The United Kingdom has been experiencing a new round of massive walkouts since Thursday in transport, post and ports. A strike movement started this summer which is gaining momentum and coagulates around a central problem: the purchasing power of the British, who want wage increases.
"Are we heading for a general strike?" headlined the BBC on July 28. If the United Kingdom does not yet seem to have reached this stage, strikes have nevertheless multiplied in several sectors across the Channel since the beginning of the summer against galloping inflation.
The latest to date, workers at the port of Felixstowe – the largest cargo port in the east of England, which handles nearly four million containers a year – began an eight-day strike on Sunday August 21 to demand better wages in the face of record inflation. Crane operators, machine operators, dockers… Some 1,900 members of the powerful British union Unite have stopped work to demand wage increases. A first for more than thirty years, the last strike dating back to 1989, at the end of the Thatcher years.
And they are not the only ones: postal services, garbage collectors, lawyers, employees of the telecom operator BT or Amazon handlers have also walked out or plan to do so soon. Rail workers have been disrupting the operation of British transport (including the London Underground) since August 18. It is already the biggest rail strike movement – again since 1989. It could "go on indefinitely", warned the general secretary of the RMT union, Mick Lynch, with the walkouts by railway workers continuing by episodes since June to demand a salary increase adapted to the increase in the cost of living.
"It's a very hot summer on a social level," explains our correspondent in the United Kingdom, Bénédicte Paviot. "Existing strikes in several sectors will undoubtedly increase, this is the prevailing feeling here."
“What is historic in this movement are the sectors on strike”, notes for his part to FranceInfo Marc Lenormand, lecturer at Paul Valéry University in English studies and British civilization, specialist in British social movements. "What is special today is to see private sectors, sometimes industrial, on strike, which has not been the case depending on the sector for twenty, thirty, even forty years."
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