A strike for justice, or a race to the booty?
From British coalminers to Hollywood scriptwriters: strikes and their striking consequences
Image: Saltley Gate pit, 1972. It would become the Battle of Saltley Gate (from The Morning Star Online).
My early development years were spent in a Britain that knew two names: Wilson and Heath. My late teens and twenties knew one: Thatcher. And one word interwove through all those years: strike. By the end of my 20s, the word strike had become a thing of the past. How glad we all were.
Having led Britain through the mid-to-late 1960s, Harold Wilson resumed the premiership after Edward Heath’s 1970-1974 administration for three short years before bowing out of leadership politics in 1976. He was succeeded by James Callaghan, who lost the 1979 election to Margaret Thatcher.
In 1972, the lights went out — not all over Europe, but certainly ’round our way. The miners’ unions had gone on strike, which was affecting the supply of coal to power stations, whose workers, out of sympathy, refused to handle it. In some sectors, a four- then three-day working week was introduced and domestic power supplies went off at around seven o’clock at night — right in the middle of Star Trek. The candle industry did a brisk trade. Luckily, we cooked on gas and, I was assured, they would never cut that off because it was too dangerous to do so, because of taps left open when it came back on.
We played card games like Casino and Black Maria by candle light and gathered together around the dining table – like real families used to in the days of old, when there was no electricity to cut off. It was vaguely romantic, in that twee, olde worlde sense. And it was vaguely a pain in the backside — especially missing the second half of Star Trek.
Harold Wilson’s politics stemmed from a visit to London when he was eight years old: he was photographed standing in front of the entrance to 10 Downing Street and, two years later, he stated his ambition to one day be prime minister. That he would fulfil that ambition is perhaps less obvious than the diminutive Harold might have thought. His entrance to Oxford, a sine qua non for the office of prime minister, was secured with an exhibition and a county grant and, while his tutors praised his astounding ability to assimilate and order facts in his mind, his mind was lacking in original thought of its own.
He remained true to his Yorkshire roots, never abandoning his brogue accent, was ever associated with smoking a pipe, which he didn’t in private, and famously honoured the Beatles with MBEs, which they repaid him for handsomely by ribbing him in their song The Taxman, and not by accident — it was written after the gong’s award. His wife, Mary, greatly disliked the life of a politician’s wife, and it was declining mental and colonic health, coupled with his long-suffering wife’s insistence, that saw him bow out of backbench politics in 1983. Impersonator Mike Yarwood did a passable take on Wilson, and helped engrain into the public’s mind that Harold Wilson was a great prime minister, although no one was quite sure what he was great for. Winning the 1966 World Cup wasn’t quite his doing; nor was the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest, attributable more to Sandie Shaw singing a song she hated, or didn’t hate, depending who asked her. Not sending troops to Vietnam was perhaps a greater achievement, but reneguing on not devaluing the pound did Wilson little credit, even if what he said was true — he didn’t devalue the one in your pocket.
Harold Wilson’s 1960s governments did book huge advancements, to which credit needs to be given: the Open University, the Post Office Girobank, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, redressing the balance of trade and, more controversially, rejigging tertiary education opportunities with the, initially, forced conversion of grammar schools into comprehensives. Margaret Thatcher would later, as Minister for Education, lift the element of compulsion that Wilson had imposed on local authorities in that regard. The controversy of comprehensive schooling lingers on to this day: an acquaintance of mine, who is an ardent socialist, Labour supporter and trade-unionist, sent her own son, much to the surprise of some of her circle, to a fee-paying private school and thus, for my money, abrogated her innermost principles in doing so. But principles, for what they ever were worth, have fallen elsewhere by the wayside since those halcyon days of ideological politics.
Nineteen seventy-two was a sad year in Britain. The post-war Labour governments had pretty much nationalised all of major industry. The iron and steel industry had been privatised by the Tories in 1951 and, in 1967, Labour renationalised it as the British Steel Corporation. British Railways, formed in 1948 out of the Big Four private railway companies, themselves forged out of the partly ragged remnants after the First World War in the 1921 Grouping, was revamped and remodelled in the later 60s as British Rail and subsequently lost many by-lines and even major arteries as the result of Dr Beeching’s Axe. By 1970, the transition from steam to diesel and electric was complete, with electrification going ahead at full steam, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, on main lines hither and thither.
