The Effects of Strikes on Workers: A Critical Analysis

The Effects of Strikes on Workers: A Critical AnalysisAuthor(s): Michael R. SmithSource: The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 3, No. 4(Autumn, 1978), pp. 457-472Published by: Canadian Journal of SociologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3339777 .

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The effects of strikes on workers: a critical analysis*

Michael R. Smith McGill University

Abstract. It has been argued that surveys that turn up relatively contented workers in Britain and North America give a false picture of the stability of these rich capitalist societies since they neglect the potential of "explosions" of consciousness often associated with strikes. The argument developed in this paper is that while there are some elements of truth in the claim that strikes lead to a change in the perception and attitudes of workers, the net effect of strikes on working class consciousness (and presumably on the likelihood of political instability) is by no means necessarily an "advance."

Resume. On a pretendu que les sondages qui revelent qu'il existe une satisfaction relative des travailleurs en Grande-Bretagne et en Amerique du Nord, donnent une fausse idee de la stabilit6 de ces societes capitalistes, puisqu'ils negligent l'effet potentiel des "explosions" de conscience de classe qui accompagnent souvent les greves ouvrieres. La these de cet article est que, bien qu'il y ait une part de verit6 dans la supposition que les greves modifient la perception et les attitudes des travailleurs, l'effet net des greves sur la conscience ouvriere (et par implication sur la possibilite d'instabilite politique) n'est pas necessairement un indice de "progres."

* The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Faculty of Graduate Studies, McGill University. Helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper were made by Jim Rinehart and a number of anonymous referees. Responsibility for errors in what remains is entirely my own.

Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 3(4)1978 457



Much has been made of the fact that the well paid Vauxhall workers who conceived of their relationship to their employers in terms of teamwork in the Affluent Worker interviews (Goldthorpe et al., 1968) subsequently struck, complete with ostentatious displays of socialist symbols and some amount of disorder (cf. Blackburn, 1967; Gorz, 1974). What happened at Vauxhall was seen as important because it challenged the adequacy of an interpretation which treated the working class as fundamentally integrated into a capitalist system. The relative conservatism of the bulk of the trade union movement in Britain and North America at least, has become something of an orthodoxy (cf. Parkin, 1971:91; Aronowitz, 1973:222, 256). The interpretation that Goldthorpe and his colleagues had developed went one stage further than this. It suggested that the aspirations of individual workers were quite well served by unions which generally accepted the capitalist system. The workers studied by Goldthorpe et al. seemed to accept the legitimacy of production for profit and simply displayed a willingness to aggressively pursue a share in the product of a capitalist system. Goldthorpe's "Affluent Workers," then, got the unions that they deserved. If one puts conservative unions together with conservative workers, one ends up with what appear to be rather stable class relations.

But Blackburn, consistent with a theme in writings on the left in recent years (cf. Lefebvre, 1970) has argued that working class consciousness is fundamentally volatile; that a small change in an otherwise mutually satisfactory economic relationship between workers and an employer can quickly "explode" into an acute awareness of formerly tolerated aspects of the workers' situation (the technology of production, labor market instability) and of the more general inequalities of capitalist societies. It follows from this that a strike against a narrow element of an elaborate work contract is likely to quickly take on the character of a more generalized protest. The act of striking, in itself, forces workers to reconsider their own position and that of their employers and a transformation of consciousness ensues. For if under normal working conditions, workers are enmeshed in a set of social relationships which might direct work related aggression towards first line supervisors or towards their fellow workers rather than towards their employers, the act of striking and the developments that it entails make it clear who the "real" enemy is. Following from this, surveys that turn up singularly unrevolutionary responses on the part of workers in Britain and North America - France and Italy, as Mann (1973) points out, are rather different - give a false picture because they neglect the fragility of the set of attitudes that they uncover. What happened at Vauxhall was used by Blackburn to illustrate this argument.

If one accepts this argument it follows that Britain and North America are considerably less fundamentally politically stable than they appear or are thought to be. In an analysis of Canadian industrial relations, Rinehart (1975:121) seems to be thinking somewhat along these lines in stressing that "while unionization and revolution are two very different processes, conflict at the workplace can easily assume broader political overtones." And he seems to be suggesting that Canada, as a capitalist society, is less politically stable than people normally think' in that the intensely politicized common front strike in Quebec in 1972 (cf. Ethier, Piotte and Reynolds, 1975) in a real way heralds the future (cf. Rinehart, 1975:117-123).

