IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-16923-8_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Britain’s Strike ‘Problem’

In: Workers and the New Depression

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Taylor

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Taylor, 1982. "Britain’s Strike ‘Problem’," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Workers and the New Depression, chapter 6, pages 150-170, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-16923-8_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-16923-8_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-16923-8_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.