Britain’s biggest civil service union has promised there will be more strikes if the government fails to make further concessions on the pensions deal.
Schools across the UK will close and non-emergency NHS operations will be cancelled as over 2m workers take to the streets on Wednesday.
PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka, however, is unrepentant, saying that we will see more coordinated strikes and more disruption if the coalition don’t back down.
“We will carry on trying to defend peoples’ retirement for as long as it takes until we get an acceptable outcome”, he told the Huffington Post UK.
And he called for the rich to pay for the deficit, saying that ordinary taxpayers should not have to make sacrificies.
“This is the government ensuring that the class that they favour are doing OK while everyone else is made to suffer?”
Negotiations on changes to public sector pensions have been going on since February 2011.
Those talks appear to have broken down in the past two weeks, with the government's offer being billed as a "take it or leave it" concession.
These are unlikely to come this side of the day of co-ordinated action on the 30th of November, however, because the deadline for finalising the pensions package for public sector workers comes a month later.