1. The question of national unity is not, of course, at issue here.

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At issue, then, are the effects of strikes on class consciousness and, more generally, the political stability of a capitalist Canada. And that is, clearly, a very important issue indeed. Blackburn seems to be claiming that strikes, at least some of the time, lead to an "advance" in consciousness and as such, threaten capitalist hegemony. If that is true, it suggests that currently, parts of the Canadian working class must be developing an unprecedented degree of advanced consciousness since they have been striking often, in both historical and international terms since the mid 1960s. From a left perspective, this has additional important implications for praxis for it provides strong support for a policy of militant trade unionism, even where the consequence is a redistribution of income within the working class rather than between capital and labor (cf. Allen, 1966; 1967).

In this short paper I try to show that the argument that strikes lead to an "advance" of consciousness and consequently to a threat to capitalist hegemony is only partly true and excessively simplifies our understanding of the effects of strikes on consciousness. I argue that if we are to fully analyze the effect of strikes on consciousness and in turn on politics it is necessary, firstly, to countenance the possibility that strikes can not only lead to an "advance" of consciousness but may also lead to a retrogression; and secondly, to bear in mind the possibility that strikes are also likely to have consequences for the perceptions and attitudes of workers who are not on strike, both unionized and non-unionized. As I will argue more elaborately later, this is likely to be affected by the fact that propensities to strike are markedly unevenly distributed throughout the working population.

Indispensable in developing a proper analysis of strikes and their effects on consciousness is a clearly articulated set of concepts which can be used to organize inferences about "advances" or "retrogressions" in consciousness. Michael Mann has produced a set of concepts which are useful in this respect. Firstly, we can separate class identity - the definition of oneself as working-class, as playing a distinctive role in common with other workers in the productive process. Secondly comes class opposition - the perception that the capitalist and his agents constitute an enduring opponent to oneself. These two elements interact dialectically; that is to say opposition itself serves to reinforce identity, and vice versa. Thirdly is class totality - the acceptance of the two previous elements as the defining characteristics of (a) one's total social situation and (b) the whole society in which one lives. Finally, comes the conception of an alternative society, a goal toward which one moves through the struggle with the opponent. True revolutionary consciousness is the combination of all four, and an obviously rare occurrence. Marxism provides a theory of escalation of consciousness from the first to the fourth. Consciousness grows (some Marxists say it "explodes") as the worker links his own concrete experience to an analysis of wider structures and then to alternative structures. (Mann, 1973:13)

The point that I want to make in the remainder of this paper is that there are reasonable grounds for thinking that different aspects of strikes have separate implications for each of these dimensions of consciousness. Moreover, I want to emphasize that these elements of consciousness can have some non- cumulative aspects; that in particular, in some situations (contrary to Mann) there may be an increase in the sense of "opposition" but a decrease in the sense of "identity."

Strikes, opposition and identity What the Vauxhall case shows, above all, is the effect of strikes on workers' consciousness of opposition. Raising a red flag and demanding that the board

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of directors be strung up (Blackburn, 1967) expressed this opposition quite eloquently.2 There is some question as to how durable this sense of increased opposition really is and just how much it contradicts Goldthorpe et al.'s instrumentalism interpretation (cf. Mann, 1973). And it is hard to separate out a genuine change of consciousness from rhetoric used as a ritualized part of the background to bargaining. But still, it is difficult to see how a strike would not lead to an enhanced sense of opposition on the part of the strikers.

