As workers across Britain prepared for strike action over pay and conditions, it has emerged that 2022 has been the worst year for real wage growth in nearly half a century.

Analysis of official statistics by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found real wages – the amount people earned in relation to their cost of living – fell by an average of £76 a month in 2022 due to pay not keeping pace with inflation, and that key public sector workers are now £180 a month worse off in real terms than they were a year ago.

It means workers have seen the sharpest fall in real wages since 1977 and the second worst since the end of the second world war.

Due to the inevitable discontent generated by the latest economic crisis, numerous sectors of workers – with many lower paid workers finding they have to supplement their wage by attending food banks – embarked on a further wave of strikes, picking up the momentum from those in October. This time, with an increasing sense of the different sectors converging, it was the nurses, ambulance workers, border staff, rail workers and postal workers, and driving instructors among others, who were out.

On Thursday 15th December, nurses at hospitals across Britain went out on strike, the biggest in their history, with over 100,000 participating. Already they’d won the valuable support of pharmacists, who declared their intention not to be used as surrogate nurses when the action took place. Ambulance workers went out on 21st December. Border staff at airports and ports struck from 23rd December to Boxing Day, Monday 26th December, and on the 28th to New Year’s Eve. Rail workers and Royal Mail staff also held more strikes over the holidays.

The government’s dark threats to introduce (even more) stringent anti-strike legislation did not materialized, but they are merely biding their time. The army was called in, along with sections of the civil service, to act as blacklegs (in other words, scabs). Several hundred soldiers received a week’s training, which was supposed to equip them to cover for the striking border staff at ports and airports over Christmas. Apparently only 5 days training was been deemed sufficient for a further contingent of soldiers to cover for ambulance drivers during their action on the 21st!

But getting the army involved was not without risks.

The English daily newspaper, The Guardian (12/12/22) commented: “With about 1,000 [army] personnel due to miss Christmas breaks as they fill in for ambulance crews and border staff, military sources and retired senior officers warned about the potential impact on troops who have also seen declining real-terms pay”. In the paper’s ‘Analysis’ column, it is further noted that “Last year’s pay award to the army rank-and-file was 3.75%, which is well below the 11.1% rate of inflation – and soldiers cannot join a union to fight for better terms and conditions”.

So, soldiers were expected to undermine strikers at the very same time as they are being affected by a fall in their own real wages, and by declining working conditions, themselves, and precisely at a time when ‘public opinion’ is broadly on the side of striking workers, because, as most people reason, what choice do the strikers really have when they have only one economic weapon to wield: withdrawing their labor? Who in their right mind would opt to continue to be a punching bag for the capitalists instead?

The fact is, morale is not great among soldiers either, and they might not relish being part of the “military assistance to civilian authorities”, or Maca arrangements, as this blacklegging arrangement is called. They missed their third Christmas in a row, after the military was called in to help with the COVID crisis and other deployments. Quoting from The Guardian again: “‘Maca used to be the last resort Now it’s the go-to. Bad government planning equals soldiers missing Christmas’, said one military source, reflecting what they said were repeated grumblings they had heard from junior ranks”.

Lord Dannatt, former head of the army, further warned that soldiers being forced to miss Christmas with families could damage morale and result in some of them quitting. “Soldiers might decide they’ve had enough of bailing the government out of the muddles it gets itself into. They might think, ‘I joined to be a soldier, not a strike-breaker’”.

And one sector of strikers who the designated soldiers were ordered to undermine are those in the health sector, who the army, having worked alongside them during the pandemic, might view as making a righteous protest; a sector, moreover, which has clearly won great sympathy from ‘the general public’, and whose ranks were severely decimated during the pandemic by the cold hand of death – and affected far more than among many other sectors due to their direct and ongoing exposure to coronavirus infection, especially in the period before vaccines were developed. The very sector, in fact, who we were invited, in order to celebrate their bravery, their heroic and self-sacrificing service to the community, to make weekly appearances on our doorsteps to take part in a community clapping session; which sat very uncomfortably beside the government’s repeated rejection of even their most modest requests for wage increases. No wonder some of the placards on display during the strike featured the slogan “clapping doesn’t pay bills”.

