Class conflict and the state

National Statistics has today quantified what we've always suspected - that strikes are far more common in the public sector than in the private.
It estimates (pdf) that in the last 10 years, the public sector has accounted for 4.2 million of the 5.8 million working days lost through labour disputes.
So, although the state represents only one-fifth of all employment, it accounts for 72.2% of strikes.
There's a simple reason for this. The state is a monopoly. Monopolies, unlike competitive enterprises, don't care about annoying their "customers" - because they've got nowhere to go. So, neither workers nor managers in the state sector have much incentive to avoid strikes.
Bosses have less incentive to improve workers' morale, and workers have less incentive to co-operate with management.
This just corroborates two of my priors. The state is a dysfunctional organization. And the old left were just stupid to believe state ownership would solve the problem of class conflict.

Comments

[Igor Belanov]

You seem to have totally disregarded the main reason why public sector strikes vastly outnumber those in the private sector. Basically unionisation is much higher in the public sector, therefore unions have more influence and strikes are more likely to achieve something. Plus strikes are often over the erosion of working conditions that often just don't exist in private business. Workers in the private sector are more likely to lose their jobs or have them 'outsourced' if they take part in industrial disputes.

[chris]

There's no logical reason why unions should cause strikes; a very powerful union would never strike, simply because it could get what it wanted without the strike.
Also, this just raises the question: why is unionisation higher in the public sector?
Of course, the threat of job loss stops strikes in the private sector. but this is because a strike will lose customers, and nothing to do with non-unionisation.

[dearieme]

"the old left were just stupid": well, yes, obviously. Not alone, of course, but obviously.

[Igor Belanov]

One of the main reasons for higher public sector unionisation is that the employers and workplaces are generally larger, making organisation much easier. Added to that many employees have a 'career' in the public sector, nurses, teachers, etc and I imagine employee turnover is not as high. Many small and medium sized private businesses deliberately retard unionisation or refuse to recognise them. Private management is no more perfect than that of the public sector, and there's not always any correlation between bad management and strikes- NHS management is poor, but strikes are virtually non-existent.

[Phil at work]

I think you've corroborated your priors by wheeling out some more priors ("There's a simple reason for this...") - which is easy to do but not very helpful, particularly when the alternative explanation's simpler.

Certainly, there isn't a perfect correlation between union strength and strike frequency, but that's not really the point - the question is whether there's a correlation between union *weakness* and *lack* of strikes. As for why unions are stronger in the public than the private sector, having worked in both I suggest

1. Ethos. The public service ethos in Britain is not associated with union-busting; people who want to make sure council residents get decent services are generally not people who want to drive down the wages of the people delivering them. This doesn't mean that public sector employees are more likely to join unions, but it does mean they're less likely to be prevented from joining unions.

2. History. Private-sector firms change mangements, go bust, merge, get taken over. Public-sector organisations go on and on. That level of continuity in and of itself gives unionisation more of a chance to take hold.

Of course, neither of these would make sense without my own prior assumption:

P: In most workplaces, a majority of workers will unionise if not prevented from doing so.

[dsquared]

surely it's because secondary action is all but illegal and the public sector has all of the biggest single workforces (a strike by the postmen is much bigger in terms of working days than a strike by GateGourmet). In order to compare like with like here you need to compare number of strikes, not weight them by the size of the workforce.

[chris]

The public sector accounted for 48% of total strikes in 1996-2005 - 856 of 1783. That's more than twice the share of public sector employment in the total.
However you cut it, the public sector is much more strike-prone than the private sector.

[Chris Williams]

Not only that, but I imagine that many of the private sector days are also in quasi-monopolies such as British Airways or the train operating companies. There's a reason for this - there's no point striking if you've not got them over a barrel, because otherwise they will close down the plant and move somewhere else, or sack you all and hire cheaper workers. Just ask all those electricians who walk out nine months before the deadline on big construction projects. Good on them - I'm coming round to the position that anything that makes the UK's income distribution more like Sweden and less like Brazil is a good thing.