Britain Has Rediscovered the Workplace as a Battleground
Britain is being battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis. But millions of Brits now feel emboldened to challenge a social structure that expects them to live worse lives while working harder and harder for bosses who have never had it better.
Ground staff gather at a picket near Heathrow’s Terminal 2 on November 18, 2022 in London, England. Ground staff from the aviation service Menzies are staging a 72 hour walkout in protest of what the union describes as a “derisory” pay offer. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)
In Britain today, anyone asking a worker about the direction the country is headed will be unlikely to receive a printable answer.
Stumbling from crisis to crisis, the country is on its third prime minister of the year. Energy bills have skyrocketed by 96 percent since last winter, and rent has shot up by as much as 20 percent, while inflation — which currently stands at 12.3 percent — has been predicted to rise as high as 18 percent by the first few months of 2023.
This is happening in a country which was the first in Western Europe to register two hundred thousand deaths from the coronavirus and has already been subject to brutal austerity measures that have wrecked the social fabric. An analysis by the Trades Unions Congress (TUC, the British equivalent of the AFL-CIO) released earlier this year found that British workers earned sixty pounds (seventy US dollars) less per month in real wages in 2021 than at the start of the financial crisis in 2008 — the longest wage slump since the Napoleonic Era.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.