Owen Jones’s view that strikes have helped build our society is absurd (The right says strikes are abusive and wicked. I say they have helped build our society, 13 December). Strikes are damaging to the economy and harmful to both strikers and the general public. If you are in doubt about this, ask anyone living or working in our industrial heartlands. Strikes are failures of an economic system created by both Labour and Conservative governments.
Instead of working out ways to give both unionised and non-unionised workers a voice in formulating industrial policy, both parties seem content to retain a system that pits employees against both government and employers.
Damaging strikes are an inevitable outcome. Clearly the Tory government has no interest in changing the system which has benefited its donors and created massive income inequalities.
One might hope for better from Labour but, sadly, the party’s manifestos in 2017 and 2019 did not show any imagination in developing a system in which the strength of trade unions lay in their capacity not to call strikes but to influence industrial, pay and fiscal policies. This can be done and was done for several decades in Germany post-1945.
The lack of any strategy to ensure that governments share responsibility with worker and employer organisations to achieve a fair incomes policy means the opposition is in a weak position when the government tries to force it to declare its position on strikes. In fact, how easy it is to call a strike is an irrelevance; what matters is how to avoid strikes in the first place.
Prof Philip Graham
London
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