This week, on the first day of rail strikes across the UK and under the threat of industrial action from refuse workers, teachers and lawyers, The Sun emblazoned its front page with the headline: “We regret to announce that this country is returning to the 1970s.” Later that day, in a now much-memed exchange, Sky News presenter Kay Burley told the RMT union general secretary, Mick Lynch, that she understood what picketing entails “because I very well remember the picket lines of the 1980s”. And trailing his interview with Lynch a week earlier, the BBC’s Nick Robinson wrote on Twitter: “Is he a champion of workers … or a politically motivated dinosaur?”
While some paint trade unions as outdated and irrelevant, the truth is that it is they who are out of touch. Today’s industrial disputes are about very current demands for higher pay in the face of inflation, after a year of wage stagnation. That’s why it’s not members of a certain age balloting for strike action, but a new generation of energised trade unionists.
