Preliminary Programme

Wed 22 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Thu 23 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Fri 24 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Sat 25 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

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Wednesday 22 March 2006 14:15
J-3 LAB04 Strikes in an international perspective 1970-2000: Germany, Great Britain and Denmark
Room J
Network: Labour Chair: Brigitte Lestrade
Organizer: Heiner Dribbusch Discussant: Sjaak Van der Velden
Heiner Dribbusch : Strikes in Germany 1969-2004
This paper will focus on the strike-development in the Federal Republic of Germany in the period between 1969 and 2004 against the background of the broader economic development.
It will aim at analyzing not only the quantitative development of strikes but also the change in forms and strike tactics in the ... (Show more)
This paper will focus on the strike-development in the Federal Republic of Germany in the period between 1969 and 2004 against the background of the broader economic development.
It will aim at analyzing not only the quantitative development of strikes but also the change in forms and strike tactics in the context of the development of German industrial relations. (Show less)

Dave Lyddon : Strikes in the United Kingdom, 1970-2000
The number of officially-recorded strikes in Britain fluctuated (with some exceptions) between 2,000 and 3,000 per annum from the mid-1950s to 1979. It then fell in a series of steps to around 200 annually (in the early 1990s), which level still holds today. Striker days ‘lost’, which have been dominated ... (Show more)
The number of officially-recorded strikes in Britain fluctuated (with some exceptions) between 2,000 and 3,000 per annum from the mid-1950s to 1979. It then fell in a series of steps to around 200 annually (in the early 1990s), which level still holds today. Striker days ‘lost’, which have been dominated in any period by a few very large or very long disputes, also fell in the early 1990s, in the almost total absence of such prominent strikes, to the lowest levels since records began.
From 1980 the effects of the biggest economic recession in Britain for fifty years were compounded by the start of a series (up to 1993) of statutes aimed at progressively restricting what constituted a lawful trade dispute. By the early 1990s, in the wake of another deep, though shorter, recession, the manufacturing sector (the main site of strike activity from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s) and many now former nationalized utilities and industries had massively contracted and restructured.
One commentator, discussing strike activity in Western Europe generally, characterized ‘the period of the 1980s and 1990s as one of relative quiescence’. Yet the 1980s was a massively conflictual decade in Britain. Milner and Metcalf (1993) decided, as did Gospel and Palmer (1993), that the 1970s, not the 1980s, was, respectively, the ‘peculiar’ or ‘exceptional’ decade, as its strike record was high on all three standard indicators (strike numbers, days lost, workers involved). This is true but the brutality of too many of the 1980s’ strikes cannot be compared with the relative calm of the 1950s and 1960s, even if there were similarities in strike indicators. The 1980s had much in common with the years 1921–26, a period of large strikes and lockouts, including some catastrophic defeats for unions; the 1970s might be compared to the 1910s, both decades experiencing historically high levels of strike activity for the time and both with some startling strike successes for unions.
Despite the trauma of the 1980s, there were significant sectoral differences. The most strike-prone areas were what Cronin (1979) has called ‘the large strategically important industries most thoroughly entangled in … the pressures and tensions of the market’. Some manufacturing industries were subject to radical product market restructuring in the 1980s, compounded by the tactical use of injunctions by employers to undermine some of the more important strikes in resistance; the miners and dockers further suffered government deregulation of their industries. The defeated twelve-month-long miners’ strike of 1984–85 was the most important in a series of catastrophes for unions and workers. Yet, in the ‘sheltered’ public-service sector, strike numbers doubled in the 1980s over the 1970s. Even in the relatively pacific 1990s, postal and railway workers exploited, respectively, a growing business and the chaos following privatisation, to push their demands by strike action.
This paper considers various explanations for strike decline in the 1980s, then stagnation in the 1990s: economic and market, legal and governmental, the ‘demonstration effect’ (of failed strikes and dismissed strikers), and collective bargaining reform. (Show less)



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