to take advantage of the 700 or 800 pounds of universal credit [entre 800 y mil euros de la prestación social principal del Gobierno británico] to make ends meet”, explains one of the picket workers. “And I guarantee you that 99% of the people who pass by on the street have shown their support for us,” he says.

“I do believe that a real summer of discontent is coming, at least in the UK. This government is currently a group of zombie men and women, incapable of governing, in which everything revolves around Boris Johnson and his lies, and their need to survive,” says Guy Standing, an economist at the School of Economic Studies. Orientals and Africans of the University of London, creator of the term “precariat” and one of the intellectuals who has most agitated the ideas of the political left in recent years. “What is happening is similar to the pre-Thatcher era in two respects: it is a period in which the old economic model has collapsed, and in which the government is incapable of governing. It limits itself to reacting to events, and attacking the unions, to please the extreme right. The most focused conservative deputies sense that it is a mere political tactic that hides the truth”, denounces Standing.

Teachers, nurses, postal service employees, municipal officials, and even public defenders have begun to organize to vote whether or not to strike. “They have had wages frozen, or cut, for a decade, and they are feeling it more and more in their pockets,” Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, the UK’s main trade union confederation, has warned the Johnson government.

The British prime minister, cornered by his own internal problems, is reluctant to give in to pressure from the public sector, for fear of aggravating inflationary pressure, but also because it is tempting, as happened with Brexit, to look for an enemy ―the unions , in this case, that allows him to squeeze a climate of confrontation to his advantage. As on other occasions, the United Kingdom will be the field of experiment to respond to a much more global problem. And it will be possible to verify if the “summer of discontent” ends up affecting all of Europe, or the storm worsens on the island and does not make the leap to the continent.

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