The tide of industrial action rolls steadily on. Even physiotherapists are threatening to bring the country to its knees, rather than performing their usual task of setting it on its feet. Next, surely, it will be vicars, who will abandon their sermons, rip off their vestments and refuse to bury your grandmother. All this, needless to say, involves a good deal of inconvenience. You might, for example, have to stand for hours in the freezing cold holding a placard and worrying about the pay you are losing in doing so. People do such things anyway, however, since itās inconvenient to have to walk because you canāt afford public transport, or take a second job in order to provide your children with a decent breakfast.
Thereās also some lesser inconvenience to what the media calls the public, but it doesnāt usually last for long. A lot of cleaners and shelf-stackers have to put up with the inconvenience of being poor for years on end, whereas some stockbrokers are enraged by a mere two or three days of cancelled trains. The public is a mythical entity, apparently quite distinct from nurses, postmen, railway workers, junior barristers and the like. These people cause social disruption, and thus canāt be members of the public. Members of the public are the objects of such disruption, not the agents of it. A CEO is a member of the public but an ambulance driver is not.
Strikes are double-edged swords, which hurt those who deploy them. When a manager sacks or disciplines an employee, only the employee suffers, whereas workers who take industrial action may have to diminish their already slim resources in order to try to increment them. Strikes are also purely negative strategies, and trade unions largely defensive bodies. Weāre a long way from peasants with pitchforks marching on the lordās castle. Bosses have a number of positive ways of exercising power over their employees: firing them, slashing their pay, cutting their tea breaks, imposing longer hours, speeding up their work and so on. Unions, by contrast, have the single option of withdrawing their labour, which is hardly a revolutionary move. Like those who practise civil disobedience, all they can do is take a stand and cry “Enough!”, aware that they will then be travestied as wreckers and hooligans who are holding the country to ransom.
Their behaviour is not just unprincipled but unpatriotic. Theirs is a strike against the community itself, a case hard to maintain when a lot of the community are also brandishing banners. To walk away from your workbench is to be a bully and a blackmailer. Simply by sitting on your hands, rather than by storming the Treasury or kidnapping merchant bankers, you become an object of odium, not least to the affluent elite whose profits you are putting in peril. Charles Dickens travelled to Preston in the mid-19th century to observe an industrial strike at close quarters, and wrote admiringly of the reasonableness and decency of the working people involved in it. He then produced a novel called Hard Times, which contains one of the most lurid caricatures of trade unionism in Victorian England.
Nobody objects to the right to withhold oneās labour; itās only when it starts to be effective that people fire off letters to the Telegraph. Moves by strikers to lend their cause more impact ā linking up different struggles, for example, or striking at certain key moments ā are regarded as seizing an unfair advantage, as though itās bad form to overtake another runner in a marathon. By contrast, stockpiling coal to prepare for a minersā strike, as Margaret Thatcher did, is simple common sense. The ideal, surely, is to have a strike which has no effect whatsoever, rather like having a baby that never bawls or a brand of chocolate that is both delicious and slimming.
Few civil rights have been at once so respected in theory and abhorred in practice. The first question a TV journalist tends to ask isnāt āWhatās the cause of the dispute?ā but āHow can we stop it?ā Thereās an entrenched assumption that strikes, like salt or smoking, are bad in themselves ā an assumption not shared by those who might benefit enough from them to switch the heating back on from time to time. You canāt ban strikes because thatās what fascist societies do, but you canāt stomach them either. Fifty years ago, it was customary to decry trade unions as too powerful; but as successive governments have bound them legislatively hand and foot, they have deprived themselves in the process of this reason for harassing them. Not that it was ever a plausible argument in the first place: the muscular capacity of trade unions is nothing compared to the power of capital.
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