Strikes are dominating headlines — but the disruption they have caused is trailing historical precedents
15 January 2023
“I know this has been a tough winter,” Rishi Sunak told voters this week in a party political broadcast.
Though conspicuously omitted from the challenges he listed, the strikes by staff from nurses to rail workers are likely the most prominent concern for the Prime Minister as for many Britons.
Official statistics for November, set to be released next week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are expected to corroborate that 2022 has been the year with most working days lost to strikes since 1989. The mounting cost of living has increased pressure by trade unions to adjust stagnating wages to runaway inflation.
An early estimate based on the coverage of strikes by trade-union affiliated publications shows that the number of working days lost in November might have been as high as 600,000. Meanwhile, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a think tank, notes that the figure for December could even exceed 1mn. In total, this would bring the tally of 1,2mn working days lost so far in 2022 up to more than 2mn.
In response, the government has announced a further crackdown on industrial action. The Prime Minister is pushing legislation to limit the scope of walkouts by forcing key public sectors to maintain minimum levels of staffing at all times.
“I fully believe in the unions’ freedom to strike,” Sunak said during a recent visit to a school in London.
“But I also believe that that should be balanced with the right of ordinary working people to go about their lives free from significant disruptions.”
However, historical data shows that the actual extent of strikes in Britain has remained comparatively modest for a crisis year.
Real wages that have been stagnating for over a decade and are expected to decline in 2022 have left British workers with a crunch in living standards greater than during the strike-intensive 1970s and 80s. Nevertheless, the previous three decades were marked by astonishingly little industrial action. Strikes likely cost about 10 times fewer working days in 2022 than in 1979, the peak of the “winter of discontent,” to which current walkouts have been compared.
This is a legacy of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s crackdown on trade unions. In the decades prior, employers in several sectors had, under pressure from unions, agreed to hire only union members. This made it compulsory for many workers to belong to a union, which could also call strikes at any time without a ballot. Determined to break their power, Thatcher introduced a number of bills that effectively banned the practice of forced union membership. Moreover, tightly regulated ballots with a majority of members voting in favour became a requirement for holding a strike. Industrial action in support of other sectors was made illegal. Thatcher’s Conservative successors John Major and David Cameron further tightened legislation.
As a result, union membership as well as the frequency and scope of strikes predictably declined. Economists also point to the economy’s shift away from traditionally unionised sectors, such as manufacturing. Today, less than a quarter of all British employees and merely 13% in the private sector are union members.
As only unions may legally organise strikes, the overwhelming majority of businesses are safe from walkouts. So despite an economic crisis that has affected employees universally, strikes aren’t likely to reach previously seen levels of disruption.
The 2022 strikes have thus remained largely limited to regularly striking sectors as well as companies with public sector history, such as Royal Mail. Transport and education, for example, that were among the main drivers of strike activity last year also consistently featured among the 3 sectors with most working days lost in the last 5 years on record. In that sense 2022 has not been an unusual year — even though the number of strike days and the participation of less active parts of the public sector (such as nurses and ambulance drivers) outstripped recent trends.
But recent developments have also reduced the ripple effect of strikes on the economy and thus their effectiveness as a leverage.
The spread of remote working means fewer businesses depend on employees commuting to work. Gemma Dale, a lecturer in the business school at the Liverpool John Moores University, told PA earlier this year: “I think (home working) isn’t fundamentally damaging (to strikes) but it is something of a problem.”
“(Transport strikes aren’t) going to be causing big business to be putting pressure on the Government in the way that (they) might have done pre-pandemic.”
Certain sectors remain worried, nevertheless.
The bump in travel activity hit Britain’s hospitality particularly hard.
“Analysis shows that the fresh wave of rail strikes set to hit the country in December will cost the (hospitality) sector £1.5 billion on strike days, similar to the level of disruption caused by the Omicron Covid-19 variant last year,” Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, a trade association, wrote in a letter to the UK transport secretary.
Concerns are also raised about the impact on the NHS with strikes delaying surgery and impacting the availability of emergency services.
Still, the CEBR estimates that the direct cost of strikes for the main period of activity will come out at about £1.7bn — a mere 0.1% of expected GDP.
As the impact of walkouts is waning, the public has also been more supportive of strikes than in previous decades.
In September, a solid majority was in favour of upcoming strikes, according to an IPSOS poll. And while that figure shrunk to a narrow majority against industrial action in December, support for nurses (52–60% in different polls), firefighters and postal workers as well as sympathy for railway workers (61%) prevail over opposition.
Meanwhile, there has been nothing to gain for the government. Respondents to various polls showed little support for its handling of the crisis.
Rather than preventing disruption, the impact of strikes on his government’s popularity and Britain’s reputation may thus be the actual challenge for Rishi Sunak.
