300,000 Public Workers Down Tools Across the Moonshae Isles

Three hundred thousand public workers walked out today in a public-sector strike. That's the story.

Clerics, teachers, court scribes and infirmary hands across the Moonshae Isles downed tools for twenty-four hours over pay. The guild treaty ran out in Midsummer, prices kept climbing, and the unions say wages are now five to seven percent behind. Essential services keep running. Everything else sits there, wondering where everyone went.

Royal Minister Jack Chamberlock, keeper of the realm's purse, answered with a letter. He offered talks at the Hall of Workplace Parley, warning of "great disruption to the public, especially the most vulnerable." The Treasury also points out that it has set aside 1.2 billion gp for public pay, which it calls "significant." Significant is a word you use when you want to avoid saying a number someone can check.

The unions turned the offer down fast. Shop Steward Kevan Callinhorn, chair of the Moonshae Congress of Trade Guilds, said the offer "cannot see how it represents any change" in the Minister's position.

Here is the sticking point. The unions want pay on the table. The Minister says pay can be discussed "alongside other matters." That means he'll talk about anything except the thing you came to talk about. It's like inviting a hungry dwarf to supper and offering to discuss tablecloths.

"I teach forty children arithmetic, and the arithmetic of my own wages is the hardest lesson I give," said Orla Brindlehammer, a village schoolmistress, standing at a picket line outside the Hall of Letters. "Nobody in the Treasury has ever failed that class. They've never had to sit it."

Palace sources say a neutral mediator may be called in, but not until at least one strike day has passed. So they want the strike to hurt first. Fine. Further single-day stoppages are already scheduled over the next eight days, and the unions say nobody is bluffing.

The Minister's department and the unions are no longer on speaking terms, which makes the offer of talks the one thing both sides agree is odd. I've covered the Golden Coast clerks calling their first strike. Different realm, same Treasury energy.

Public workers keep the roads mapped, the sick tended and the children able to count. They are asking for pay that keeps up with bread. That isn't a radical position. It's a ledger.

Solidarity. And stretch your back. — Brakka