But what are the effects of strikes on the sense of identity with the rest of the working class? Clearly, a strike forces upon the employees in a particular plant a real dependence upon each other and upon other workers. Picketing and attempts to organize boycotts express this dependence. This sense of dependence is presumably a minimal requirement for the development of a sense of identity. In some documented instances there appear to be grounds for suspecting that a strike has led to an increased sense of identity with other workers on the part of strikers because substantial support from other workers has been forthcoming. For instance, the Winnipeg general strike involved the collective support of a good part of an entire community for striking building and metal trades workers (cf. McNaught and Bercuson, 1974; Bercuson, 1974) and something similar seems to have happened in the Ford Windsor dispute in 1945 (Moulton, 1975:137). The Asbestos strike garnered quite extensive and tangible expressions of community and union support (Boisvert, 1974:303-304). In those kinds of situations it is hard not to believe that the sense of identity of both recipients and donors was enhanced by the fact of giving or receiving support. On the other hand, the history of particular disputes is also full of examples of assistance which had been anticipated but which was never forthcoming. At Oshawa, anticipated financial assistance from the UAW simply did not materialize (Abella, 1975:117); striking Stratford furniture makers were cold shouldered by the TLC because of the involvement of the communist Workers Unity League in the strike (Morton, 1975:86) and, despite the popularity of the strikers' cause in the community, support on the part of the CCL for the Ford Windsor workers was, at best, equivocal (Moulton, 1975:143). Since community and union support is one of the things that draws the attention of historians to particular strikes one is inclined to suspect that equivocal support is even more characteristic of less celebrated strikes. In other words, striking forces on strikers a sense of dependence on other workers. If that results in widespread support there is presumably an enhanced sense of identity. But widespread support of a more than superficial nature is often not produced and those circumstances are likely to be embittering and to reduce their sense of identity.

Interindustry strike differentials and consciousness I have also claimed that the distribution of strikes through the working population is important if we are to determine the effects of strikes on working class consciousness and Canadian political stability. To make this point it is first necessary to establish what this distribution is. I focus on interindustry

2. It is, of course, true that there had been a buildup of grievances in the months preceding the strike (cf. Blackburn, 1967). What is important here is how, when the strike started, the strikers immediately organized themselves around socialist symbols and displayed a willingness to resort to tactics which flouted existing standards of law and order.

460



Table 1. Matrices of correlations between man-days lost per thousand union members, wages and concentration, 1962-1967 and 1968-1973

1962-1967 1968-1973

man-days lost wages man-days lost wages Wages 0.380 0.402

(0.049) (0.039) Concentration* 0.176 0.548 0.280 0.755

(0.230) (0.006) (0.116) (0.001) Mean 2062.9 86.28 3292.5 136.9

Standard deviation 1231.0 19.72 2479.8 31.0

*Since concentration is an ordinal measure, the mean and standard deviation is not included in this table.

differentials. The data analyzed here are restricted to the manufacturing industry.3 The industry categories in terms of which strike statistics are presented were drastically changed in 1962 so that my analysis is restricted to data from the period 1962 to the most recent year for which Strikes and Lockouts was available to me, 1973. Since strike rates are subject to gross year to year fluctuations related to the expiry of major contracts, it makes sense to work with averages over several years. In the subsequent analysis I have broken down the entire twelve-year period into two six-year periods, 1962-1967 and 1968-1973. That makes it possible to test the stability of any patterns that might be uncovered. I have restricted my analysis to average weekly wages, concentration rank (that is, the extent to which output in a given industry originates in a small number of firms), and man-days lost per thousand unionized employees. Relatively few strikes in Canada are over union recognition so that most strikes are the actions of union members. That being the case, it makes sense to control for interindustry differentials in unionization by using man-days lost per thousand union members as a dependent variable.

Table 1 presents matrices of correlation coefficients between man-days lost per thousand union members, wages and concentration rank for twenty manufacturing industry groups during each of the two periods being analyzed here. It is clear from the table that wages and concentration rank are strongly intercorrelated. This collinearity means that any attempt to sort out their separate effects on man-days lost from strikes using multiple regression with

3. The concentration rankings come from Concentration in the Manufacturing Industries of Canada, Ottawa: Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, 1971, Table 11 (p. 20). It should be clear that I am dealing with industry groups here and that the rank reflects the percentage of shipments in the industry group originating in a concentrated industry. The other data sources are as follows: Man-days lost from, Strikes and Lockouts, Economics and Statistics Branch, Labor Canada. Union membership from, J.K. Eaton, Union Growth in Canada in the Sixties, Labor Canada, 1976 (for the period 1962-70) and Labour Gazette (for 1971-73). Wages from, Wages, Employment Indexes, Average Weekly Wages and Salaries, Average Weekly Hours and Average Hourly Earnings, Monthly and Annual Statistics, Historical Series January 1961 - May 1965. Vol. 1., Statistics Canada 72-504 (for 1962); Earnings and Hours of Work in Manufacturing, Statistics Canada 72-204 (for 1963-69); and Employment, Earnings and Hours, Statistics Canada 72-002 (for 1970-1973).

