UK STRIKES:BRITISH PRIME minister David Cameron has appealed to 750,000 state employees, including teachers, civil servants and college lecturers, to abandon plans for a national strike tomorrow called to demonstrate opposition to plans to reform public sector pensions.
The 24-hour strike action called by four of the biggest trades union will see thousands of schools closed in England and Wales, along with closure of or disruption to tax centres, customs checkpoints, courts and job centres. Even driving tests will be abandoned for the day.
The action – a preliminary to a series of even bigger strikes in the autumn – is a significant gamble for the trade union movement, which has lost millions of private sector members in recent decades, since the famous “Winter of Discontent” in 1979.
Meanwhile, the UK Border Agency has warned airlines to consider suggesting to passengers to abandon plans to fly on Thursday because of the immigration delays that will affect flights into Heathrow and other UK airports.
Saying reform to pensions is “essential”, Mr Cameron accepted that half of all public sector workers get less than £6,000-a-year when they retire, but they pay on average 1.5-3 per cent for their pension while a private worker can pay up to 20 per cent, if they have a pension at all.
“We can’t go on as we are. In fact, about half of public service pensioners receive less than £6,000 a year. No. The reason we can’t go on as we are is because as the baby boomers retire – and thankfully live longer – the pension system is in danger of going broke,” he declared.
In 1970, a civil servant could expect to live for 20 years after retirement. Today, the expectation is 30 years. Pension payments to public workers in 2009 came to £32 billion – one-third higher, even after including inflation, than the figure from 10 years before.
Contributions will be increased from next April but not from those earning less than £15,000, while existing entitlements will be ring-fenced. Most importantly, he said, public pensions will remain defined-benefit schemes.
“This means every public sector worker will receive a guaranteed amount in retirement – not an uncertain amount based on the value of an investment fund like most people in the private sector,” the prime minister told the Local Government Association.
Three-thousand schools in England and Wales will be completely closed if the strike goes ahead, while 2,000 more will be affected. Headmasters have appeared to dismiss a call by education secretary Michael Gove that parents should be drafted in to keep them open.
Dismissing suggestions that teachers would face the wrath of parents for closing schools, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Christine Blower, said she believed Mr Cameron would “very surprised” by the numbers that will go on strike.
She disputed his claims that public pensions are unaffordable: “They can’t come to us and say the contributions need to go up because they haven’t got the basic information. The National Audit Office has said that teachers’ pensions are fair, justifiable and sustainable,” she said.
Unite official Len McCluskey, who will soon take over as leader of the UK’s biggest union, said the Conservatives are “back to the old Thatcherite rhetoric again”, attacking the “very social architecture that has held us together for 65 years”.
Meanwhile, Labour leader Ed Miliband continued to declare that the strike is “a mistake” as he urged trade unionists not to strike, but said the Conservative/Liberal Democrats alliance had “mishandled” negotiations.
