Thursday, August 18, British trains were on strike and traffic was severely disrupted. The next day, the London Underground was at a standstill. Two days later, the trains were again blocked. On Sunday, it was the turn of dockworkers at the port of Felixstowe in eastern England to launch an eight-day work stoppage. Monday, August 22, anger also took hold of lawyers, who voted by a very large majority to strengthen the strike movement they launched in April. In Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, after almost a week of work stoppages by garbage collectors, garbage is piling up.
Almost every day, the United Kingdom is confronted with a new movement of exasperation from employees. “Summer of Discontent”, as it has been nicknamed, started in June and tends to harden. It is now the biggest wave of strikes for thirty years, even if it remains for the moment far from “Winter of Discontent” of 1979, which had immobilized everything.
That being said, in a country that has hardly seen any social movements since the 1990s, there is no major demonstration or real coordination of actions. In front of the stations, a few dozen demonstrators are sometimes gathered, politely brandishing a handful of signs. On Monday, in Felixstowe, the kingdom’s largest container port, less than a hundred people in pink or red fluorescent vests made an appearance on the parched lawns near their place of work.
Inflation shock
The lack of habit vis-à-vis strikes – in Felixstowe, it had not happened for thirty years – makes all the more pregnant the generalized movement which seems to take hold of the country. “In the port, the employees are really not militants, underlines Robert Morton, representative of the union Unite for the transport sector. But they just can’t let their wages be ravaged by inflation. »
Each walkout has its specificities, but all come together on one point: the shock of inflation, at 10.1% in July across the Channel (or even 12.3% depending on the indicators), is violent. Over one year, the average remuneration, including bonuses, had increased by 5.1% in the second quarter, representing a decline in purchasing power of 3%. You have to go back to the financial crisis of 2008 to find such a pronounced fall. This is probably just the beginning: the Bank of England expects inflation to reach 13% in the coming months. As for analysts at Citi, an American bank, they even expect 18% in January 2023.
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