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Table 2. Market concentration and man-days lost per union member 1962-1967, 1968-1973

Concentration

62- 67

High

Rubber (6) Textiles (7) Transportation

equipment (5) High Electrical

products (10) Non metallic

minerals (8) Petroleum and coal (2) Chemicals (9)

Tobacco (1) Machinery (3) Primary metals (4)

Low

Low

Wood (16) Printing and

publishing (19) Miscellaneous

manufacturing (13)

Food and beverages (11)

Leather (12) Knitting mills (19) Clothing (17) Furniture and

fixtures (18) Paper (14) Metal fabricating (15)

High

Rubber (6) Primary metals (4) Machinery (3) Transportation

equipment (5) Electrical products (10) Non metallic

minerals (8) Petroleum and coal (2)

Tobacco (1) Textiles (7) Chemicals (9)

Low

Wood (16) Miscellaneous

manufacturing (13) Paper (14)

Food and beverages ( 11)

Leather (12) Knitting mills (19) Clothing (17) Furniture and

fixtures (18) Printing and

publishing (19) Metal fabricating (15)

68- 73

Man Days Lost



these data is not really feasible. What the table does show is that wages are significantly related to man-days lost for both periods but that concentration is insignificantly related.

One of the disadvantages of dealing with a sample of twenty industries is that correlation coefficients are acutely sensitive to single cases. One gets a rather clearer idea by looking at Table 2. In that table, the data cells are divided at the median for each of the variables. (The concentration rank of each industry is in parentheses.) The results are quite illuminating. They suggest, firstly, that the correlation between concentration and man-days lost is rather strongly affected by some very deviant cases. This is particularly true of the tobacco industry which is the most concentrated industry in Canada but has relatively few man-days lost in both periods and of wood industries (largely sawmills) which is very competitive but has a high rate of man-days lost. Beyond those two, only miscellaneous manufactures (which is, of course, a grossly heterogeneous category and therefore difficult to interpret) is found in the "wrong" cell for both periods of time. Analyzed this way, we can see what looks like a fairly strong relationship between concentration and man-days lost per thousand unionized employees. This raises two questions: Firstly, what accounts for this general relationship? And secondly, what accounts for the deviant cases? I will deal with these questions in turn. Then, at the end of this section I trace out the implications of the general relationship between concentration and man-days lost for the initial concern of this paper with the effects of strikes on class consciousness.

Time series analyses of strikes show that their incidence is associated with "resources." That is, strikes occur most often under conditions most propitious for their success; in particular, under conditions of full employment and where legislation is more supportive of unions (cf. Ashenfelter and Johnson 1969; Hibbs 1976; Smith 1972). It is not, therefore, surprising that cross sectionally they tend to coincide with the distribution of resources. One would expect them to be most likely to occur in industries where they have a history of "paying off"; where, that is, the rate of return on an investment in a strike has been highest in the past and is known to have been so by the membership of the relevant union. That rate of return is likely to be highest where managers can ultimately afford to concede substantial increases; that is, in those industries where they can readily pass on wage cost increases to the consumer. Those industries are surely most likely to be concentrated industries.4 Employers will resist wage claims since even if competition is only a moderate problem there are still problems of elasticity of demand; that is, the question of to what extent price increases will lead to falls in aggregate demand, at least in the short run. Moreover labor costs are one of the few areas in large corporations where plant managers retain discretion and with that discretion, the possibility of superior performance as a means for impressing their superiors. That will dispose local plant managers to resist labor cost increasing demands by workers. But concentrated industries are likely to build up histories of more or less successful strikes which are part of the framework within which the membership and leadership of unions make their separate decisions on whether or not to incur the costs of a strike and how long to stay out. For, ultimately, employers in

4. There is, of course, a certain amount of controversy over this. The best treatments of this issue deal with the United States (cf. Blair, 1972; Scherer, 1970).

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such industries can afford to give in, and it makes economic sense for them to do so. In competitive industries (in which labor costs are often a larger proportion of total costs), on the other hand, for many employers, it is cheaper to shut down a plant or to move it than to give a substantial wage increase. In those industries there will be a history of unsuccessful strikes and that history will affect present propensities to strike on the part of union members and leaders.5

Table 2, then, suggests a quite strong relationship between time lost from strikes and market concentration. But the two consistently deviant cases (other than the miscellaneous industries category) do require some attention. These are tobacco and wood industries.

