The wave of strike action that is currently ongoing in the UK raises numerous issues, some that are specific to one group of workers but others relate to the situation overall.
Poor Reporting
This applies to all the disputes and indeed many other news events and this is that the reasons that have led up to the action are not explained fully. A typical report will say something like Union A are taking action due to a disagreement on pay, employment levels and changes to work practices. This report will then be repeated with little change on every bulletin leaving Joe Public little wiser as to the reasons for the strike action. This lack of detail can lead to wild speculation eg – “I wish I was paid as much as a train driver – do you know they can earn £60k a year for four days of work each week ?” It is hard to respond when you don’t know the truth yourself. Quite how to fix this situation I am not sure. One approach could be that each bulletin goes into a bit more detail on each element one by one so over a few days all listeners/viewers have a much better overview
Inflation
The most powerful driver responsible for increaasing inflation is wage rises. Once the affects of the energy crisis have washed through we still have still have a relatively low rate of inflation of under 5%. The irony of this current round of strike action is that if the claims were paid at a level anyway v close to what the unions are asking for then the underlying rate of inflation would soar and these very workers would actually be worse off than they were before.
Naïve Unions
It seems to me that the government and employers are fairly relaxed about many of these disputes as they think they will make some of their long term objectives more likely. This is not a widespread affect but particularly affects the postal and rail workers. The postal workers and our much loved local posties are at real risk as a result of a loss of business. As an example, apart from Amazon and online grocery I buy regularly from three small specialist suppliers. All three of these have used Royal Mail Next Day delivery up to now but all of them have now said they will no longer use the mail service and instead have switched to Evri who I know have designed a next day system to specifically poach business as a result of the strikes. I can honestly see a large ongoing reduction in traffic even when the strikes end which would result in a real threat to the Universal Service Obligation.