Why are over 500,000 workers striking in the UK?

Over half a million workers in the United Kingdom walked off their jobs on February 1st in one of the largest labor strikes in the history of the British Isles. 

Strikers are demanding better pay and better working conditions as inflation and historical wage discrepancies have crippled many public service workers over the last decade. 

“The divide between public and private-sector pay has become especially sharp over the past year as consumer price inflation reached double digits,” wrote Sachin Ravikumar of Reuters. 

Wages in the UK’s private sector have increased roughly 7.1% over the last three months according to Ravikumar while public sector wages have only risen by about 3.3% over that same period. 

“Many of the particularly disruptive industrial disputes are in partly or fully public sectors,” Ravikumar added. 

This might explain why the strikers are mostly composed of teachers, nurses, civil servants, transportation workers, border officials, and university staff. 

Britain is facing its worst inflation crisis in over four decades according to Ravikumar with numbers hitting around 10% in recent months, a figure that has “outpaced public pay offers, and caused a cost-of-living crisis.”

While the world may be surprised by the sudden striking of thousands of British workers, experts knew this would be the most likely outcome after years of pay erosion. 

“The labor strikes in Britain are years in the making,” wrote Vox reporter Ellen Ioanes. 

"The strikes emerge from the background of a decade-plus austerity program and social services cuts that have hit the poor and middle-income classes particularly hard," Ioanes added.

Since the Great Recession, the United Kingdom has been helmed by successive Conservative-led governments that have implemented various austerity measures that crippled public worker wage growth in the British Isles.

Brexit and the pandemic-related lockdowns made matters worse, and the inflation crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created the perfect conditions for one of the worst cost-of-living crises the UK has ever experienced. 

It was the current cost-of-living crisis that became the “tipping point” for most workers according to a politics and international relations professor from the University of Sheffield. 

“It’s quite difficult to disentangle all of the different factors,” Professor Liam Stanly told Ellen Ioanes, “because the UK’s been quite dysfunctional for quite a long time.”

Unions representing different striking factions are demanding different things but all most all are requesting pay raises that will beat or at least match inflation. 

The effects of the strikes on daily life in the UK have been almost immediate. Tens of thousands of schools have been partially closed according to Jenni Reid of CNBC while transportation and healthcare services have been seriously disrupted.