Why do people go on strike?
Christopher Booker
Of course it was absurd of a senior ambulance official to describe his colleagues' refusal to answer 999 calls as 'legalised murder'. If you or I see a man struggling in an icy river and we refuse to jump in to save him, we may be contributing to his death by our heartless negligence, but we are scarcely liable to a charge of hemicide. Nevertheless, it has been possible to discern in the public mood towards the present wave of strikes a sense that we have at last reached a considerable watershed in the history of that unrest which has plagued our society over the past decade. And there is no doubt that the action of the ambulance men, and the apparently reckless remarks made last week by Mr Bill Dunn of COHSE Cif it means lives lost, that is how it must be . . . we are fed up of being Cinderellas. This time we are going to the ball') have seemed to many people the most significant indicator of all that some new and highly alarming factor has entered our social expectations.
The ambulance men's apparent indifference to human life has seemed to sum up the feeling, growing since the firemen's strike of 1977 and recent events at various hospitals, that workers have broken through some important barrier in abandoning their sense of common humanity. As with the members of the TGWU who seem prepared to break any rules, or inflict any economic disaster on their fellow-citizens to make their point, it appears that, short as yet of large-scale physical violence, there are no longer any bounds which strikers are prepared to observe. Even the direst sense of poverty has scarcely reduced people to quite so pitiful a state of desperation before. And at such a point we must ask — what is it that has happened to such people?
Over the past fortnight or so, I have occasionally thought back to an experience I had twenty years ago. In the summer of 1958, I worked for a few months as a labourer, helping to build the M.1. Several thousand of us were stuck out in the fields of Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire, working all the daylight hours on Britain's first real motorway. Every week, we would receive a visit from a sad little official of the Transport and General Workers Union, trying to recruit members for his union. The reason why he was sad was that he never had any success at all. My fellow-workers, almost to a man, would have nothing to do with unions. Eventually I felt so sorry for him that I signed on. I became one of Frank Cousins's 1,745,000 block votes. When I left the building industry, I was told that I would continue to be considered a union member until I was again in a position to pay my dues — and as far as I know, Mr Moss Evans may still continue to count me as one of his members to this day.
The point of this diversion is not to reflect on the reasons why I did join the union, but why my fellow-workers did not. They were on the whole a pretty ebullient, independent-,minded crowd. They were earning what, for the time, were huge wages. They had come from all over the country, with virtually the status of self-employed men, to work on a huge project, of national importance, of a kind which had never been seen in Britain before. They had considerable pride in what they were doing, and by and large they unmistakably enjoyed a high degree of self-respect. And here I believe may lie a clue to the real reason for the air of desperation and misery which surrounds so many of the groups of people who are going on strike in Britain today.
Just before Christmas, I heard a NUPE official involved in some hospital dispute uttering on television one of those phrases which stick in the mind because they so obviously mean the very reverse of what the speaker is actually saying. 'The very last thing my members want to do' he said 'is to cause inconvenience to the public'. What he meant, of course, was that, like most strikers these days, the very first thing his members wanted to do was to inconvenience the public — because otherwise, as with the case of the poor old social workers, no one would take a blind bit of notice, and the strike would be just an empty gesture.
In fact, over the past year or two, I have sometimes had the feeling that we are all involved in having to watch a longdrawn-out and rather painful lecture in what used to be called 'civics' — a practical demonstration in just how our enormously complex, technologically-based society works. Group after group. whose contribution to the workings of the machine one normally takes for granted — firemen, hospital porters, sewage workers, gravediggers, lorry drivers — have 'withdrawn their labour' in turn, almost as if they were unconsciously working to a roster, to show how every little cog plays its part in the whole. It has been as if each of them has been trying to say to the rest of us 'look, we exist. Although you normally never give it a thought, you depend on us'. Strike after strike has been a cry for notice, for respect, from people who obviously felt that the rest of society was overlooking them.
Now I know that the overt reason why people go on strike is that they feel underpaid, that they are 'slipping behind', that they cannot make ends meet — in short that they want more wages. But this in itself is not enough to explain just why people are so ready to go on strike these days, why the atmosphere surrounding disputes has become so poisonous, or why there are still certain groups (such as a good many nurses) who are obviously more reluctant to throw their weight around than others. And the real clue to why people go on strike is that, deep down, for all sorts of reasons of which lack of money is only one, they have lost their self-respect.
It was no accident that, in the early Seventies, one of the groups who should have shown the new mood of desperation earlier and more violently than most was the miners. Over the previous decade, the Robe ns 'modernisation' programme had cut the three-quarters of a million men working in the mines to only a third of that figure. Coal-mining, once one of the proudest, most self-respecting of trades, was obviously heading fast down the social, economic and financial scale — to the point where the miners eventually felt they had to lash out to prove how important and manly and necessary to society they still were. Again it is no accident that the most intractable of the unions in the Times dispute are the printers, members of the NGA — not because they were underpaid (they are one of the most prosperous groups in the working community), but because the impending shadow of the 'new technology' is telling them that they are no longer necessary. Indeed the newspaper industry provides a classic demonstration of how little industrial unrest is necessarily connected with financial need. Collecting wage packets labelled 'Mickey Mouse' or 'Duke Hussey', regardless of how many fivers are inside them, is scarcely a way for a man to feel self-respect, and it should not be surprising that his unconscious self-contempt boils over in ceaseless resentment at the system which has brought him to such a pass.
In fact if you look at the areas of activity which have been most prone to disruption and unrest in recent years, you will see that they fall into certain obvious catagories. One is large industrial organisations, like Ford's, where workers have to perform mechanical tasks in anthills which reduce their individual identity to nothing (it was noticeably not, for instance, the small bakeries which were affected by last year's bread dispute). A second is industries which have been run-down, which have lost their old certainty of importance and prosperity — e.g. the docks. A third comprises all those people who feel that they are at the bottom of some heap, in which all the importance and sense of purpose appear to belong to others — e.g. manual workers in hospitals. A fourth simply comprises anyone who feels ultimately that his work is trivial and mean
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