AUSTERITY-HIT working people are being “pushed to breaking point,” the TUC warned today after official figures showed rising unemployment and take-home pay down £19 a week amid 40-year high double-digit inflation.

The fact that the damning figures coincide with the biggest strike wave to sweep Britain since the 1980s comes as “little surprise,” the union body’s head Paul Nowak said, as he demanded Tory ministers act now to resolve national pay disputes and “put money in people’s pockets.”

Most economists had expected the jobless rate to remain unchanged in the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, which cover the first three months of the year, but it rose from 3.8 to 3.9 per cent.