Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: In a further headache to United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s administration, teachers in Wales and England on Monday announced they would take strike action from February 1. Already, across the country rail workers, nurses, and those of other professions are staging industrial action.
According to UK’s National Education Union, said that the first strike would be on February 1. The teachers’ strike would coincide with the industrial action of as many as 100,000 public sector workers. These coordinated strikes could become one of the biggest industrial actions for decades.
As a result of these strikes, a total of 23,400 schools in Wales and England will be affected while teachers in Scotland are already holding similar strikes.
Pressure is being piled on Sunak to make an attempt to resolve pay disputes with workers who have been striking for many months. Workers seeking better pay number in the hundreds of thousands. Workers from numerous sectors are striking as the rate of inflation is hovering above 10 percent.
Industrial action seeks UK govt to correct real-term pay cuts
In light of this, Britain largest education union, the NEU, which has around 500,000, has revealed that for its members the government has offered a 5 percent pay increase. This, in their point of view, would amount to a pay cut.
The union added that many teachers have left the profession due to low pay.
Read Also: Scotland’s Primary Schools Shut as Teachers Strike
The general secretaries of NEU, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, in a joint statement, stated the intention was to get historic real-term pay cuts corrected instead of seeking a pay rise.
The government responded by saying that a big salary increase would make the inflation problem even worse.
