British trade unions: General Shrug now!

In 2010, we were first warned about a ‘spring of discontent’ against cuts in public spending, then a summer of discontent and finally another winter of discontent. No sign of any such strike wave materialised all year. This year, the anticipated ‘spring of discontent’ has already come and gone without troubling the scorers who keep count of strikes. Now we are told to brace ourselves for another summer of discontent, as the leader of the UK’s largest public sector union announces that what one newspaper calls ‘wave upon wave’ of strikes over government plans for his members’ pensions will be ‘the biggest since the General Strike’ (of 1926).

As fantasising football fans like to say: just you wait until next season. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the return of the mass industrial action of the past always appears to be just out of reach over the horizon. Yet many trade-union officials and media commentators still seem to believe in the myth of a coming season of revived labour-movement militancy, while the remains of the radical left cheer on the delusional with demands on the ghost of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to ‘Call a General Strike Now!’. In response there is tough talk about the need for tough new anti-strike legislation.

Time to grow up and stop telling fairytales about the imminent return of the sleeping giant. As one who will defend the right to strike every bit as staunchly as the right to free speech, and is on the side of those fighting for a better future, I think we have to face the shocking fact that it is not 1926 or 1979 if we are to cope with the problems of the twenty-first century.

There may well be some large-scale token industrial action ahead; many teachers, lecturers and civil servants have already voted for a one-day strike on 30 June. But that will not alter the fact that, despite the ravages of the recession and the high levels of discontent among the workforce, we are living through an era of almost-unprecedented industrial peace.

Take the standard historical measure of these things – the number of working days lost due to industrial action in any given year. In 2009, around 455,000 days were lost in total. That compares to 29million days lost in 1979, the peak of the ‘winter of discontent’ when public sector workers went on strike against the Labour government’s policies of imposing wage restraint. Remarkably, as one recent study points out, ‘strike days lost [were] about 50 times higher in 1979 than now and [there have been] fewer strike days in the past 20 years put together than in 1979, despite 4.5million more people in the workforce today’. So it might not take much to claim the ‘biggest strikes in a decade’ etc. But in real terms it might not mean anything at all.

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