More than 1 million public sector workers went on strike in Britain yesterday over pay and spending cuts by the government imposed as part of its austerity program, trade unions said.
The strike, the biggest since British Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government took power in 2010, involves a wide range of workers from teachers and civil servants to street cleaners and park attendants.
A string of protests is planned around Britain, including one in central London which will conclude with a rally in Trafalgar Square.
As part of a push to balance public finances, Cameron’s coalition government froze public sector salaries in 2010 for two years and has since limited pay rises to 1 percent a year.
Unions say this means that salaries cannot keep up with rising living costs and that “enough is enough.”
“This is why today’s strikers deserve public support,” Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O’Grady said.
“They are saying that ordinary workers should not be locked out of the recovery and that we should all get a fair share as the economy grows again,” O’Grady said.
Britain’s economy emerged from recession in 2009 following a fierce downturn rooted in the global financial crisis and has since been gaining strength.
Despite the strikes, the government said it expected “the majority of hard-working public servants to turn up for work across the country.”
It insists the strikes are not merited and says “pay restraint” was a necessary part of austerity measures imposed after the recession which followed the 2008 financial crisis.
“We went through a deep, deep recession, we had a huge budget deficit and we needed pay restraint,” Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude told BBC radio.
“Public sector pay has increased by more than in the private sector since the recession... if we had raised pay more, there would have been more jobs lost,” Maude said.
Cameron has attacked the low turnout in the union ballots which led to the strikes and vowed to introduce legislation to ensure a minimum number of people take part in a ballot for it to be legal.
“How can it possibly be right for our children’s education to be disrupted by trade unions acting in that way? It is time to legislate and it will be in the Conservative manifesto,” he told the House of Commons on Wednesday.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of