The tobacco industry is the most concentrated industry in Canada but has a low rate of man-days lost for both periods. The lowest rates of man-days lost of all across both periods are found in the clothing, knitting mills and leather industries. These industries differ from tobacco in that they are highly competitive. However, one trait that they share with the tobacco industry is a particularly high concentration of female employment. For reasons apparently related to the indifference of male trade union leaders to the problems of female members (cf. Marchak, 1973; Beynon and Blackburn, 1972), women may frequently either make poor material out of which to fashion a solidary strike or alternatively are perceived as such by their male trade union leaders. The result, the case of the tobacco industry suggests, is to independently reduce the time lost from strikes in the industry.

The other consistent deviant case is wood industries which is highly competitive but, contrary to the general pattern, has a great deal of industrial conflict. Some years ago Kerr and Siegel (1954) published an article on interindustry strike propensities which attracted a great deal of attention at the time.6 They argued that industries which are socially or geographically isolated and whose employees do not have too many internal bases of cleavage but do have some of the structural requisites for communication are likely to strike a lot. Thus, according to this reasoning, loggers and miners strike a lot because their geographic separateness makes the common elements of their fate

5. It may well be that the firms in these industries are particularly likely to have poorly developed sets of rewards that cumulate with seniority. As such, they are likely to recruit relatively unstable labor forces; what Edwards calls "secondary workers." One would hypothesize that these would be particularly poor material out of which to fashion a successful strike (cf. Edwards, 1975).

6. More recently, to the extent that Kerr and Siegal's article has attracted any attention, that attention has been of a thoroughly critical kind. In Shorter and Tilly's blunt words: "we believe that Kerr-Siegal 'isolated mass' argument to be largely wrong" (1974:289). Yet, Shorter and Tilly's empirical refutation of Kerr and Siegal is not much more plausible than the latter's admittedly feeble initial data. Their argument rests very heavily on an analysis of strike rates by geographic location divided into mono-industrial, poly-industrial and metropolitan. The latter should have the lowest strike rate according to their formulation of Kerr and Siegal, but turns out to have the highest. Yet the differences between strikes per 100,000 employees that they report are not substantial and, in addition, depend on some coding decisions which are, at least, arguable. Moreover, by using a geographic classification, as they themselves acknowledge, they do not control for industrial differences between kinds of community. For a more balanced criticism, see Eldridge (1968:35-45). One can infer from Eldridge's analysis that Kerr and Siegal's isolated mass argument may well be correct - but only applicable to a very few extreme cases. That is, the bulk of industries fall out of the isolated category.

464



apparent to them and at the same time makes quitting as a way of dealing with the day to day discontents of work rather costly.7 In a one industry town there are simply no other jobs. Moreover, since in the one industry logging or mining town work relations are necessarily reproduced very closely in the community, there are good structural bases for collective and militant organization around work related issues. And the fact is that mining, the quintessentially isolated industry, does have an embittered industrial relations history in most countries.8 For the purposes of this paper, what is interesting is that sawmills, like mines, are very often located in fairly isolated and increasingly remote areas subject to commercial exploitation. A substantial part of wood industries is isolated and it does have a remarkably high rate of man-days lost from strikes in Canada despite the fact that it is substantially unconcentrated.

Now, to return to the general relationship between concentration and industrial conflict; how is that relationship related to the concerns about strikes and class consciousness raised in the first two parts of this paper? I have shown that time lost on striking is most concentrated in industries with generally higher wage levels and where the market structure of those industries makes it easier to transfer increases in wage costs to the consumer through price increases. In short, the distribution within the working class of time lost on striking generally coincides with resources rather than deprivation.9 Relatively well paid auto workers spend much more time on strike than do (often female) wretchedly paid clothing workers.10

There are implications from this for the relationship between strikes and consciousness. Striking, as a tactic for improving conditions is not effective and therefore, in real terms as readily available, for a good part of the unionized labor force, let alone the non-unionized sector which is substantial in Canada. The extreme is, of course, the clothing industry but other industries have that property to a lesser extent. Moreover, just as importantly, within generally

