The United Kingdom has known since Thursday a new wave of massive strikes in transport, post, ports, the largest strike movement in decades that has continued since the beginning of summer in the face of inflation that devours British purchasing power.
In full school vacations, only one train in five circulated this Thursday in the country. The RMT, TSSA and Unite unions called on tens of thousands of rail workers to stop working, and Network Rail, the public network administrator, urged users to avoid this mode of transport.
Annual inflation at 10.1% in July
However, passengers who defied the order were sympathetic, while the general price increases, which exceeded 10% last month on the Canal for the first time in more than 40 years, devalue the wages of Britons.
“I’m going to be very late, that’s for sure,” Usama Sarda, a thirty-something dentist who attends a wedding in the north of the country from London’s Euston station, admits to AFP. But the strike “is correct, because inflation is currently at an all-time high,” she said.
A strike on a scale unprecedented since 1989
Railway workers “are people like me,” adds Greg Ellwood, a 26-year-old consultant crossed at the Leeds station in the north of England. “We’re all just trying to make a living and get ahead. I have all the sympathy in the world for them,” he says.
The biggest rail strike movement since 1989, at the end of the Thatcher years, could “go on indefinitely”, RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch warns on Thursday, with stoppages by rail workers continuing in episodes since June, for lack of salary agreement.
Source: BFM TV