What the railways had run on was also nationalised. Having been taken under public control during the war, the coal industry became the people’s property in 1947, under Clement Attlee. It remained so until 1987, when the British Coal Corporation took over from the National Coal Board and proceeded to reprivatise what, for that short interregnum, had been the people’s property. People’s property portended two truths in the people’s eye: the axing of stuff, be it jobs or railway lines; and strikes.
The National Coal Board’s period was marked by two hard-hitting strikes, in 1972, and again in 1984-85. The strikes were a test of political will, and of social cohesion. Political will won the day on both occasions and, if reprivatisation was what would debouch from the British Coal Corporation’s 1987 act, social cohesion was what lost, especially in the mining communities that had been founded, grown and flourished with coal as their very raison d’être. The wave of privatisations that were enacted under Thatcher in the 1980s — in water, electricity, gas, railways, oil, radioactive chemicals, ferries, aerospace, cars and housing — caused pause for thought, both at the time and now. Former prime minister Harold MacMillan criticised the moves at the time as selling off the family silver. Some industries have proved their privatised success only with the aid of government subsidies, thus effectively privatising control, but not financial responsibility.
Strikes came to be indelibly associated with nationalised industry. With a government at the other side of the negotiating table, and bottomless pockets, in the view of some of those who viewed the workers’ demands, it seemed that strikers had an all too powerful bargaining position, to assuage which the government could offer endless amounts of public money. With that view ensconced in the public mind, nationalised sectors started to earn the derision of the privately employed general public. When Thatcher embarked on dismantling nationalised industries and placing their management in private hands, it was widely believed that strikes had disappeared along with the public ownership aspect.
My own father, who was a diehard Tory, would say, towards the end of the 90s, that an industry whose very activity is the lifeblood of the nation should never be sold off into private hands. If ever a worm turned, he was it.
Belgium’s railways were founded as a nationalised concern, with today’s Société nationale des Chemins de fer belges (founded 1926) succeeding to the original Belgian State Railways of 1834. It has never been privatised, but, then, Belgium’s taxpayers have never been far from its operating expenses, if they have been very far from its capitalisation. The trains run notoriously off time — in fact, even if not especially new, Belgium runs the latest trains in the whole of Europe. But I doubt whether privatisation would make them run to time, albeit that was a firmly held belief when train services were privatised in the United Kingdom, where the connect between capitalisation and running to time is likewise elusive.
The essence of privatisation is to introduce market competition into an industry, and thus impel it to offer the best service at the lowest price. But with only one set of rails between town A and town B, that philosophy devolves into take it or leave it. The South-Eastern Railway and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway in England famously vied with each other to the point that neither serviced a town without the other laying parallel routes to compete. They eventually, after virtually holding each other in mutual strangleholds for many decades, forged an alliance in 1899 and, for 24 blissful years, enjoyed a spirit of cooperation as the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway Committee, before being grouped in 1921-3. The clear lesson of the SECR was that neither outright competition nor privatisation is an ideal solution for railways. Private railways should run without subsidy and, if they do that, the least of our concerns should be whether they run to time.
In 1972, prime minister Edward Heath faced a revolt by colliery workers, thus ushering in the period in which card playing became one of my major occupations. The strike was called by the National Union of Mineworkers in a scenario that had simmered since unofficial strike action had been taken in 1969. Miners’ pay had failed to keep pace with that of workers in manufacturing, and, in respect of that, Lord Wilberforce, whose inquiry recommended the 27% pay rise that ended the dispute after seven weeks, said, “We know of no other job in which there is such a combination of danger, health hazard, discomfort in working conditions, social inconvenience and community isolation.” He didn’t and, frankly, nor do I. The Belgian government’s response to the 1956 Bois du Cazier mining disaster, in which 262 miners died (“Tutti cadaveri,” one rescuer was heard to exclaim – All dead bodies), 136 of whom were Italian guest workers, had been to switch recruitment tactics from Italy to Morocco; but only lip service was paid to the hazard of fire that had consumed its employees.
For seven weeks in 1972, Britons saw violence in their news reports. And one death, a picketer struck by a lorry trying to circumvent his picket. We endured misery, in a sharp cold snap, and we lived life as the Victorians would have done, but without their lack of expectation of something better. In many ways, it was the same sentiment as was shared by the strikers.
