Tube drivers have been offered a four-day week by Sadiq Khan’s Transport for London in return for calling off strikes. Add that to their 43 days holiday a year and £70k salary.
Nurses have voted to reject the Government's pay rise offer of 5.5% with an announcement timed to coincide with Chancellor Rachel Reeves addressing the Labour party conference.
Keir Starmer's claim in his Rose Garden speech that the Tories left the economy "worse than we imagined" is belied by strong recent growth figures and the public availability of economic data, says Seb Charleton.
Labour is accused of being in thrall to the unions after ministers accepted over £480,000 in donations, before handing out inflation-busting public sector pay rises.
After Labour's capitulation to the pay demands of train drivers (15% pay rise) and junior doctors (22%), other public sector unions are threatening to strike unless they get big pay rises too. Who could've predicted that?
Civil servants at the ONS, Britain’s official statistics body, have threatened to go on strike after being asked to work in the office for two days a week.
Striking doctors are being warned that the NHS will start formally collecting evidence of the harm to patients caused by their refusal to help struggling hospitals.
With salaries for headteachers in British state schools of up to £156,000 a year, only heads in Luxembourg earn more, according to figures from the Organisation for Economic and Co-operation and Development. Starting salaries of £61,000 also trump all but a handful of nations. Which begs the question: Why have members of the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) decided to join the three other teaching unions in calling for strikes? Do they want even more money? The Sunday Times has more. All four unions have rejected the government’s latest pay offer of a £1,000 one-off payment for 2022/23 on top of an earlier pay rise of 5.4% and an average 4.5% pay rise for staff in England in 2023/23. Teachers in Scotland and Wales have already accepted pay offers of up to 14.6%. Unions want their pay offers fully funded by new money from the Treasury, not taken from existing school budgets, which they say means there is less money to run the schools. They claim that just 0.5% of the pay deal they were offered is funded by additional money from the Treasury. So far strike action has shut or partially closed about half of all state schools, but if the three main teaching unions and head teachers walked out on the same day this would cause much wider ...
It is likely that some patients will be harmed as a result of the coming strike by junior doctors and some may well die – this is several orders of magnitude more significant than not being able to get on a train.
In a departure from his normally upbeat, things-are-getting-better column at the beginning of a new year, Dan Hannan now thinks of himself as a “rational pessimist” and says things will get worse in 2023.
