Who are the strikers fooling? – UnHerd

Jesters exist to tell unacceptable truths

The tide of industrial action rolls steadily on. Even physiotherapists are threatening to bring the country to its knees, rather than performing their usual task of setting it on its feet. Next, surely, it will be vicars, who will abandon their sermons, rip off their vestments and refuse to bury your grandmother. All this, needless to say, involves a good deal of inconvenience. You might, for example, have to stand for hours in the freezing cold holding a placard and worrying about the pay you are losing in doing so. People do such things anyway, however, since it’s inconvenient to have to walk because you can’t afford public transport, or take a second job in order to provide your children with a decent breakfast.

There’s also some lesser inconvenience to what the media calls the public, but it doesn’t usually last for long. A lot of cleaners and shelf-stackers have to put up with the inconvenience of being poor for years on end, whereas some stockbrokers are enraged by a mere two or three days of cancelled trains. The public is a mythical entity, apparently quite distinct from nurses, postmen, railway workers, junior barristers and the like. These people cause social disruption, and thus can’t be members of the public. Members of the public are the objects of such disruption, not the agents of it. A CEO is a member of the public but an ambulance driver is not.

Strikes are double-edged swords, which hurt those who deploy them. When a manager sacks or disciplines an employee, only the employee suffers, whereas workers who take industrial action may have to diminish their already slim resources in order to try to increment them. Strikes are also purely negative strategies, and trade unions largely defensive bodies. We’re a long way from peasants with pitchforks marching on the lord’s castle. Bosses have a number of positive ways of exercising power over their employees: firing them, slashing their pay, cutting their tea breaks, imposing longer hours, speeding up their work and so on. Unions, by contrast, have the single option of withdrawing their labour, which is hardly a revolutionary move. Like those who practise civil disobedience, all they can do is take a stand and cry “Enough!”, aware that they will then be travestied as wreckers and hooligans who are holding the country to ransom.

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Who are the strikers fooling? – UnHerd