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On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity

Outbursts of strike activity in many industrial societies during the late 1960s and early 1970s focused considerable attention on relations between labour, capital and the state in advanced capitalist systems and led to many inquiries into the sources of the' new' labour militancy. and smaller strike waves in other nations also contributed to the surge of interest in labour discontent. Recent attempts to re-evaluate the potential of advanced industrial societies to generate severe social conflicts are perhaps a useful corrective to the dominant theoretical perspectives of postwar social science which has stressed the integration of the working class into the socioeconomic fabric of modern capitalist nations. Sociologists wrote of the embourgeoisement of blue-collar workers; political scientists and political sociologists argued about, but in the main subscribed to, the idea of' the end of ideology'; and among industrial relations specialists the thesis of the' withering away of the strike' (most prominently associated with the work of Arthur Ross and Paul Hartman) was widely accepted. One of the aims of this article is to show that when industrial conflict is analysed over the long-run-i.e. is viewed in historical perspective-the thesis of a general withering away of the strike is at odds with the empirical evidence, and that the emphasis on a new labour militancy is to a great extent misplaced. The first section of the paper introduces a three-dimensional characterization of strike activity and analyses quantitative trends in the overall magnitude of industrial conflict in eleven nations since the turn of the century. The next part of the article presents my own theory of the long-run evolution of industrial conflict. Strike activity is viewed as one and members of the State and Capitalism seminar at Harvard University for comments on the earlier version. The story developed here is presented at greater length in my Strikes: The Political Economy of Industrial Conflict in Western Industrial Societies (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).