7. Although mining in Canada does exhibit rather high quit rates (cf. Economic Council of Canada, 1976).

8. Hibbs (1976:1034) recognizes this and excludes mining from his own cross national analysis of

man-days lost rates. 9. One industry which is deviant in one of the periods analyzed but which is particularly

interesting in this respect is printing and publishing. The bulk of this industry is extremely competitive but it had a very high rate of man-days lost from strikes from 1962 to 1967. The reason provides an interesting example of the conditions under which deprivation leads to strikes. The bulk of man-days lost in this period involved resistance to technological changes in some major Canadian newspapers. There was a major and prolonged strike in the Star, Telegram and Globe and Mail syndicate over automation from 1964 to 1967. There was a smaller one in 1964 at La Presse over the same issue. These accounted for about 93 percent of

man-days lost for this industry in this period. These strikes represent the kind of artisanal resistance to the reorganization of production that Shorter and Tilly (1974) found to be at the root of prolonged and bitter disputes in France. Moreover, newspaper publishing is within the better paid part of the industry and each firm produces a highly differentiated product which reduces the competitiveness of that section of the industry even within metropolises where there are several daily newspapers. In short, the high rate of man-days lost in printing and publishing has its origins in a better paid, less competitive section of the industry subject to technical change.

10. Moreover, I think that it would be difficult to claim that production conditions in the auto industry are generally more alienating than those in the clothing industry. It should be recalled that the overwhelming majority of auto workers do not work on the assembly line (cf. Blauner, 1964:91).

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Table 3. "In general, do you approve or disapprove of labor unions?"

Approve Disapprove Can't say National 1961 66 23 11 1970 54 30 16

Labor 1961 73 17 10 1970 59 25 16

Source. Gallup Report, July 25th 1970.

concentrated industries there is often, in addition to a small number of dominant firms which account for the bulk of industry output, a substantial number of firms whose conditions of operation resemble those in more

generally competitive industries. That is, they are small scale firms competing in an industry dominated by a few giant producers who are in a position to reap the advantages of substantial scale economies. For employees in those firms the constraints on effective striking are likely to be just as substantial as they are for

employees in industries like, for example, clothing, knitting mills, and leather

goods. If the option of striking is foreclosed for these employees one might expect

to find an increasing lack of enthusiasm with strikes in general and a decreasing amount of sympathy for particular strikes; particularly since the by-no-means- neutral news media (cf. Clement, 1975) will normally present information on strikes which tends to emphasize the implications of strike settlements for consumer prices. This mechanism would imply a reduction in "identity." Failed strikes within industries whose structure is not conducive to strike success

might be expected to lead to an embittered attitude on the part of that sector of the working class toward the more fortunate sector - as well as towards

employers. Moreover, on the part of trade unionists for whom trade unions are not very effective vehicles and workers who are not members of trade unions one might expect to find an increasing amount of antagonism toward the

principle vehicles of both strikers and working class identity, trade unions. In other words, the association between resources and strikes between industries (and by extension within industries) reflects a gulf within the working class to which those who are on the less favored side, are likely to be sensitive and which is consequently likely to affect their sense of "identity."

Attitudinal consequences This kind of argument is not difficult to make but remains unpersuasive without some independent evidence of changes in consciousness induced by strikes. Now, Canada has had a generally and markedly increasing volume of time lost from strikes since the mid 1960s. Thus, from 1960 to 1964 the average annual number of man-days lost from strikes and lockouts in Canada was under 1.2 million. From 1964 to 1969 the annual average had risen to 4.8 million and then went to 6.4 million from 1970 to 1974. In both 1975 and 1976 the annual total was above 10 million. If the argument made above is correct,

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Table 4. "Some people say there are too many trouble-makers and agitators among union leaders. Others say this talk is only anti-labor propaganda. What are your views on this?"

Trouble- Just No makers propaganda Other opinion

National 1966 50 22 3 25 1976 67 17 4 12

Union Households 1966 50 24 2 24 1976 60 22 5 13

Non- Union Households 1966 50 20 4 26 1976 71 13 4 12

Source. Gallup Report, January 4th 1976.

there should be some evidence of reactions to this. (That is, of course, also true for the argument that strikes lead to an "advance" of consciousness.) One needs data on responses to questions dealing with unions and industrial relations that can be compared over time. A useful and probably unique source of such data are the Gallup Reports. As Table 311 shows, during the decade of the 1960s there is evidence of a non-trivial decrease in the approval of trade unions both nationally but more importantly, amongst labor. What is interesting about Table 3 is that not only does the percent disapproving increase from 17 percent to 25 percent but the percent approving decreases by even more.