I struck last month. Some years ago, I had done a large translation job for a German agency company and, it transpired, they were unhappy with it. The merits of the translation are really neither here nor there. What became our dispute was how the disgruntlement had been dealt with. For the perceived errors in the translation had been reworked by the ultimate client, using another translator. If there had been errors in it, I was sorry for that. The job had been done at such a rushed pace, it included Christmas Day, worked non-stop from before dawn to well after dusk. Time pressure placed on an intellectual creation will always, I fear, result in a sub-standard work.
Be that as it may, the agency’s standard terms included a direct reference to Germany’s Civil Code, section 323, where a complaint of poor performance must, in order to found a claim to damages, be notified and an opportunity given to make good the fault. It’s a claim made by the agency vis-à-vis its own customer. Here, the customer made what they thought were the due changes and demanded a discount. The agency, in turn, demanded a discount from me: 33% of the price.
I raised an objection and, after some toing and froing, they came back with an offer to reduce the fee by 20%, rather than 33%. After engaging the assistance of Dr Volker Triebel, an arbitrator for whom I had worked in Germany, who wrote a letter vociferously defending my position, the German agency paid the full account and I knew I’d not hear from them again. Thing is, I’m not very sure I’d have heard from them again if I’d agreed to a 33% reduction in the fee. What the episode brought home to me is how powerless one is when faced with a fait accompli. The fait, once accompli, can be hard to reverse; and persuading him who accomplished the fait that he was wrong to do so makes you, not him, the difficult one.
I was recently engaged by a Belgian firm to do distance teaching of English for them. Their instructions are to complete the time sheet online and render a bill at the end, not of the project, but of the month. This I did. There were three elements: the services rendered, a software fee I’d needed to pay to conduct online meetings, and the VAT. The firm responded that it was not VAT-registered and therefore would not pay the VAT. This reasoning is not based on the law, however, and I said so. Eventually, after two weeks of not doing anything, the time for the bill’s payment came, in respect of which I’d been assured at interview, “We don’t keep our teachers hanging around for their money.”
The VAT was the problem. They hadn’t budgeted it and wanted me to pay it myself, effectively regarding the hourly rate as including the VAT. The hourly rate was less than 30 euros and removing the VAT would leave it at a shade under 24 euros. A compromise was offered, in which the rate was massaged to come out at a final rate, including VAT, of 32 euros, a solution that would’ve meant they pay a bit of the VAT, and I effectively pay the other bit.
Half-way houses are so called because they offer a meeting point toward which neither party must trek the entire distance. But they are neither the one point of departure nor the other, and I felt this one lacked principle, so I said so, as I’d said in response to that German agency’s offer of 20% off my bill: It is expedient, but it lacks principle. They have now paid the bill, but whether they will offer further work remains, in my own mind, in doubt. I applied a simple principle — of law, not even of my own making — which says that VAT is paid by the ultimate customer, not by the supplier. And applying that principle created a difficulty, and I don’t much see why it should. But I think the Belgian firm will, and will take the view that it is not the law that was unfair to them, but me.
Forcing the stand-off on the question of whether a recipient of services is entitled to force me to pay their VAT could only come from withdrawing the services; so, for one day, I struck. There was consternation among the students, the students’ own organisation (a job-seekers’ agency), and there was, at last, communication on the reason for non-payment. It took a strike to achieve that, and to achieve a retraction of the firm’s policy of not paying VAT. It cost me 3 hours of feeable work. In the end, I would have made more money if I’d just agreed to their compromise. Financially, it was folly to strike. People don’t strike for the money; I really don’t think so. They strike where everyone strikes: when the iron is hot.
Iron never gets hotter than where one has the full conviction of having been ridden roughshod over by someone else who won’t accept the rules of the game. Who won’t recognise that fairness is as valuable a principle in relations as any legal commitment. Whatever money is worth, whether in your pocket, your purse, or anywhere else, the dignity of living to a principle will never be outstripped by money in terms of its value to the individual; not and still be worthy of being called dignity.
