In My View: Florence Eshalomi, MP for Vauxhall

The Government must drop the cheap rhetoric attacking workers and start the hard work of negotiating solutions.

The past months have seen the biggest wave of strikes in decades, with rail and bus workers, postal workers, ambulance staff, nurses and teachers taking unprecedented industrial action.

They have been pushed to this position by the deepest cost-of-living crisis in a generation.

Pay for most workers has lagged behind living costs for many years now, and many frontline service professions have seen a particularly pronounced real terms decrease over the last decade.

Set against this backdrop, the economic chaos of recent months has made things simply unsustainable for people on low and middle incomes.

Inflation is sky-high, interest rates are rising sharply, and energy bills are around £3,000 for the average household.

Added to the staff shortages across many key sectors, which leaves workers with more to do for less in return, this has proved to be the last straw for many.

No worker wants to go on strike. The people working in impacted sectors care about their jobs.

Since becoming the MP for Vauxhall, I have had the pleasure of meeting nurses, ambulance staff, teachers, postal workers and many others who keep our local community running.

They are among the most committed professionals I have seen, and they do not want to cause disruption to those they help every day.

But many feel like they have no other way of getting the Government and their employers to listen to the situation they are facing.

Every week I receive desperate emails from constituents who work in frontline services.

Many don’t know where to turn for help with managing the stresses of working long hours alongside looking after their families, and still not having enough to pay the bills each month.

Shamefully, the Tories are doing nothing to solve these issues.

Their incendiary approach to industrial relations has only made things worse.

The Government has continually frustrated negotiation with trade unions, vilified under-valued workers for cheap headlines, and refused to do the hard work of getting round the negotiating table and hammering out solutions.

Instead, they have chosen to introduce badly drafted and rushed new laws which attack the fundamental rights of workers.

The Minimum Service Levels Bill will further restrict the already limited ability of workers in key sectors to go on strike, and these proposals have barely been debated in Parliament.

This isn’t about public safety – the Bill doesn’t mention safety once!

This is Rishi Sunak trying to set workers in different sectors against each other to distract from the economic and NHS crises his Government have caused. But you can’t legislate your way out of 13 years of failure.

Labour strongly opposes this fundamental attack on workers. I am proud to be a member of both GMB and Unison trade unions and support the lawful ballot and legal industrial action.

And if we win the next election, we will repeal these cynical measures.

These are the same key workers that went to extraordinary lengths to keep essential services running during the pandemic, often putting themselves at great personal risk to help others.

Ministers joined us all to clap these heroes every week during lockdown, but claps don’t pay the bills.

The reality is that they have done nothing to recognise these sacrifices in real terms.

Instead, the Government continue to preside over an economy that is tanking, with inflation sky-high and wages failing to keep pace with the spiralling cost of living.

The Prime Minister should focus on fixing these issues, not attacking dedicated workers who are struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table for their families.

If you live in Vauxhall and need of assistance, email florence.eshalomi.mp@parliament.uk or call 0207 219 6552 and I will do my best to help.