Strikes: this is not about public sector v private

On June 30, around 750,000 public sector workers will stage coordinated strikes. The potential for disruption is huge. Two teachers' unions are involved, as well as the PCS union, which includes civil servants such as immigration officers, air traffic controllers, police support officials, court workers and jobcentre staff.

There could be worse to come this summer and autumn, with Unison, a public sector union of 1.3 million members, saying it will ballot its members on strike action if talks on pension reform with the government on June 27 fail to reach a satisfactory resolution.

Add to this planned strikes on London's Underground network later this month and talk of a 'summer of discontent' is rife in the media. Commentators are asking if these public sector workers - often considered to have better pension arrangements than private sector employees - can count on the support of the wider public.

Selfish unions risk derailing the economic recovery. "Any lingering doubts about whether our Antediluvian union leaders are prepared to recklessly put their own self-interest ahead of the fragile economic recovery have been dispelled," says the Daily Mail in a typically forthright editorial. To scupper "modest changes" to their "gold-plated" pensions, the unions risk undermining George Osborne's "impressive progress in cutting the deficit".

Public sector workers should accept reality. The Daily Telegraph picks up on the theme of fairness, saying in an editorial: "Teachers find themselves in the same position as millions in the private sector, whose defined-benefit schemes have already been closed down.

"It is unreasonable to expect [private-sector employees], already earning significantly less than those in the state sector, to subsidise better pensions than they can afford for themselves."

Don't buy into the public/private sector argument. But Zoe Williams rejects what she sees as a made-up division between public and private sector workers. "I have never looked around the people I know and considered who's in the public sector and who's in the private," she writes in the Guardian. "The idea of this hugely well-paid public sector class doesn't stand up to scrutiny", she adds, pointing out that two thirds of local government workers earn less than £18,000. Williams is struck by our "interconnectedness", explaining that we are all "carers and workers, parents and consumers, benefit scroungers and taxpayers, homeowners and drains on the NHS".

If history is a guide, the strikes won't work anyway. If these strikes work, writes Donald Macintyre in the Independent, "they will buck a steady trend of the last decade or more". The "strike weapon has been nowhere near as formidably or frequently unleashed as it once was, thanks to privatisation, the shift from manufacturing to services, and perhaps a recognition among trade unionists of its limitations." ·