I was jess a senseless teenager then, tho I do still remember comedic assertions that Reagan and Thatcher were the respective male/females clones of Mussolini more than once for their union-busting jihads. Which do you suppose infected the other...? How bad was it over there back then...?
I'm just curious how it felt from a "sitting around the pub for a brew" perspective... not the political crap. Was it really as obvious over there what was being stolen away as it was over here?
mnem
*historical theater*
Some of the unions had gone power mad. They'd diverted from their reasonable and legitimate job of defending their members to becoming hubs of political power in and off themselves. Even in their legitimate place, they had gone from protecting workers from managerial greed or malfeasance to controlling whole industries.
I had personal experience of this. I used to help run a small print shop that was part of the student union. We weren't a 'print union shop' despite being being unionised in a non-print union in a "post-entry closed shop" (i.e. To work there you
had to be a member of the staff union, but you could start working there as long as you joined the union after starting). So, unionised up to the hilt - staff
in the closed-shop staff union who were themselves working
for a union.
If we wanted to get something printed that was beyond the physical capabilities of our print machines we had to send it out to another printers. If that printers was unionised, with the printers either members of SOGAT or the NGA, they would not accept work from
us (unionised to the hilt remember, but not in a
print union) unless the the artwork we sent them was from another SOGAT or NGA unionised shop with an official union stamp or sticker on the back of the artwork. We had a mate (Wolfie) who ran his own commercial printshop as a one man business who was an NGA member (business owner, father of chapel [NGA shop steward] and sole branch member all rolled into one person) precisely to get around the union cartel in the printing world. For an occasional drink, he used to stick his NGA stamp on the back of any artwork we wanted to send out to a (different) unionised shop.
So basically that situation was insanity across a whole industry just because the union had let power go to their heads, and the rest of the world had let them get away with it.
On the other hand, the Thatcher government had a doctrinaire loathing of the mere existence of unions. There were excesses, just as I've illustrated, that needed kerbing, but Thatcher
el al merely used that as an excuse to do their damnedest to get as close to eradicating unions as they could get away with.
So fault, and excess, on both sides. Two immovable forces both determined to move each other, what could go wrong? Meantime, the general public suffered while the unions and government fought it out in public with coal, steel, firemen, power, transport and teachers strikes called left right and centre as tactics in a fight to retain power, and the police misused to suppress them at every opportunity (I have credible reports from people I trust, and who were there, of the police using
agent provocateurs to
start violence at otherwise boisterous but peaceful pickets).
In the late 70s the unions had set themselves up for a fall, Thatcher
et al took advantage of that and took the fight beyond a "reasonable victory" to as close to genocide as they could get away with. The loser was the unions, weakened by successive governments. The ultimate losers are ordinary working folks, where the power of the unions has been weakened by law to the point where it is difficult for them to be effective. There was a time where almost every blue collar, and many white collar, workers were members of a union, now union membership is comparatively rare.
Ironically, there is a national rail strike called for tomorrow.
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