Strikes are all the rage. You’ll have noticed, if you want to take a train (or pass your driving test to avoid doing so). This is visible in official data, with 417,000 days lost to industrial action in October – high compared with the 450,000 lost a year during the 2010s. But taking a longer term view, strikes are heading down, not up: around 7m and 13m days a year were lost in the 80s and 70s respectively.
Recent research argues that strikes have fallen as debt levels rose from the 1980s on, because workers became wary of striking if loss of pay and fear of losing their job put them at risk of missing loan repayments. This is interesting but overstates debt’s role.
A better guide to the decline of strikes comes from current examples. High inflation is the trigger, raising the stakes for employers and workers negotiating pay, just as it did in the 70s. In contrast, the past few decades of low inflation meant fewer strikes.
Today’s industrial action is concentrated in the public sector. Why? Partly because of slow public sector pay growth, but also because that is where trade union presence is strongest after overall membership rates more than halved from 53% to 23% between 1980 and 2021.
Good luck having a strike without a union, so industrial action has shrunk. Some argue that’s a good thing, but fewer strikes don’t come free. Our own work shows that unions raise wages (union members earn 6% more than non-members in the UK and new research finds a 3% premium in Germany) and reduce wage inequality. We want to see the back of some things, such as double-digit inflation or bad employers, but not trade unions.
Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
