‘People are much angrier now’: why Britain is going on strike
Charlotte Larbi likes working as a Network Rail customer services assistant even if it means the 28-year-old single parent has to clean up the “sick and piss” of drunks at Liverpool Street station from time to time. “They say passengers are still down from before the pandemic, but it seems pretty busy to me. Yesterday we counted 100 cases of MIPs and VIPs [mobility and visually impaired persons] who needed helping on and off trains. And I spent an hour with a passenger who was having a seizure until a relative turned up with the right medication because an ambulance couldn’t come out.”
Larbi believes she’s worth more than the £24,500 she earns a year: a basic rate of £21,500 (with no increase last year) plus £3,000 London weighting – an enhancement less than half what independent estimates say would meet higher living costs in the capital. She had been adding to her £11.81 hourly pay for a 35-hour week with overtime, but says: “I’m in a catch-22. I want to give my son a work ethic and show that you can live without being on benefits. But if I do that, I’m not present for him.” The public have been “pretty good” while she’s picketing, but sometimes people tell her: “I haven’t had a pay rise and I’m not on strike.” “And my response is: ‘Well you should be.’” With everyone “going backwards” because of inflation at 10.1% she says: “I think we’ve started something here.”
That “something” is a wave of strikes, threatened or actual, in transport, BT, Royal Mail, councils, the NHS, a wide range of private companies and nowFelixstowe docks and even the criminal bar. After three relatively strike-free decades, it’s a generation – before Larbi was born – since union power was last at the centre of political debate.
Yet despite retro
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