Sept 17 postal ballot hugely significant after 12 year high in strike days
It is a fairly safe bet the 160,000 men and women who deliver our letters will vote to walk out over pay this month in their own postal ballot. When the returned slips are counted on September 17, the result will pose a major headache for Royal Mail bosses and Patricia Hewitt who, as trade secretary, is custodian of the publicly owned service.
The picketing of sorting offices and the downing of bags would also confirm the return of the strike as a prominent feature of UK industrial relations. Official statistics recorded 1,323,000 working days spent on strike last year, the highest since 1990, as firefighters and local government staff lit the braziers. The total was more than double the 525,100 counted in 2001 and over twice an annual average of 496,000 in the previous decade.
Last year's figure remains small beer compared with the eras when epic clashes between labour and capital dominated domestic politics. In the 1980s, an annual average of 7.2m days were spent on strike, although that was a fall on the 12.9m in the 1970s. Strikes occupied 24m days alone in 1972 (45% in the pits) during Ted Heath's spell in Downing Street and 27m in 1984 (this time 80% in the pits) when Margaret Thatcher took on the miners.
Upwards of 29m working days were spent on strike in 1979, a postwar record, and the total is regularly, if wrongly, pinned on the so-called winter of discontent during the fag end of Jim Callaghan's administration.
Just over half of the 29m strike days were, in fact, accumulated during a national engineering dispute after Mrs Thatcher had moved into No 10 as employees, in what was then still a sizeable manufacturing sector, demanded a shorter working week.
Even those years appear relatively harmonious, however, compared with the big daddy of industrial conflagrations – the 1926 General Strike and lengthy miners' dispute of the same year – which saw an incredible 162m days spent away or locked out from work.
Yet the 12-year strike high of last year may prove significant as employers and union leaders both predict an upsurge in industrial action. Were the first national firefighters' strike for a quarter of a century, and the first-ever joint national strike by blue and white collar council workers, the first concrete evidence of a new wave of militancy? That is certainly the view of the 370 big companies, collectively employing 1.7m people, and 22 trade unions covered by a survey released this week by the law firm DLA. A third of public sector employers, half of those in the private sector and two-thirds in the recently privatised sector, are braced for a surge in strike ballots and stoppages in the coming 12 months.
Such a forecast would mean more lucrative work for lawyers, advising managers on how to exploit loopholes in complex balloting regulations to scupper strikes, but it may also be correct. A new, assertive, more confident generation of left-leaning trade union general secretaries was elected to lead their members rather than hold them back.
Politically, the shine is off New Labour. The new breed of union leaders is prepared to challenge privatisation and pay restraint, dismissive of warnings from the Labour hierarchy that they could let the Tories back in.
Economically, skill shortages and near full-employment in large parts of the country have exposed as hollow threats to sack strikers. Industrially, the heavily promoted concept of social partnership is breaking down as the competing interests of employees and employers underline how both sides do not always share common goals.
The staff of collapsed no-win, no-fee personal injury firm The Accident Group found themselves with no-job, no-pay when they were sacked without warning by text message in May before a strike ballot was discussed.
British Airways check-in staff walked out on unofficial strike at Heathrow in July in order to pre-empt management plans to impose electronic timekeeping.
An analysis of days spent on strike last year published in June's Labour Market Trends by an official in the office for national statistics noted that, although the 1,323,000 working days was a 12-year high, the number of stoppages was the lowest on record. There were just 146 labour disputes in 2002 that resulted in stoppages, with just two of the disputes, the firefighters and a one-day council strike, accounting for around 60% of the strike days.
Pay disputes contributed 89% of the total days; working conditions and supervision another 8%. Expressed as a proportion of potential working days, just one in every 3,900 was spent on strike. The apparent contradiction – strikes simultaneously up and down – is acknowledged by the experts behind this week's report. Mark Leach, co-author of the DLA survey, says: "Official statistics for days lost are the highest in over a decade, but fewer strikes in total have contributed to heavier losses.
"With a call by certain union leaders for coordinated action, it's possible we will see a greater intensity to strike action in relation to issues such as pay, pensions and public sector reform."
Perhaps trade unions are better organised; calling and financing only disputes they calculate they can win.
The first six months of 2003 saw 186,000 days lost on strike – comfort to those who hope that last year's jump was an aberration. The answer may lie with Royal Mail bosses and Ms Hewitt – any strike by the 160,000 who deliver our letters suggests that something really has changed out there.
