” The target of this campaign of strikes is now obvious” Posted on February 7th
Whether these unofficial strikes now fizzle out or not, they represent the first time since the economic crisis went critical that any section of the British public has moved beyond the role of passive spectators and taken matters into its own hands. And although the walkouts are illegal under anti-union legislation, such is the strength of the workforce and public support that employers have so far stayed well away from the courts.
via Seumas Milne
I’m so sure about this - the article is excellent, but I think we need to use a broader lens to examine the reaction against the recession. We have to see the university workers, teachers, public services and postal services actions over the last 2 years as part of this long tail of struggles over the financial crisis. The crisis didn’t happen over night - it built over 2 - 3 years. The attacks on the public services was just one part of capital and state reorientating itself for the struggle to come. From minor struggles to strikes and wildcats, there are rumblings out there. The significance of this moment though, is that the wildcats went where up against the European Court of Justice and against anti-union law. Against the law and against an attempt to increase profit during the ression at a European structural level of political economy. It is important in being one of the first European wildcats - against European laws.
Edit: via the Financial Times:
But companies working in the sector state privately that the attraction of using foreign rather than British workers is that they are much less likely to stage illegal strikes. There is an industry tradition of staging “sympathy stoppages” on the death of a worker’s relative or a retired worker – a site in Southampton suffered a limited walkout for this reason only last month.
British workers are also seen as being prone to walk out over problems with site facilities, such as hot-water boiler breakdowns. Tea breaks – protected in an industry-wide agreement with the unions – are another “huge bone of contention” and had led to walkouts, one insider states.
The engineering construction sector, at the heart of last week’s dispute at the Lindsey oil refinery, lost more than 22,400 days to unofficial action in the year to November. This equates to almost one day for every one of the roughly 25,000 blue-collar workers employed – about 32 times worse than the average for the UK workforce as a whole for the same period.
The Unite union rejected any suggestion that “British disease” of strike-prone workers was behind the unrest in the sector. The union said many of the unofficial walkouts stemmed from accidents. The perceived reluctance by non-UK companies to use local workers had “got to do with costs, in terms of circumventing national agreements”, a Unite official told the FT.
The lesson being, of course, never under-estimate the importance of imposing discipline and breaking worker solidarity in business strategy.
