The right to strike

I was genuinely shocked when attending Radio Four’s Any Questions in Camden on Friday night when Vince Cable, the cuddly face of liberalism, came out in favour of banning strike action - gaining the honour of getting the first boos of the night.

Specifically he said that workers in "essential public services" should not be allowed to strike. He was pressed on it and was adamant that this was what he believed. He seemed to think this meant both rail workers and BA cabin staff, both of whom work for private companies, so it seems they are essential enough to take away thier basic human rights, but not essential enough to take the industries into public hands.

While he doesn't seem to have said this in print (although I haven't scoured the entire internet), writing in the Daily Mail Cable says that "We are back to old-fashioned industrial conflict of a kind that we thought, and hoped, had gone." He compares the strikes to "union militants who once ruled the roost in Britain’s strike-prone industries and helped to wreck them."

I think Cable is making two mistakes here. The first one is that he is simply wrong to say the industrial disputes of 2010 are in any way comparable to the disputes of the 70's or 80's. The scale and quality of the strikes are quite different and since the mid-90's we have seen a dramatic decline in industrial disputes.

The number of strikes days the year before Labour came to power was 1.3 million while in 2009 there were less than half a million strike days. Union membership today is dwarfed by the size of the unions three decades ago. Personally I think we strike far too little and far too few of us are members of trade unions, but that's by the by.

His other mistake though is this fake even-handedness where he says both sides have a case and both sides are at fault - so let's outlaw strikes. This would put the employer in a position where they can run riot over their workforce who would have been completely disarmed, so not quite as neutral as we first thought.

It may have escaped Vince's attention but slave labour was abolished a little while ago and it is a human right to choose not to work. To tell people that they must work, no matter what the provocation, no matter what the justice of your case, is to encourage employers to be intransigent and arrogant beyond anything we normally see in the 21st century.

Industrial action, up to and including strike action is the only bulwark working people have against a dictatorship in the workplace. Employees have to be able to take *collective* action because the employer can take *collective* liberties with the workforce each and every day.

Whilst it's to be regreted that people wont be able to travel by train on the day of the rail strike, if we make strikes illegal we are effectively chaining people to their desks and work stations for the sake of our own convenience. That's a narrow vision because today it's them, tomorrow it's you.

The rail workers and BA staff took a clear democratic decision that it was necessary to withdraw their labour. We should support their right to take that decision even if we don't think they're right on this occasion. However, it seems to me that they are right to strike and I'd recommend reading up on their cases at the RMT and UNITE websites.