2012 will be remembered for the London Olympics, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and if one union leader is to be believed, a year of strikes.
According to Brian Sutton from the union GMB, some private sector employees are starting to consider industrial action. Confrontations between management and union representatives at Balfour Beatty, General Electric, Unilever and BMW’s Oxford Mini plant are expected in the early months of this year.
It’s also possible that public sector workers will stage more strikes over pensions. Although the government has made a new offer, there is no guarantee that union executives will accept it. Furthermore, because the government has granted concessions on pensions, employees in the public sector feel more confident that industrial action could also be an effective way to stop redundancies and pay freezes.
There has been a pay freeze in local government for the past two years, and government spending cuts decreed that the public sector has to shed a total of 710,000 jobs. Around 50% of the total has already been achieved, made up chiefly by people who volunteered for redundancy. However, this means the public sector will now have to resort to compulsory redundancies and that is when union members might start fighting back.
Mr Sutton explained that 2011 was hard, but this year will be much harder. The unions received a real boost on November 30th with the public sector pensions strike. He said he hoped the government would now be more realistic when it came to negotiating with the unions and appreciate that the public sector is not just there for the taking.
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