When forecasters go on strike, it’s because they know which way the wind is blowing. Unite members working for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research look set to vote to strike over a 2% pay offer, as figures released yesterday show inflation reaching 5.1%. How wise of them to belong to a union, and how wise to use that muscle in the face of further inflation rises. On the old RPI measure, inflation is 7.1%. It’s not caused by rising pay, which is running at below 4%, but by petrol prices, which have shot up by a third, the fastest on record, and supply shortages affecting everything else: the prices of apples and pears are up by 25%. This new cost of living crisis is causing “acute economic pain”, the Resolution Foundation said following Wednesday’s inflation announcement. It called on the Bank of England not to raise interest rates, with inflation being caused by global prices rather than domestic pay. But today that plea was ignored. In a country with rates of poverty that had already been rising before the pandemic, the pain that will be increasing over the course of this winter will hit a new high in April 2022, when the national insurance rise comes in, along with an expected lifting of the energy price cap that will impose a burden of £400 extra on the average household. The house price boom has sent rents up, with Citizens Advice finding there has been £300m extra in rent arrears since the start of the pandemic. Citizens Advice has sent up warning flares: one in 10 families, 3.2m households, face “financial crisis this winter”. Its advisers predict this many households will be unable to meet the cost of rent, food and basic bills, and hundreds of thousands more will live with just £50 a month leeway for everything else. As galloping Omicron is already laying waste some sectors – especially hospitality and transport – the Resolution Foundation is calling on the government to bring back furloughing to those sectors that are being shuttered. Though it was proportionally less generous than in some equivalent countries, the furlough scheme rescued jobs and livelihoods last time. Meanwhile sick pay in the UK is the lowest among countries with similar economies, and continues to pose huge dangers, deterring desperate and ill people from self-isolating. If this government intended to step in to protect those on low incomes from this cost of living tornado, it would have relented on the devastating cut of £20 a week in universal credit. When challenged on turning the screw on low earners, the government hopes most voters don’t count the noughts, so it boasts of a £500m one-off bung to councils to spend in a household support fund for vulnerable households. But that’s barely a 12th of the savings it has made by cutting universal credit. Official guidance says: “Those in need of support should contact their local council”, but Citizens Advice’s head of policy, Morgan Wild, says few people even know they are entitled to claim it. Nor is there a set means of distributing the money, nor data on who receives it. Wild says Citizens Advice offices report floods of people seeking vouchers for food banks who’ve never been near one before. Here’s another hidden cut: benefits are uprated every April, based on September’s inflation rate instead of using the most recent figure, so families on universal credit lose an extra £37 a month, and more by April, Wild calculates. The whole point of the torturous process of introducing universal credit, with its multiple computer failures and years spent failing its recipients, was to make it able to react quickly to changes of circumstances. That ought to make it easy to increase in line with inflation month by month: you can bet it responds far more quickly when it has to reduce what anyone is due. Citizens Advice sees a glimmer of hope in soaring inquiries on their website for information on how to resign from a job, as people search for something better. Trade union membership has risen in the last four years, mainly among teachers, but has fallen in the private sector. Union members earn more, but in hospitality, for example, only 4% belong to one. The TUC’s Find a Union website has had many more inquiries on joining, but with membership at 23.7%, it is only half of what it was at its peak in 1979, when unions strove to keep pay up with soaring inflation. They failed, but at least stopped pay falling catastrophically behind. Since then, attacks on unions, widespread privatisation and the impossibility of organising in union-phobic workplaces have coincided with the shocking growth of zero-hours contracts and insecure jobs, reversing generations of gains to working rights. Public sector pay review bodies are in the process of advising on this year’s pay: the Treasury warns them against recommending “inflationary” rises. Worse, it warns that any increases will come from existing budgets. It’s a form of blackmail to tell teachers or nurses that anything they get will be taken from their classroom or ward budgets. Here’s hoping there will be eruptions against this pay injustice. Let’s hope the growing vacancies mean people walk out of underpaid, insecure jobs in bad sectors that are already desperate for staff. But it’s hardest for the lowest-paid workers to move jobs because they do not have sufficient savings with which to cover unpaid weeks in between. Labour pledges to legislate to let unions recruit in every workplace, retrieving lost rights, with fair pay agreements across whole sectors. In recent weeks, that future seems a little closer. Looking at the economic pain forecast for the months ahead, that is just as well. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist