INTOLERANCE has been to the fore this week amid a wave of strike action by rail, Post Office and airline workers.
This lamentable intolerance has not come from the trade unions or workers, whatever picture might have been painted by the Conservative Government.
Rather, it has come straight from Downing Street. Even by the standards of these intemperate times in the wake of the Brexit vote, the tone of the comments from Prime Minister Theresa May’s deputy official spokesman about the wave of industrial action across the UK this festive season was regrettably immoderate.
The assertion from Downing Street, in case you missed it, was that the strikes represented “contempt for ordinary people trying to go about their daily lives”.
What an astounding comment. Surely those hard-pressed workers who feel the need to take industrial action over pay and conditions are “ordinary people”.
Or is Mrs May now trying to concoct the notion of worker “elites”?
Worryingly, we have had some Conservative MPs call for new anti-strike laws. If the Conservatives are true to form, we can expect more of the same. It was not surprising at all to hear former Conservative Cabinet ministers Lord Heseltine and Lord Tebbit enter the debate in typically anti-trade union style.
We can also surely expect further industrial action in 2017. And for reasons that are entirely understandable.
As Bank of England Governor Mark Carney pointed out earlier this month, wages are lower in real terms than they were a decade ago. And the movement in real wages over this timeframe is the worst since the mid-19th century.
Mr Carney summed up the gravity of the situation well.
Delivering the Roscoe Lecture at Liverpool John Moores University on December 5, Mr Carney said: “Why...doesn’t it feel like the good old days? Because anxiety about the future has increased, because productivity hasn’t recovered, and, as a consequence of the latter, because real wages are below where they were a decade ago – something that no-one alive today has experienced before.”
He told his audience: “We meet today during the first lost decade since the 1860s.”
As if that were not bad enough, things look like they could get much worse, principally because of the UK electorate’s vote in June to leave the European Union.
Surely few are in any doubt that living standards are under severe pressure. The Conservatives’ welfare cuts have hammered the working poor and the unemployed and, across the UK, the budgets of millions of households are under pressure.
The Brexit vote is already exacerbating significantly the financial pressure on households.
The pound’s tumble in the wake of the Brexit vote is making imports more expensive. We are already seeing the effect on food and clothing prices. Meanwhile, the pound’s drop against the dollar has hiked the cost of petrol, and of technology, with the likes of Apple and Microsoft having raised their prices in the UK because of sterling’s weakness.
Annual UK consumer prices index inflation surged from 0.9 per cent in October to 1.2 per cent in November, official figures have shown this month. The rate is four times what it was in May, before the UK electorate decided to go down the Brexit route.
This will put even more strain on household budgets.
Experts forecast annual CPI inflation will surge well above the Bank of England’s two per cent target next year.
However, it seems unlikely that, as UK growth slows sharply next year and Brexit uncertainties rise still further, companies will be rushing to loosen the purse strings and offer pay rises that at least match the sharp increase in the cost of living.
Economists are projecting a rise in unemployment, and this unhappy backdrop will not do anything at all to boost hard-pressed workers’ bargaining power. This unpalatable combination of factors would seem likely to lead to further industrial action (as well as a dawning realisation for some of those who voted for Brexit that it has made them a lot worse off).
There remains much debate over the cause of the UK’s weak productivity growth.
Investment is crucial to raising productivity. And investment by businesses has consistently disappointed in recent years as the Conservatives’ massive corporation tax cuts have failed to produce any particularly meaningful increase in capital expenditure.
However, you also have to ask yourself whether the decade of misery on the pay front for workers might have had a demoralising impact for some.
It might also be worth asking whether we are taking proper advantage of the technology on offer.
Sometimes it seems that too much of management’s focus on technology is on using it to monitor the performance of their staff. In some sectors, this might mean employees have to waste time proving they are jumping through meaningless hoops, instead of getting on with the jobs they have always done.
Many successful companies seem to have grasped the crucial fact that they should look after their employees, financially, of course, but also in terms of ensuring staff are happy and motivated, with a good life-work balance, and feel valued.
Employers might argue they cannot afford big pay rises because of poor productivity growth.
However, they might also want to ask themselves whether pay rises might improve staff morale and boost productivity.
There will be few easy answers for workers or employers as we head into what seems certain to be a difficult 2017.
However, there is one simple truth. Workers considering industrial action are not showing “contempt for ordinary people”. They are ordinary people.
In many cases, these workers, and their trade unions, went to extraordinary lengths to work closely with often commendably flexible employers to help preserve jobs during the last recession.
These workers, who have seen their incomes remain under great pressure as the Conservative Government has failed time and again to deliver convincing economic growth, deserve respect and understanding, not contempt from politicians.
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