Today, they are striking in Hollywood, both writers and actors. The strikers are in negotiation with the body appointed for the employers, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Whether the strikers say they have withdrawn from negotiations or not, that is the body with which they are in negotiation. They are on strike because they think they are unfairly treated, and the strike will end once the strikers are satisfied with what the strike achieves. And it’s commonly conceived that where a strike settles, that point is just and fair. Both striker and employer argue the justice of their stance. One of them is wrong. And both of them are wrong to believe the strike will achieve justice. For the strike is not predicated on a position laid down somewhere, not even in law; it is predicated on the desires of the parties to the negotiations. And negotiations never achieve justice; what they achieve is that which is acceptable to the negotiating parties: a deal.
Negotiation is the art of pleading poverty, which may exist or be non-existent. Employers plead poverty in the sense that the financial demands of their workers would cripple them, that the pay demanded is beyond their means. This is backed by a claim that the service performed by the supplier or worker isn’t worth to the service recipient what is claimed as payment for it. So that, even if the employer wouldn’t be crippled by the additional cost, the additional cost is overpayment for the service rendered. The worker retorts that it is indeed worth the additional cost, and sets out to test that assertion by withdrawing the service: let the employer now see how much value there is in what the worker does.
The value in anything lies in how easy it would be to get someone else to do it. One factor at the heart of the Hollywood strike is artificial intelligence, and its ability to reproduce actors who are even deceased; if this isn’t the first such dispute, it’s certainly one that, with cinema and TV audiences assembled along its side-lines, has attention for the question of how far AI might replace established trades in a given sector. Like a blockbuster of olden times, it has the public in its thrall.
The public are concerned by the negotiations, but they are not party to them. If the negotiations reach a settlement that has the effect of increasing subscription rates for public viewers, the public may find that justified or may be outraged. Perhaps some might even stop being customers due to the increased price. Like with a railway line from town A to town B, however, what is the competitive factor impelling the price of a viewing of a given favourite TV series? The viewer will decide to view based solely on the price of viewing it, and cannot decide to purchase an alternative, if the series is available on a certain channel and nowhere else. All negotiations ultimately have outside interests who have no voice. And, hence, negotiations never achieve true justice, and not even deemed justice, as the principle of universal suffrage would endeavour to persuade us.
The price of a product is determined by its availability, its desirability, its quality, the manpower that goes into producing it and its indispensability to the user. But, as recent trends have shown, the relative roles played by these factors can vary: it is indispensability to the user that is now a major factor in how to price something. Profit is the reason we go into business, and a business that promises no profit will not be embarked upon; and the chance that a business will not produce profit is called something that is not even in the business plan: risk. Risk is the number one factor that dictates everything, and yet it has no value. The risk of a strike in Hollywood was discounted as having no value. Now that it has been called, it will have a value, an historic one, but it’s now too late to do anything about that value, and its value will augment as the days of strike go on.
I learned when I was younger that a lawyer’s prime duty is to keep their client out of court. If that is so, an employer’s prime duty should be to keep their workers from striking. And a politician’s should be to prevent his country from going to war. But you can only keep a client out of court by threatening to take the other side precisely there. Wars are prevented by threatening war. And threats of strikes can prevent strikes. What it needs in each of these cases is for the intransigent to see the value of your claim — to thereby ward off the imminent war. But piracy is war, with or without the threat of piracy: it is a gung-ho race to the booty, and cares little or nothing for the collateral damage it incurs along the way.
My own strike was a victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one. The 1972 miners’ strike achieved a 27% pay rise and was victorious. Although the price paid by Britain’s public to get the National Coal Board to recognise the duty it bore as confirmed by Lord Wilberforce has never been counted; and the death of the picketer hit by a lorry was by far not the only death attributable to the industrial action. If the motorcyclist who crashed when the street lights all turned off one night could have known that the breakdown in negotiations with the National Union of Mineworkers would, within a month, portend his death, how far would he have urged the government to settle?
Profit is not the reason for going into business. The reason for going into business is gainful employment at a fair rate. Business is employment, and employment is purpose; the purpose of an individual cannot be divorced from the purpose of the business that serves the society within which he exists as that individual. Profit is secondary, and an economic system that upends that ideal upends the society in which it puts its own ideal to work; it forces its ugly foot into Cinderella’s glass slipper, and, from afar, all will laud and admire it for its grace and elegance. But within the slipper, the bunions are already starting to grow.
If Hollywood’s strikers have justice in their claim, they won’t get it, but they’ll get a deal. The employers likewise. But if either of them is a pirate, there will be no deal; simply a race to the booty.