The Strike and the Public
Guest post by Matthew Wood
The Communication Workers Union is currently balloting its postal members for national strike action. The ballot will close on 8 October and comes on the back of a summer of one day stoppages which have seen a mail backlog build up along with increasing acrimony between union and management.
Industrial action has featured regularly in news reporting in 2009 – the series of oil refinery wildcat strikes; a tube strike; Vestas; Leeds refuse workers and bus drivers in West Yorkshire. This is despite the amount of days lost to industrial action falling markedly since 2008. In July 2008 350,000 days were lost and the total for the period July 2007 to July 2008 stood at over a million. In contrast, from July 2008 to July 2009 only around 250,000 days were lost. As unemployment rose, firms closed, laid off or put employees on part-time working, unions and workers were cowed. For the most part they have battened down the hatches and are weathering the storm.
Perhaps though, the strike is more interesting now because it fits more neatly within the late-noughties narrative of the ‘crisis of capitalism’. Since 1989 the strike had been a glum relic, a futile fight against an opponent long since deemed victorious. Global capitalism meant freedom, flexibility and efficiency in the job market; to rail against it – to strike – was to hold on to discredited old certainties, to selfishly weight the scales in your favour (other workers, they play by the rules) and would only lead to unemployment and misery for all. It’s a little bit of a shock then that Europe’s most deregulated labour market now has an unemployment rate rising toward three million. Suddenly it’s not so clear that the end of history is quite as inevitable, or as desirable, as the world was led to believe.
For the student of socialist theory, the strike retains a certain excitement, even if a strike is rarely framed by the strikers, or even by the employers, as a revolutionary act. The strike retains its excitement because it still represents the uneasy fundamentally opposed relationship between capital and labour. As long as there are strikes – as long, even, as there are gripes about bosses, bankers or big business – capitalism has not overcome this contradiction.
But everyone hates their boss. Killing him or her is just another hackneyed fantasy of Western culture. Just because we dream of murdering them, it doesn’t mean that we actually want to abolish them as a social class! The public’s opinion of strikes and strikers is, then, a little tepid. A bunch of left-wing thugs bullying their country, their managers and their honest colleagues who want to work is the standard trope trotted out every time the RMT or the CWU or whoever else down tools. There is a grain of truth in this view; trade Unions are, for the most part, conservative organisations – they protect the interests of their members and are opposed to anything that would endanger their position in the liberal democratic project. During the General Strike the TUC was immensely worried about revolutionary elements coming to the fore and in 1984 cross-union support for the National Union of Mineworkers was on the whole fairly timid.
So when a union calls its members out on strike, members of the public are often surprised to hear the sort of rights that these unionised workforces have already won – paid breaks, collective bargaining agreements, health and safety agreements, grievances procedures etc.
“I get £6 an hour, a zero-hour contract, a boss who spits when he talks and I have to pay twenty pence for the coffee machine – and they’re out on strike over a 4 per cent pay rise?” How can it be right that there exists this labour aristocracy whilst the rest are toiling through the daily shitstream? What makes them so special? This is a common anti-union argument – when it wishes that the unions are obliterated it imagines a future of equality; but it is not a progressive equality – it is an equality of misery and job instability for the working classes (broadly defined). At least, I suppose, you won’t be envious of anyone else’s lot (apart from your betters, but then – they are your betters).
The reply to be made here is fairly obvious. Self-interested trade unions can lead to a strong and weak sector amongst working people. But without trade unions all (or almost all) labour would be cheap, casual, deregulated and stultifying. Non-unionised working people should be able to sympathise more readily with industrial action. Likewise, to build their influence and to improve their standing trade unions should be seen to do more for people outside of their organisations. The RMT has already shown an element of this – campaigning for sacked Vestas workers and tube cleaners. Similarly, in the past the TUC petitioned the government on the rights of agency workers. However, the perception that the TUC is only interested in its members – not the whole of Britain’s working population – is one that still persists and needs to be fought.
