A strike can be caused by many different things, but all strikes are the result of societal or economic failure. The failure can be at the micro level – a lack of agreement between management and workforce about what can be afforded, for instance. But the failure can also be at the macro level – government policy that pushes businesses and workers to the limit, inadequacy of the dominant ideas of political economy to cope with changing times and new concerns, or even a failure of the collective imagination of an era or culture.
So, when the UK is hit, as this December, by strikes involving nurses, teachers and lawyers, along with postal, rail and energy workers, there is plenty of micro failure in individual industries to go round. But since the UK is also recording its highest number of days lost through strikes for more than a decade, with those figures certain to rise again over the next quarter, the failure is simultaneously macro – and on a substantial, even historic, scale. The current disputes differ in various ways but they share something larger. They are part of a national failure of industrial policy that demands different, national solutions.
