Strike. Photo: Public Domain
Strike. Photo: Public Domain

What we all feel, as we try to make the money stretch to cover the bills, has been proven true in the latest official stats. Real pay is falling at the fastest rate on record.

But workers are fighting back!

The RMT’s national rail strikes lit a fire in the bellies of workers everywhere. We’ve known we were struggling, but now we also see what we can do about it. Join a union and fight back!

Now the rail strikes are swelling with train drivers in Aslef and rail staff in TSSA taking action too.

CWU members in BT are embarking on a national strike and Royal Mail workers have delivered a massive vote for action.

Bin and bus workers, factory workers, university and college staff and even barristers are taking action.

Now hundreds of thousands of public sector workers are getting ready to join the strike wave. Teachers and support staff, local government workers and civil service workers are all getting ready to ballot in the autumn.  The Fire Brigades Union has also rejected an insulting 2% pay offer.

The growing strike wave is rattling the nerves of the rich bosses and their political friends.

Feeling the pressure, the Tory government has been forced to announce a pay ‘rise’ for 2.5 million public sector workers, whose pay had been frozen for a decade. The austerity mantra of ‘we’re all in this together’ actually meant losses of 20% and more in real terms pay for public sector workers, while the rich got considerably richer.

But with RPI inflation currently at 11.7%, the pay ‘offers’ the Tories have announced are still pay cuts!

Whoever wins the Tory leadership election, this divided but vicious government of the rich must go. Boris Johnson going won’t change anything much. Let’s build this movement to kick out all the Tories.

But as Sir Keir Starmer and his lackeys have made abundantly clear, replacing the Tories with Starmer’s Labour won’t mean striking workers have a party on their side. If we want a party to give a political voice to the fight for a pay rise – as well as £15-an-hour minimum wage, an end to zero-hour contracts, to build council houses and fully fund services, and all the other policies we need to really tackle the cost of living – workers have to fight for that too. We need a new mass party of the working class. That can fight to take the wealth off the bloated super-rich, democratically nationalise rail, mail, energy and more, and campaign for socialist policies for the benefit of working-class people, not the rich.