Teachers, nurses, police officers, airport border guards and other public sector workers from 30 trade unions across Britain walked out of work on Wednesday to protest deficit-cutting government reforms in what has been called the largest strike in a generation.

BBC reports that the Conservative-led British government plans to make workers work longer before they retire, pay more to their pensions while employed, and accept a final pension based on a career average rather than their ending salary, and receive only a one percent pay raise over the next three years. Government officials say as people live longer, current pensions are becoming unsustainable, and that reform is in fact overdue. And as the British economy edges ever closer a recession, public workers are saying that they are being punished unjustly for the deficit.

The strike came a day after British Finance Minister George Osborne announced a pay raise cap of one percent for public sector workers for two years after the current pay freeze ends.

"Why are the government picking on us in the public sector?" 54-year-old Kevin Smith asked Reuters while outside Parliament in London, where he works as a security officer. "We are going to get a one percent pay rise for the next three years. We had no rise the last two years, before that we were getting lower than inflation rises. So how long is it going to last?"

The protests had a devastating effect on Britain in its first day, with CNN reporting as many two million public workers protesting the changes. According to the BBC, over half of schools in England and Northern Ireland are closed. Over 80 percent of schools are closed in Wales, and in Scotland, only 30 out of 2,700 council-run schools are open. An estimated 400,000 National Health Service workers are on strike, and service is only available for citizens in need of emergency assistance. With as many as 90 percent of immigration workers striking, airlines cut flights to London Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airports, as all airports braced themselves for delays while scrambling to make arrangements for absent border guards, using managers, contractors and even foreign personnel to fill the gap.

Prime Minister David Cameron said it was wrong for unions to strike as negotiations between the parties were still going on, and thought the government had made a "very reasonable, very fair offer to public sector workers.”

Union leaders, however, said the unions had not met to formally negotiate with the Treasury since November 2.

Government officials fear the strikes will cause significant economic damage.

"If you're damaging the productive capacity of this country,” Simon Walker of the Institute of Directors said to BBC, “you're really doing huge damage to the fabric of the economy and that will last a long time and impact on all of us.”