Yet, the majority of labor continued to approve in 1970 and the question itself leaves as many questions unanswered as answered. For instance, those who disapprove could do so either because they considered that trade unions struck too much or because they thought they struck too little. Moreover, it is hard to tell whether approval reflects an evaluation of the history of the labor movement or of current conditions.

Table 4, on the other hand, provides rather more direct evidence of negative attitudes towards militant trade unionists. Amongst respondents from union households, 60 percent thought that union leaders were "trouble makers" in 1976, an increase from 50 percent in 1966. Moreover, it is interesting that most of this increase came from the "No Opinion" category. In the context of many strikes, people seem constrained to take up definite positions on them.

We can get a still better sense of the nature of what people in general and workers in particular are thinking about trade unions by looking at responses to industrial relations policy questions for they indicate the kinds of government actions which respondents would consider to be reforms. Table 5

11. This table and the succeeding ones are drawn from the Gallup Reports. The Gallup Reports do not always include N's with their tables. Where they are included, they report a sample size of a little over a thousand.

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Table 5. "At the present time, do you think the laws regulating labor unions are too strict or not strict enough?"

Too strict

National 1966 1970

Union Members 1966 1970

Non- Union 1966 1970

15 15

21 18

13 13

Not strict enough

33 50

25 37

36 56

About right

22 16

29 23

19 14

Can't say

30 19

25 22

32 17

Source. Gallup Report, September 5th 1970.

Table 6. "It has been suggested that prices and wages (salaries) be frozen - that is, kept at their present levels - as long as there is a threat of inflation. Do you think this is a good idea, or not a good idea?" (February 11th 1970)

Good idea Poor idea Can't say National 60 31 9

Occupational Professional/ Executive Clerical Labor Other

59 63 58 65

34 27 34 24

7 10 8

11

"Some people believe that the right to strike has outlived its usefulness and that before any strike is permitted both management and labor should agree to a voluntary arbitration decision for at least a year. Do you favor or oppose such a plan?" (April 29th 1972)

Executive/ Professional Sales/ Clerical Labor Farm/Others

Favor 81 86 74 77

Oppose 13 7

16 8

Undecided 6 7

10 15

"The Canadian Labor Congress has called for a one day work stop on October 14th, in protest against wage controls. It is being called by some 'a national day of protest' and by others a 'General Strike'. In your opinion, is the CLC acting in a responsible manner?" (October 6th 1976)

National Union Non-Union

Yes 25 32 21

No 62 58 64

Don't know 13 10 15

Source. Gallup Reports

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shows increasing sentiment on the part of both members of unions and non- members for stricter laws regulating labor unions. Unfortunately, it only covers 1966 to 1970. One can only speculate on whether or not the growth would have been more substantial had it covered a period from before the mid 1960s strike wave up to the present. But still, by 1970 more than a third of labor union members thought that laws were not strict enough for unions.

More interesting still, while comparisons over time cannot be made with these questions it is nonetheless interesting to note the extensive support for government policies which are at least advertised as attempts to wrest wage determination away from the free collective bargaining process. Table 6 digests three surveys bearing on this. The first shows that in 1970 a solid majority of labor was in favor of wage and price controls. Of course, that may express more of a concern with inflation than with collective bargaining. The 1972 figures, however, deal specifically with restraints on free collective bargaining and here almost three-quarters of blue collar respondents were in favor of an arbitrated outcome. By 1976, a solid majority of union households were opposed to the CLC's attempt to protest against the federal government's restraints on free collective bargaining. There is little question that there is a strong sentiment on the part of a majority of union members, and blue collar workers in general, against the working and presumably, more specifically, the outcomes of the free collective bargaining process.

Crude survey data of the sort reproduced in Tables 3 to 6 is not simple to interpret. The forms in which it comes preclude the possibility of the kind of tabular breakdowns by background variables like age and income - not to mention industry - that one would like to see. And isolated questions of this sort are difficult to make sense of, detached as they are from the more general framework of meaning within which the respondents gave their answers. That is to say, when a blue collar worker announces that he or she disapproves of unions, one would really like to know precisely why. And yet, these caveats notwithstanding, these data do have a real interest. For, they permit comparisons over substantial periods of time, something that most carefully constructed surveys rarely do. More interestingly, out of those temporal comparisons in conjunction with the data on attitudes towards labor relations policy for single points in time, a real pattern emerges. Substantial portions of the blue collar and union population are clearly becoming increasingly disgruntled with militant industrial actions on the part of other blue collar workers who belong to unions. By 1976, a clear majority of union members thought that union leaders were frequently agitators and trouble makers. Table 3 showed rising disapproval of unions. Table 6 (especially in conjunction with the other tables) suggests strongly that that disapproval has its origins in a negative evaluation of union militancy.

