Would you ever go on strike?
With large trade unions talking of strike action ahead, would you ever join the picket line?
Strikes are back at the top of the news agenda, with talk of co-ordinated strikes between two of the nation’s biggest trade unions.
The latest protests will once again surround the issue of public sector pay, in particular the pay freeze the Government is implementing.
Unison and GMB have said that their members will strike if there is no change in the situation, while the TUC will also be tackling the issue at its annual Congress which takes place this week.
Just last week the National Union of Teachers voted to strike over the “erosion” of their pay and working conditions. It may attempt to strike in unison with the NASUWT teachers’ union, which has already voted in favour of industrial action.
With the prospect of so much industrial action ahead, have you ever been on strike? What was the issue? Would you ever consider going on strike in the future? Does industrial action and protest make any difference?
Let us know your thoughts in the comment box below.
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Comments
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Striking in the Public Sector is a form of blackmail. In the Private Sector, if your firm prices itself out of the market and you lose your job, you have only yourself to blame. War never has a happy ending for everybody involved.
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I love how people still think that we have a public sector. Look at the memberships of the unions in question. Teachers - employed by schools, which are businesses. Nursing and NHS staff - primary care trust, which is a business. Binmen and council bureacrats and dinnerladies and...- most of these services are provided by private companies. The public sector now consists of a list of jobs and a bloke to hand out the contracts. Since the company is about making money for shareholders. the game becomes 'how little can we do with how few people' The public sector put tax money in and got services out. The privatised sector puts tax money in and gets profits out. As for striking - those few who are employees can, but the run the risk of being fired - illegal, but that's hardly going to stop the likes of any of the employers we're talking about. It does seem odd to me that the going rate for teaching is less than the minimum threshold to pay back the Student Loan you need for the degree to get in. I'm told nursing pay in graduate positions is similar.
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I don't think that I could reasonably include firefighters or paramedics in my comments about finding alternative employment or betterment. I don't know how we could also protect those in other healthcare professions who deserve special treatment - but we also do have too many theorists and pen-pushers in the public sector who couldn't do a decent day's work to save their lives and anyone who is admitting that they don't have transferable skills is really stating their true worth to the rest of us. Just to remind people that we didn't just have a supposedy Socialist opposition, we had them in government and the path they led us on was knee-deep in sh*t, as has always been the case in the past. Odd that I 'understand nothing about business' - I'm running a company and have been self employed for 30 years, bringing products from sketch to retail sales and training people to make them.
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18 September 2012