Britain’s Strike ‘Problem’

Robert Taylor

Chapter 6 in Workers and the New Depression, 1982, pp 150-170 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Britain has won a reputation during the past twenty-five years for being a strike-prone nation. The willingness of workers to take disruptive forms of industrial action in pursuit of a wage demand or to remedy a grievance is regarded by many people (including trade unionists themselves) as a manifestation of Britain’s so-called ‘disease’. Certainly much of our media (particularly television and the popular tabloid newspapers) spotlight stoppages and often convey the impression that the country suffers from a peculiarly virulent form of labour militancy. ‘For a number of years our industrial relations image has tended to create the impression that British industry is “riddled” with strikes’, argued a 1978 study carried out by the Department of Employment.1 ‘We can ill afford an exaggerated industrial relations image which would tend to impede export orders and inhibit inward investment by contributing to decisions not to trade with or invest in the United Kingdom’. Industrial disruption is seen as ‘bad news’, ensuring lost production and the further impoverishment of society. Yet editorial denunciations about the strike-happy British worker remain no substitute for a careful and dispassionate scrutiny of the facts. Here, as in so many other areas of our industrial relations system, mythology tends to mask a much more complex reality.

Keywords: Manual Worker; Industrial Relation; Late Sixty; Late Seventy; Industrial Relation System (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1982
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-16923-8_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349169238

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-16923-8_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().