LONDON — When he heard that there would be a three-day transit strike starting on Thursday, Bereket Tsegay began checking train schedules daily to ensure he would make his train to London from Brighton, on the southern coast of England where he works. The last strike had ensnared him in a three-hour delay.
But while he was spared, Mr. Tsegay said it left him frustrated with both the operators and the unions. “I don’t feel confident until I go and see my train, because anything can happen,” he said. “We the customers are the victims,” he added. “Why should I become a victim of their conflict?”
He was hardly the only one feeling aggrieved, as train travel in Britain largely ground to a halt after tens of thousands of railway workers walked out over wage disputes, the latest work stoppage in a summer of labor unrest and sweltering heat.
It was the sixth railway strike since June, with the walkouts lasting through Saturday in some places during the peak summer travel season. The strike on Friday will target transportation in London.
A series of failed negotiations between railway companies and unions means that only about a fifth of usual trains were running, leaving some areas without rail services at all, according to Network Rail, the company that manages the country’s railway system. Travelers were advised to make only essential journeys.
But after a summer of disruptions — in addition to the strikes, the summer heat has caused problems, including buckling tracks — travelers reacted with a mix of resignation, anxiety and annoyance.
“Of course it affects everybody, and it’s frustrating,” said Moke Wall, a furniture maker who had given himself twice as long as usual to attend a client meeting across the city. “I am appalled at the government.”
Marie Claude Beck, who was visiting from France, found herself in a difficult situation. Her train to Norwich, England, from Paris had already been booked when she learned last month about the strike.
That left her looking anxiously at a board of schedules at Liverpool Street station in East London, hoping she and her granddaughter would make the final leg of their journey.
“I think they have good reasons I can understand,” she said, of the striking workers. But, she added, “It’s really uncomfortable, and I’m very anxious.”
The walkout came as Britain was experiencing the fastest rise in consumer prices in four decades, magnifying worries of a cost of living crisis as goods and services, including essentials, are becoming more expensive.
Inflation in Britain rose in July to 10.1 percent, the government said Wednesday, compared with last year — and economists say the worst is yet to come, predicting a peak in the fall ahead of warnings that households will experience huge rises in energy bills.
“It’s really just shot up over the summer months,” said Xiaowei Xu, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a research institute. “People are quite worried about what’s coming up.”
Though pay has grown, it has trailed behind prices when adjusted for inflation. Wage growth in the transportation sector has lagged when compared with the economy as a whole, Ms. Xu said, adding that it is easier for workers to find other jobs and leverage in these times.
Still, policymakers are worried that inflation will endure as workers negotiate higher pay and companies raise prices for goods and services to keep up.
The strikes this week are part of protracted face-off between unions and railway companies over wage disparities and pensions that culminated in the largest railway strike in three decades, in June.
Several unions representing workers in the rail industry, including the main railway union, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, known as the R.M.T., and the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, voted separately to strike this week, though the same broad issues of pay, job security and working conditions were at issue.
That three-day strike stranded travelers between cities and tied up London’s streets with cars and bicycles as commuters took detours that sometimes added hours to their usual trip to work.
On Wednesday, transportation officials slammed union leaders, accusing them of using the strikes to avoid reforms to a system they called inefficient, including using technology to complete tasks once done by workers.
“We must make it harder for trade unionists in secure, well-paid jobs to victimize other, much less fortunate workers — by, for instance, stopping them getting to work,” Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, wrote in The Daily Mail. He added on Twitter that the government had a plan to “rebalance industrial relations in favour of the public.”
But though unions and railway companies have been unable to settle on a package, the R.M.T., which is representing many of the 50,000 workers striking this week, went a step further. It accused the Conservative government of using the strikes to further an anti-union agenda, charging that the government was blocking railway companies from offering them a fair package for political reasons amid a tussle for Britain’s leadership.
Opposition lawmakers for the Labour Party, which has longstanding ties to labor unions, voiced support for the strikes, with some showing up at picket lines.
“I think there’s a political dimension to it now, which is unfortunate because this is an industrial relations matter about jobs, conditions and pay,” Mick Lynch, the union’s general secretary, said to the BBC on Thursday.
Network Rail said it was disappointed that unions had rejected an offer it called “good and fair,” pointing out that revenue from passengers traveling remained lower than prepandemic levels. On Thursday, its chief executive, Andrew Haines, told reporters that he wanted workers to vote in a referendum on a new pay offer, blaming the R.M.T. for the holdup.
According to an estimate from the Office for National Statistics in May, railway workers including drivers, earned a median salary of 43,747 pounds or about $52,600 in 2021, though that median fell to 36,800 pounds, or about $44,250 without including driver salaries.
But with workers in other fields, including airlines, schoolteachers and postal workers, also considering strikes this summer, the labor unrest could persist for some time.
“People are getting poorer every day of the week,” Mr. Lynch said to reporters in London on Thursday, adding that future walkouts could continue indefinitely in the transportation industry and elsewhere until pay disputes were settled.
“What they’re trying to fight for is what they believe in,” said Ben Scopes, who had chosen to brave the trains to return to Ipswich, northeast of London, after a family vacation. “It is what it is.”
