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As workers across the UK prepare for strike action over pay, it has emerged that 2022 will be the worst year for real wage growth in nearly half a century.
An analysis of official figures by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that real wages – the amount people earn in relation to their living costs – will fall by an average of £76 per month in 2022.
Key public sector workers are now £180 a month worse off in real terms than a year ago, it said.
That means workers have seen the steepest drop in real wages since 1977 and the second-worst on record since the end of World War II. It also explains why so many workers have gone on strike or are about to go on strike for a pay rise.
Strikes by postal workers, train and bus drivers, Border Force Agency staff, driving instructors, NHS workers, teachers and many others will cause major disruption across the UK in the coming days.
According to the TUC, the real pay of nurses has fallen by £1,800 over the last year, while the real pay of paramedics has fallen by £2,400. The nurses, who are due to go on strike on Thursday, are earning £5,000 less a year – in real terms – than they did in 2010. And for midwives and paramedics the figure rises to more than £6,000.
TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said the current wave of industrial action in Britain was the result of workers being “pushed to breaking point” by years of wage restraint. She also alleged that ministers were more interested in escalating disputes rather than resolving them.
“Family budgets have been cut by mounting bills and more than a decade of salary withholding. Conservatives have presided over the longest real wage squeeze in 200 years,” she said.
“The Tories’ failure to secure wages has left millions of families with a brutal cost of living crisis. It’s time to reward work – not wealth. We cannot be a country where the NHS and teaching staff have to use food banks, while City bankers are given unlimited bonuses.”
Amid rising household and other costs, workers face food inflation running at more than 12% and annual energy bills of more than £1,000 more than last year. Despite this, ministers are actively blocking pay offers by employers – in the case of the rail dispute – or refusing to intervene in others.
On Sunday, the foreign secretary, James Chaturai, rejected an offer by nursing unions to suspend a planned strike in exchange for pay talks. Nurses, whose salaries start at £27,000, have demanded a 17.6% pay rise, which has been dismissed as unfair by ministers who themselves earn more than £150,000 a year.
The union body said it was “nonsense” to claim that raising wages would increase inflation and that any serious plan to improve growth should include putting more money back into workers’ pockets.
A government spokesman said: “We are increasing the pay of millions of workers by raising the ‘National Living Wage’ to £10.42 an hour in April – an extra £1,600 a year for a full-time worker.
“On top of this, the energy price guarantee will save the average family around £700 this winter, while we have reversed the rise in National Insurance contributions and made changes to universal credit to help working families keep more of what they earn.
“It is important that we bear down on inflation, which is eating away at people’s wages, but we also recognize the important contribution that the public sector has made to our country, which is why we have offered two million workers the biggest pay rise in almost 20 years. . “
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