Britain loses 2.5m days to worst strikes since 1990

Bloomberg

The economy lost nearly 2.5 million working days to strikes last year as Britain suffered its most severe industrial action since Margaret Thatcher was in power.
The Office for National Statistics said Tuesday that 843,000 working days were lost due to labor disputes in December, making it the worst month in more than a decade.
That took the total for June to the end of the year to 2,472,000 days lost. The last time it was worse was 1989-90, toward the end of Thatcher’s time as prime minister. Up until June, the ONS had temporarily stopped measuring the data due to Covid.
Unions are railing against pay offers that fall behind the UK’s rate of inflation.
Protests have escalated this year with major walkouts held by hundreds of thousands of rail staff, civil servants, teachers and workers in the National Health Service and elsewhere in the public sector. On February 1 as many as half a million went on strike together.
The crisis looks set to worsen after the RMT union rejected another pay offer for rail workers at the end of last week, raising the prospect of more train strikes. Nurses’ strikes extending over two consecutive days could become more common, according to reports.
“A continuous 48-hour strike that includes staff from emergency departments, intensive care units and cancer care services would likely have the biggest impact on patients we’ve seen,” Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive at NHS Providers, said in an emailed statement at the weekend.
Junior doctors are expected to vote in their thousands in support of strikes with a ballot closing next week and industrial action due early March. More ambulance drivers in southern England and Yorkshire also joined the wider NHS dispute over the weekend and will take part in upcoming strikes.