Uk strikes and why we aren't seeing a repeat of the '˜Winter of discontent'

For anyone caught up in Monday’s Tube strike in London it was a miserable start to the working week.

Crowds of commuters packed pavements and a railway station had to be evacuated because of overcrowding caused by the 24-hour strike. Tube staff walked out on Sunday in a row over ticket office closures which had the knock-on effect of clogging up many roads around the capital as people tried to get to work.

And this was just the start. The country remained in the grip of industrial unrest yesterday as strikes involving Southern Railway train drivers and British Airways cabin crew caused further upheaval for travellers and commuters.

Southern’s 300,000 passengers were worst affected, with virtually none of the 2,000-plus daily services running because of a walkout by members of Aslef in a bitter dispute over driver-only trains, while BA was forced to cancel some flights following the start of a 48-hour strike by BA cabin crew over pay.

With these spate of strikes and a big freeze on the way over the next few days you could be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped back in time to 1979 and the so-called “Winter of discontent” when a wave of crippling strikes brought the country to a standstill.

However, Dr Chris Renwick, from the University of York’s Department of History, says we’re a long way from that. He says the key comparison is the number of working days lost. “In 1979, there were 29 million days lost. When we compare this to 2016, where up to 169,000 working days were lost as of November, we can see that these numbers are not massively significant.”

Figures from the Office for National Statistics shows there were more days lost to strikes last year than in 2015, but fewer than in 2014. “If we take a broader historical view, however, industrial action is at one of its lowest rates ever, so any recent apparent increase is largely insignificant when you consider the bigger picture.”

There’s also a long way to go before we reach the largest historical strike action on record back in 1926, the year of the general strike, where 162 million working days were lost.

Although the recent strikes have brought misery to all those who’ve been caught up in them, Dr Renwick says they need to be put in context.

“Whilst we are seeing more industrial unrest than we’ve grown accustomed to in the last few years, we are certainly not living in an era of union activity that threatens the country’s social and economic fabric.”

So why are we seeing this spike in strike action? “The increase has a number of causes, including the current and previous government’s determination to keep public sector wages down as part of its austerity policies.

“But the level of unrest is quite low, largely because trade union membership has declined significantly during the past 30 years and Britain’s laws governing strikes are among the strictest in the developed world. Worries about an apparently sharp recent rise in industrial action are largely a consequence of it being so rare to start with.”

Mark Stuart, Montague Burton Professor of Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations at the University of Leeds, agrees that we aren’t seeing more strikes today.

“If you look at the statistics, the numbers have been pretty low over the past 10 or 15 years, so we’re not seeing a resurgence in the number of strikes compared to the 1970s and 80s.”

He says most disputes still revolve around pay and conditions and the introduction of new technology, as they have in the past.

“I think we’re likely to see strikes continue but they will be set piece events involving one day here and one day there, but there won’t be a return to the levels we’ve seen in the past.”