A four-day rail strike started in the UK on Tuesday, as part of a series of multi-sectoral union actions throughout the month to protest inflation and demand better wages.

The Rail, Maritime and National Transport Workers’ Union (RMT), which has 40,000 members working on the Network’s rail network and 14 rail companies, took part in the strike. The coercive measures will continue until Saturday and will continue in January for another four days, according to a report from the RTM union.

The workers’ demands were for a 7% wage increase and they lashed out that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s conservative government was “deliberately blocking” the way to a deal.

It is estimated that only 20% of rail services will operate on strike days. According to a directive by Network Rail, the public company that manages the UK’s rail network, residents are asked to avoid traveling unless absolutely necessary, instead responding appropriately to requests from their workers.

Unions made clear that the government’s offer was “well below inflation” and “absolutely unacceptable”. “Our members did not want to accept the offer… the value of the deal was not high enough,” RTM said in a statement.

The railroad strike took place against a backdrop of a “winter of discontent” in England. In October alone, 417,000 workdays were lost due to social conflict in the UK, the highest level since November 2011, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

As well as rail workers, security officers on the Eurostar trains that link the island to mainland Europe and border police that control passports at airports will also go on strike in the coming days.

There will also be a strike in the health sector as nurses declare an unprecedented strike this Thursday and on December 20, which will be joined by ambulance drivers and the administrative sector, as well as the private sector.

Combat measures are planned this week from other sectors, such as the post office, while similar measures were announced later this week by employees working in highway maintenance and baggage handling at London’s Heathrow airport.

The year 2022 was marked by a wave of mass strikes in the UK by various sectors including railways, dockworkers, Openreach engineers, BT call center employees, Scottish scotch collectors and criminal lawyers.

It has also been traversed by successive crises and changes of government, with the departure of Boris Johnson, then Liz Strauss and now under Rishi Sunak, one by one they have tried to limit the size of the force and the right to attack, without any success. .

Even though the union leadership had gone on strike in shifts without any measures of centralized struggle, intense pressure from below continued, which was expressed in the major labor conflict that would occur throughout the month of December.