Waiting for the Upturn? posted by Richard Seymour

Last week, The Guardian shocked and awed its bruschetta-munchers by pointing out that strike days had shot up in 2004 - almost doubling the figure from the previous year. Naturally, it immediately set about calming the readers down:

The latest figures for this year appear to show that 2004 was an unusual year. Only 12,400 days have been lost through strikes between January and March this year from 18 stoppages involving more than 10,000 workers.

The 904,000 working days lost last year compared with 499,000 the previous year and the annual average of 560,000 for the decade up to 2003. But these figures are dwarfed by the 1970s, when 12.9m working days were lost annually on average, and even the 7.2m in the following decade.

Well, that may be so, but then the figures for the first quarter of this year are somewhat skewed by the fact that the PCS voted overwhelmingly to strike against the government's pensions proposals, and forced New Labour to back down. Had they not backed down, the strike would have involved hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, and lost perhaps over a million working days to strikes. Similarly, the recent victory of Rolls Royce workers who just beat their management hands down in unofficial strike action (and occupation) sends up a smokey whisper of future blazes. The tendency to see unofficial industrial action where union bosses go all rubbery is particularly telling - we saw the posties do it, during the General Election in 2001, and shortly after that with the much-maligned 'wild-cat' strikes. Meanwhile, even the bankers are getting rather Bolshy.

I spy a red flag.