Conclusion Workers in an industry are no doubt aware that their managers earn substantially more than them; they exist in a work environment where supervision and, increasingly, the design of work itself circumscribe their capacity for discretion; they may well feel insecure in the context of an unpredictable labor market. Going on strike as Blackburn has argued, and as the Vauxhall incident tends to show, is likely to lead them to focus the discontent associated with this condition on their employers. That is an

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increased sense of opposition. But the consequences of such an action for a sense of identity are likely to be problematic. Those consequences will depend upon the extent to which their strike is supported by other workers. In North America in particular where many unions do seem to operate with a business union philosophy (cf. Bell, 1962; Laxer, 1976) with decentralized bargaining (cf. Task Force, 1968), significant support will often fail to materialize. If consciousness "explodes" in a strike the result is likely to be an acute sense of inequality, but by no means necessarily a sense of a fate shared with a class. On the contrary, it is often likely to be a sense that the workers in a particular plant (or sometimes, industry) should look after themselves. That, of course, would constitute an obstacle to a shift to the level of consciousness that Mann calls totality.

Moreover, the political configuration in capitalist societies with universal

suffrage will not only depend upon the consciousness of workers who strike but also on the reaction to strikes of workers who, because conditions are not favorable, themselves rarely strike. These kinds of workers are likely to be

increasingly unenthusiastic about the strikes of their more fortunate fellow workers. Both groups, of course, are less privileged in comparison to employers and managers but, as Runciman (1966) has shown, much of the working class

compares its own condition with other members of the working class rather than with capital. The consequence of the extant distribution of strikes is, then, to reduce the sense of identity of a good part of the working class.12

The Gallup Poll data suggest that it is not simply a question of identity which is at issue. In Mann's view, the most advanced stage of development of consciousness involves "The conception of an alternative society" which

develops "through the struggle with the opponent" (Mann, 1973:13). The

opponent that Mann has in mind is employers. But the analysis that has been

presented in this paper suggests that intra-working class antagonisms may be

equally important in determining workers' conceptions of an alternative society. Sentiment on the part of many trade unionists seems to be linked to a

conception of an alternative society in which the government acts as an authoritative arbiter in industrial relations. For these trade unionists, its role is

just as much to keep wage increases (of other workers) moderate as to keep price increases moderate. The anti free collective bargaining sentiments that

appear in Table 6 tend to support this interpretation. In his conclusion to Consciousness and Action among the Western

Working Class, Mann argues that:

Coexisting with a normally passive sense of alienation is an experience of (largely economic) interdependence with the employer at a factual, if not normative level. Surges of class consciousness are continually undercut by economism and capitalism survives. (1973:68)

In this paper I have accepted the view that strikes are quite likely to generate surges of class consciousness on the part of the strikers. But the actual distribution of strikes, the fact that the bulk of man-days lost from strikes are accounted for by a better off section of the labor force, means that those same strikes are an additional obstacle to the development of class consciousness. This is true not only because of their effect on workers' sense of identity: it is also true because the reaction of many workers to the maldistribution of strikes

12. Deaton (1973) has already dealt with this for the case of public service workers.

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and, in particular, to the fact that striking is not a resource as readily available to them, seems to be to look to the Canadian state for solutions rather than to trade unions which are more directly organizations of the working class. Since the state, at the very least, can be said to have "links" with the class of employers (cf. Porter, 1965; Clement, 1975), that kind of policy preference provides the elements of a sort of interclass alliance between employers and less well off workers against better off workers. Even if strikes in Canada do serve to "advance" the consciousness of that section of the working class involved in them (some of the time), with their present distribution, they are as likely to "retard" the consciousness of a good part of the rest of the working class with rather unprogressive political consequences. A strike wave then, may be rather less of a threat to capitalist hegemony than is sometimes thought.

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Documents

The Effects of Strikes on Workers: A Critical Analysis