UK rail strikes spark seasonal walkouts

Rail workers in the United Kingdom on Tuesday began a two-day national strike, kicking off a month of walkouts involving professions from nurses to passport control workers that could spell Christmas misery for millions.

Commuters faced a battle to get to work, while many opted to stay at home, as thousands of members of the country's biggest rail union the RMT launched their latest stoppage over a below-inflation pay offer.

Braving the ice and snow that has already hit travelers, activists picketed major railway stations on Tuesday, as train services wound down and people were advised only to travel if essential.

Trains were only running from 7:30 am to 6:30 pm on strike days, with just 1 in 5 services expected to run.

At London's Kings Cross station, Allan Smith, a 28-year-old web developer, said he had sympathy with the strikers, despite struggling to get to Heathrow airport. "I totally get it. It's hard for the people at the moment," he told Agence France-Presse.

Former firefighter Chris McBride, 74, blamed "incompetent government" for the chaos, with more stoppages planned between now and into the New Year.

Postal workers are staging a two-day strike from Wednesday, while nurses are set to walk out for the first time in their union's 106-year history on Thursday, again over pay.

Meanwhile, according to newly released figures from the Office for National Statistics, or ONS, October saw the highest number of working days lost to industrial action in the UK in more than a decade.

The figure — 417,000 days — was revealed on the same day that the latest round of nationwide rail strikes brought train services across the UK to a halt.

The UK is experiencing a wave of industrial action on a scale not seen since the 1980s, with inflation in double digits pushing up the cost of living and energy costs soaring due to the conflict in Ukraine.

In the three months to October, the ONS said regular pay had gone up by 6.1 percent. But factoring in inflation, which is at its highest in more than 40 years, at 11.1 percent, wages effectively fell by 2.7 percent.

Earlier this week, a report by the Trades Union Congress highlighted what it said was the biggest wage drop since 1977, with the organization's general secretary Frances O'Grady saying that workers were suffering as a consequence of "years of wage stagnation" that had left them "brutally exposed" this year.

Agencies via Xinhua contributed to this story.