Britain on strike - a throwback to the 1970s?

By Anna Tomforde Nov 30, 2011, 15:24 GMT

London - Lori Malone is fed up. 'Hands off our pensions,' reads the poster she is holding up outside the Houses of Parliament in London.

The 25-year-old university graduate and parliamentary researcher was among an estimated two million public service workers who took to the streets in Britain Wednesday, in the biggest outbreak of industrial action since the 1970s.

'This is only the beginning. You can't use the public as a scapegoat and you can't use them to pay off a debt they didn't create,' Malone told dpa.

Up further north in Birmingham, Suzanne Rule struck the same note.

'I've just got my first wage, and am still living with my parents. I want to have my own life, but I can't start it yet,' the 25-year-old teacher told the BBC.

In addition to paying off her loan for university tuition fees, she is now being asked to pay 100 pounds (157 dollars) a month in social security contributions, including pensions, she explained.

'We are living day by day. This is not fair,' she said.

The immediate target of the teachers, health workers, office cleaners and immigration officials who have backed their unions' call for a 24-hour walkout is their future pensions.

Government plans to increase the pension age, while also ordering a pay freeze and raising pension contributions, have been rejected by the unions as a scheme to 'work longer, pay more and get less.'

But, according to some union officials, the marches and protests go well beyond the pension issue.

Mark Serwotka, the secretary general of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, said that while members were up in arms about the 'pension robbery,' the protests were directed at the 'whole austerity agenda.'

'The government's approach to the economy is wrong. There is no need to get rid of the budget deficit in just four years,' said Serwotka, in an attack on the central plank of the government's economic strategy.

Anger has been growing in Britain at the government's austerity plans, which are predicted to cost more than 710,000 public sector jobs by 2016-17, according to the latest figures.

As unemployment rises, and economic growth remains absent, voters' patience with the Conservative-Liberal coalition's strategy is wearing thin, and the trade unions - traditionally close to the opposition Labour Party - want to make a stand.

The public service workers who turned out on Wednesday will have delivered a stern warning to the government, but comparisons with the strike wave of the 1970s are not valid, analysts believe.

In 1974, the Conservative government of Edward Heath was brought down by a powerful trade union movement, and in 1979, Britain's so-called winter of discontent propelled the demise of Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan.

His rule was followed by that of Margaret Thatcher, the 'Iron Lady' conservative prime minister who prided herself on her policy of curtailing trading union power in Britain.

Since then, trade union membership in Britain has halved from 13 million to around seven million.

'Trade unions are living in a bubble and ignoring the fact that Britain has to make its way in a competitive world,' said John Longworth, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce.

Simon Walker, of the employers' association Institute of Directors, accused those behind the industrial action of doing 'incredible damage' to Britain's image as an international trading partner.

The unions, he said, would have to ask themselves whether they wanted Britain to be a 'vibrant economy' - or become a country comparable to Portugal and Greece, which 'thrived on their past glories.'