Columnist Melissa Todd gives her take on ongoing strikes...

Lorks, these strikes are infuriating, aren’t they? Having to Google dates every time you want to take a train or post a parcel. As if Christmas isn’t intolerable enough without this fresh layer of inconvenience and misery.

And yet. This industrial action is unusual, being motivated not entirely or even predominantly by pay, but rather representing a fight for Britain’s future. What kind of country do we want to be? One that’s cheap, or one that works?

Our transport system has been decimated by terrible decisions that have impacted relentlessly on passengers as well as staff, and now they are proposing to lose all ticket offices and guards. Would you fancy being stuck on the last train out of London alone on a Saturday night without any staff on the train beyond the driver? Not sure I would. Trains aren’t buses: you can’t readily escape them.

Of course, decent pay affects staffing levels too, impacting on any industry’s efforts to attract and retain workers.

This industrial action is being driven by a real sense of fear that nurses, ambulance staff, rail workers, postal workers, won’t be able to feed their families, warm their homes, pay their rent; that the pay rises they’re being offered are derisory and amount to a real-terms wage cut.

Inflation is running at over 11% and likely to increase. Our inability to feed ourselves properly and heat our homes will inevitably result in lowered immune systems and more illness, but the NHS has lost so many staff medical attention can no longer be guaranteed.

'NHS staff are leaving. Teachers too. If they aren’t paid properly, there’ll be no one left to tend our sick or educate our children. They’ll drift off to Aldi...'

That public sector workers, who have devoted their careers to serving us, feel compelled to take such steps is a terrifying indication of the pressures their sectors face, but also how much worse it could get, how lives could be endangered if their concerns aren’t heeded.

NHS staff are leaving their professions in unprecedented numbers. Teachers too. If they aren’t paid properly, there’ll be no one left to tend our sick or educate our children. They’ll drift off to Aldi instead, away from the stress of appraisals and Ofsted inspections.

We should all be able to afford decent housing, warm clothes, sufficient nourishing food, without question, without fear. F D Roosevelt suggested that freedom from want should be a basic human right, entrenched in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous now? But I would like us all free from want, and free from fear, and more than that, I’d like to confer on everyone the freedom to enjoy all the world offers, all of us, travel and theatre tickets and books, everything civilisation has striven to produce over the last three millennia.

Those bounties shouldn’t be enjoyed only by those of us with sufficient leisure and wealth, otherwise the rest of us are no better than the turkey you very likely can’t afford to buy this Christmas. Worse, perhaps, for at least your turkey won’t know what he’s missing.

Meanwhile, the press and politicians try to pitch poor against poor, worker against worker, bleating how much the strikes will cost the country, how much train drivers earn, apparently forgetting that MPs have enjoyed nine pay rises since 2010, that they enjoy a subsidised dining hall, while suggesting the rest of us might subsist on a bag of value pasta; that Nadhim Zahawi - who suggested nurses take a lower pay rise to “send a message” to Putin - submitted an expenses claim which included the bill for heating his horses’ stables. Remember all that next time you see a headline screaming about greedy union bosses “holding the country to ransom”, that dreary meaningless cliche.

The success of any business or public service hinges on a collaboration between workers and executives. But in the UK, as in the US, but unlike other European nations, shareholders and executives make decisions remotely, which tend to treat employees as units of production; chattel, rather than human beings. Workers aren’t part of the decision-making process by which enterprises are run. Bring them into the boardroom.

As trade union membership has declined in the last 40 years so dangerous levels of economic inequality have increased. Unions have been vital historically in securing basic dignities for working people, weekends, maternity and paternity leave, sick pay, holiday entitlement. Without the strikes and solidarity of previous generations you might be working 14-hour days for precarious pennies in dangerous conditions. If you weren’t born to privilege, that is.

So delight in the discomfort afforded by strikes this Christmas. It’s making the privileged sweat.

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