Industry | 2010.08.13
Strikes are worth having, regardless of the outcome | Zoe Williams
Industrial action cannot be dismissed as \'old politics\' – it keeps the mechanics and the muscle of conflict alive
As fast as you can say "co-ordinated strike action", people start talking about bins not being emptied. I don\'t understand it. At Christmas the country shuts down for a fortnight and no one goes on about it then.
The first wave of protest against public sector cuts – on 20 October, to coincide with George Osborne\'s spending review – will involve teachers, civil servants, and health and transport workers, with another day of action on the 23rd (actually a Saturday so, in strike terms, the equivalent of trying to start a fight with 10 friends holding you back, shouting "Leave it!"). The rest of the details of the "autumn of discontent" will be thrashed out at next month\'s TUC conference, which will be less of a talking shop and more of a muster point.
The problem with strikes is the memories they unearth – though not of overflowing rubbish. (I think it\'s like one of those family anecdotes you just assume must be true because you\'ve heard it so often.) No, the crucial memory here is a void: I cannot remember one strike that has worked. I know some strikes have been less catastrophically bad for the strikers than others, but I can\'t think of one that has been an unmitigated success. It\'s instructive that Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, said that this autumn would be the biggest public mobilisation since the poll tax riots of 1990. What a beautiful moment that was for mass protest. And it worked (unless you count the council tax). But it wasn\'t a strike; Crow didn\'t want to mention past industrial action, as this would remind people that it never works.
Of course, there are strikes that you could call successful, but since the terms of the negotiation are usually that nobody dances down the steps afterwards, they never come across as such. The CWU deal for postal workers , brokered just three months ago, delivered quite a good deal for the strikers. Yet when I picture strikes, it is always as two totally intransigent sides, whose opposition becomes increasingly personal, and whose positions harden in the act of fighting one another. I picture Willie Walsh and Derek Simpson , or Thatcher and Scargill : people congenitally incapable of compromise.
Furthermore, the rearguard action launched by the Fawcett Society on behalf of the women affected by the impending cuts looks much more credible. The logic is straightforward: an Equality Act impact assessment was signed into law – in retrospect this looks hilariously mischievous – the week the general election was called. Since cuts to public services will affect women more than men – and since women, the disabled, the elderly and minorities make more use of services than do able-bodied white men in their prime – there will inevitably be a case to answer. As an impediment to cuts, this looks a lot more elegant, modern and effective than strike action. It\'s already on the statute books, so no need for any rhetoric about what is and isn\'t fair: no windy position-taking, no passion required.
The only kind of passion that is acceptable in modern politics is to say: "I\'m passionate". To manifest it, to shout and hector, to appeal to a voter\'s humanity, this is all de trop . We all know this about Westminster – that everybody\'s a Blairite, that Blairites admire Thatcher, that Thatcherites want to be more like Polly Toynbee , that a lot of these handles are picked up whimsically for a season, like new handbags, and convey no solid ideology.
But it has permeated the outskirts, as I found this past week when I was looking at thinktanks to find one from each point on the political spectrum. But I could not get one to say, solidly: "Yes, we are on the right/left"; or even tacitly to be held to represent the right or left; or even to accept the tag of "centre right" or "centre left". This is now a fledged orthodoxy – that the old politics, where we state our differences rather than trying to tease out similarities, is unsophisticated.
The vexatious fact remains that we are not all on the same side. I have not always been a great supporter of unions; some of them fight harder for their male members than their female ones (a matter of public record). And yet that backdrop of unresolved sexism offers a useful comparison of the difference between employees who have fought, in an old-fashioned, oppositional, zero-sum way, and those who have not.
Where unions have clung on to benefits, have demanded that payscale adjustments be made up for in bonuses , their members have ended up with more money. This is because the employer and the employee are on opposite sides. The political language that eschews diametric opposition, preferring conciliation and compromise, will always favour the employer because it favours the status quo. The employer controls the status quo; the employees are in charge of disruption, but only once their power is amassed.
So there is a value to industrial action that is innate to the process, regardless of the outcome: it keeps the vocabulary, the mechanics and the muscle of conflict alive. These are things we\'re going to have more and more use for.
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