Nurses were asking for a 19% pay increase (5% above inflation, to make up for previous declines in the real value of their wages). The derisory offer made by the government, 4.5%, which the nurses union, the Royal College of Nursing, rejected, was set by the official NHS pay review body last year. This body has been quite clear that this figure was set before many of the factors that triggered the massive inflation that has devalued pay. In fact, just before the strike went ahead the nurses’ union said it might call off the strike if the government was prepared to intervene and enter discussions, but when the health minister point blank refused to discuss any deviation from the pay award, the strike went ahead, and dates were set for late December and January as well.

But keeping up with inflation is not the only grievance of the nurses. On the picket line nurses also declared their anger about the withdrawal of the government grants that used to pay for their training. Now nurses joining the profession are saddled with debt from the very start, and due to less people joining the profession (partly as a result of this and partly due to Brexit) there is a constant shortage of staff and a consequent expectation that existing staff will constantly ‘fill the gap’.

Compounding the pressure on existing staff, the current wages and conditions are so bad in the health sector that a mass exodus is also taking place. Over the years various governments have been pillaging the health system in Britain by means of its so called ‘Private Finance Initiatives’ or PFIs, by means of which, similarly to in the education and transport sectors, to name just two, it is parceled out to private businesses and finance companies in order to generate as much profit as possible, leaving many NHS trusts with huge strains on their budgets just to pay the year on year interest on borrowing for new buildings, etc, let alone – failed – the costs of administering to people’s health needs and meeting staffing costs. The result of all this put together is an absolute shambles, with staff shortages so extreme that the latest scandal is agency doctors being paid up to £5,200 a shift! Freedom of information requests to every NHS trust showed they paid £3bn to agencies for staff during 2021-22, that is, 20% higher than the previous year. On top of this, trusts spent £6bn on so-called bank staff, in which NHS employees are paid to carry out extra shifts.

The point has now arrived where all the jaded old arguments about strike action being incompatible with ‘economic reality’ no longer convince because people simply don’t care whether it is or not! It has clear to broad masses of people that there is something wrong with the present ‘economic reality’, with ‘the system’ itself, even though many find it difficult to articulate exactly what.

Workers’ wage demands do indeed clash with the requirements of capital, as do their demands for improved conditions. From which (barring the various attempts to ‘reform’ it – a completely failed experiment), there is only one conclusion to draw: either the system remains as it is, and suits the capitalists but not the workers, or the capitalist system is replaced by a new system, that doesn’t suit the capitalists but does suit the workers (that is, communism – the real movement for communism – and not the State capitalist regimes that have masqueraded under that name for the past century.

For this to happen, and indeed also for the working class to be able to attain its immediate economic goals, albeit only temporarily, it needs to fight alongside other sectors of workers, and it needs to do this locally, nationally, and internationally, and work in conjunction with its own class party.

Its party, however, is certainly not the Labour Party, a party which proudly boasts that it is ‘the party of business’; which sings monarchist anthems at its congresses, and which will most likely be voted into power at the next election, when it will seek (and fail) to make austerity measures – and capitalism itself – more palatable to workers. No. The party of the working class is the International Communist Party.

We refer to capitalism as ‘the corpse that still walks’; and what is for certain is that it needs to be firmly nailed into its coffin and buried as quickly as possible!

But capitalism’s grave diggers, Marx’s evocative description of the working class, are up to the task, and ‘the logic’ of every strike ultimately leads in that direction. It will be the working class, collectively, by means of its most determined and conscious elements, who will have to deal the death blow. And the way it prepares itself for that, in the time before the final reckoning, will be by continuing on its way, fighting for its own needs rather than for those of the capitalists; who supposedly ‘give us work’ whereas it is us, after having been forcefully chained to ‘their’ means of production because we need to work to survive, who provide them with the capital they use to exploit us!

Eventually the incompatibility between the two classes will become too glaring, too incompatible with the needs of the vast majority, and the battle lines will become more clearly drawn; when the sheer pointlessness of eking out an existence just in order to generate profits for a progressively smaller clique of entitled, socially-useless, but filthy rich wheeler-dealers, will be seen for what it is.

The new strike wave that has just commenced in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, following a brief pause, is now underway, and during the battles to come, every participant is sure to learn valuable lessons, and in particular that in solidarity there lies strength. But with the government of the capitalists planning to attack the working class as a whole, with its threatened anti-strike legislation, we can only hope that the momentum of the current, and coming, strike actions will be enough to frustrate these plans, and indeed, push back some of the anti-union legislation that is already in place. Such a move would give the class far more room for maneuver, by loosening the current anti-strike legislation that ties the hands of trade union actions, and rendering it less effective.