Pickets of privilege

Treatment for that once-virulent condition, the British disease of strikes, has largely been successful. The number of working days lost to industrial action in the first ten months of last year was the second-lowest since records began. Pay and conditions have been relentlessly improving. Since the Winter of Discontent in 1979, the average worker’s disposable income has almost doubled. And no thanks to pressure from trade unions: the steady progress comes from the transformative effects of an open economy and a free market.

In the 1970s and early 1980, it was miners, steel workers, railwaymen, bin men, and British Leyland car workers who earned the worst reputations for trade union militancy. Striking was almost entirely associated with blue-collar workers standing around braziers in their donkey jackets.

Now things couldn’t be more different. Of the above groups, only railway workers retain a reputation for industrial action, and almost all strikes are carried out by privileged white-collar public sector staff. Almost half of the days lost to strikes in 2014 were in public-sector administration, with most of the others in education and in health and social care. With the junior doctors’ strike and a walkout by teachers in West Dumbartonshire, it is a trend which is sure to continue.

Professionals have grown more militant, but unions have not grown more professional. As with the union barons of yore, the British Medical Association first sought to spread misinformation. First, by publishing a fake ‘pay calculator’ which wrongly suggested that doctors’ pay would be cut by almost a third. Then the BMA put junior doctors in front of cameras to claim that they are going to suffer ‘longer hours and pay cuts’. It just isn’t true.

The new arrangements were always going to balance cuts to overtime pay with a healthy 11 per cent uplift in basic pay (already, the total pay for those not in the first two years of training averages £53,000).