The Trades Union Congress is warning of industrial action across the public sector before Christmas.

Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said Labour would lose support at the next election if it did not do more to help “ordinary people”.

The government must improve wages in the public sector, he said, and tax the profits of energy companies in order to help “the millions of households that are already in recession”.

Ministers are expected to announce an energy package next week, but have ruled out a one-off “windfall tax” of energy companies.

Union leaders, congregating in Brighton for next week’s TUC congress, were emboldened by the threat of a new teachers’ strike.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) agreed on Friday to ballot 250,000 members about walking out on rolling pay strikes and stopwork meetings, beginning November.

Next week, the NUT will leads a push for coordinated industrial action across the public sector, in protest at Treasury’s attempt to lower inflation to 2 per cent by capping pay rises.

Christine Blower, the NUT’s acting general secretary, said: “This is a campaign that becomes more relevant with each passing month. With food prices up 40 per cent, utilities up over 30 per cent, along with general inflation now running at 5 per cent, teachers, particularly young teachers, are suffering.”

Teachers closed or partially-closed 9,500 schools when they walked out of the classroom in April, in the first national pay strike in 20 years. An estimated 2.7 million pupils got the day off school.

The Prison Officers Association, a more hardline union, is calling for a series of one-day general strike - the first since 1926.

Mr Barber said the Government had “got things wrong” on public sector pay, and he predicted that unions would work closely together to win decent increases for teachers, civil servants and staff in the NHS and local authorities.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Barber said tensions between the unions and government had “got sharper”, especially as the economy had dived and working families were struggling to make ends meet.

He warned the Prime Minister that he was facing a new onslaught from the Labour left unless he took on the “super-rich” and reined in his government’s close relationship with the City and big business.

On Monday, Mr Barber will use his opening address to the congress to criticise a “yawning chasm” between the super rich and the rest of society.

He will blame “greedy” bankers and higher world demand for oil for the credit crunch, and will accuse governments of listening too much to big business.

“It’s not fair that employees are facing a fall in their living standards while top bosses see their pay packets go up by 20% or even 30%,” he says.

“It’s not fair that workers pay more tax on their earnings than people who earn 100 or even 1,000 times more, and it’s not fair that pensioners and low-income families are living in fear of a cold winter while energy companies post huge profits and speculators rake it in.”

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