Half A Million Workers to Strike on Britain’s Budget Day

Teachers, junior doctors, civil servants and workers on the London Underground will join picket lines, with rallies and marches planned near Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament, Bloomberg reported.

The capital’s Tube subway trains will be all but shut because of a dispute over reforms to pensions and working conditions, some schools will be closed and hospitals will be disrupted as workers coordinate their industrial action.

The protests – mainly over pay – pile pressure on Hunt to loosen the Treasury’s purse strings as double-digit inflation erodes earnings and plunges households into a cost-of-living squeeze.

“When the Chancellor leaves Downing Street to go to Parliament to deliver the budget, he will see picket lines outside the Cabinet Office and various government departments that are on strike,” said Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union. “It isn’t responsible for people who work for you to have to use food banks and skip meals.”

But Hunt and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have said that generous public sector pay deals would stoke inflation even further, prolonging the economic hit to workers.

“We want to work with unions to agree fair and reasonable pay increases,” the Prime Minister’s spokesman Jamie Davies told reporters on Tuesday. “We want to sit down with the unions,” he said, adding that strikes had to be suspended before any discussions could take place.

More than half of Britain’s parents could be affected by closed schools, according to the Office for National Statistics, with many reporting that they will have to work fewer hours.

Almost 50,000 junior doctors from the British Medical Association and HCSA unions will complete the final leg of a 72-hour walkout that has added to pressures on the National Health Service, which has been struggling to cut waiting times.

“We can’t go on like this,” said Julian Hartley, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents the health service’s trusts. “The knock-on effects of a three-day strike will be felt for a long time to come.”

Civil servants, joined for the first time by staff at HM Revenue & Customs, will hold their biggest strike yet with 133,000 people walking out.

Passengers landing in British airports could be affected with passport officers striking again, although previous walkouts have not caused significant disruption.

Still, ministers are hopeful of progress after health unions including the Royal College of Nursing suspended strikes in order to resume pay talks.

Harriett Baldwin, the chair of the Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee, cautioned against giving public sector workers pay increases in line with inflation.

“Then you get into a wage-price spiral,” she told Sky News. “It gets much harder to get inflation back down again.”