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.
We should not be romantic about strikes. They may sometimes be unavoidable, though not always, as anyone old enough to have worked in the print industry in the 1970s will recall. They may sometimes be judged successful, though there have also been catastrophic strikes, such as the 1980s miners’ dispute and others that, even if successful in the narrow sense, have left legacies of bitterness. Strikes can be heroic, unquestionably so in famous cases, but a politics that is too often rooted in heroic defeatsought to stimulate us to look for different ideas that might work better in the businesses, industries and services on which we rely.
Britain’s winter of strikes has been triggered by inflation and by the continuing low level of real wages, especially in the public sector. But the immediate disputes rest on other, older failures, especially of recurrent attempts to cut public spending too far, including on wages and staffing, without increasing taxes and growing the real economy.
The strikes also send a larger message. They signal the failure of an industrial policy that involves far too few challenges to business, and which has assumed that unions are irrelevant, can be legislated out of the picture (as in strike ban plans) and are to be largely ignored. This has been a recurrent problem in British history. It shouldn’t take a strike to raise it up the political agenda. In practice, however, it often does. It is doing so now.
It’s almost a century since the General Strike of 1926. That strike suffered as heroic a defeat as any in British history. But it showed that the unions could not be destroyed, and that they were around to stay. It led to one of those intermittent periods in which the country glimpsed a different approach to industrial relations. And it is full of echoes for today, when new approaches are again needed.
The year after the strike, a group of industrial employers headed by Sir Alfred Mond, the head of the newly formed Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), wrote to the TUC general council proposing discussions on greater cooperation in British industry. “We realise,” Mond wrote, “that industrial reconstruction can only be undertaken with the cooperation of those empowered to speak for organised labour. We believe that the common interests which bind us are more powerful than the apparently divergent interests that separate.”
The so-called Mond-Turner talks with the TUC followed, during which Ernest Bevin, a founder of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, with his formidable strategic sense of what might be gained from them, ensured that everything about industry – including finance, markets and management – should be on the table, alongside more bread-and-butter trade union issues. In 1929, a national industrial council was formed, whose purpose was to consolidate a shared approach to industrial change and unemployment. It was all swept away by the slump of the early 1930s, but Britain’s first experiment with codetermination in industry is full of lessons for the post-industrial landscape of the 21st century, if we are smart enough to learn them.
If that is to happen, however, British government and business – and also the unions – are going to have to learn new habits to replace the failed approaches that have led to the current winter of disputes. The political scientist Andrew Hindmoor gives a revealing illustration of what is wrong. In the coalition government of 2010-15, he calculated, business representatives attended 45% of all meetings with ministers. In the Treasury and business departments, the figure was 60%. By comparison, trade unions attended 5%.
That sharp disparity of access will not have changed during the seven years of Conservative government since then. If anything, as the PPE scandals suggest, it has probably widened. But the disparity needs to narrow. That can be achieved either by voluntary initiatives, as happened in the Mond-Turner period, or it must be led by government. But the words written by Mond in 1927 remain potent and true today.
The current disputes all reflect the slow shift in the economy from wages to profits. If Britain wants to prevent strikes like these from recurring – and we should – the state doesn’t simply need to pay its workers better, though that is certainly the most immediate part of it. It also needs to reinvent an industrial policy for the 21st century based on codetermination and industrial democracy. The phrase may have fallen into disuse nearly 50 years ago, but what this country needs is a pay policy.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
