LONDON — A resurgent labor movement is confronting the government of Tony Blair with the biggest threat of widespread industrial action in the two decades since Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke trade union power over the British economy, reports the New York Times.
Railroad employees, mail deliverers, police officers, teachers, hospital workers and civil service unions are all threatening walkouts in the coming months, egged on by a new generation of radical leaders and playing to Britons’ discontent with the state of their public services.
The unions’ principal complaint is Mr. Blair’s effort to involve private enterprise in public sector areas like health and transportation. The private-public partnerships, as Mr. Blair calls them, are at the heart of his plans to modernize Britain’s government and stimulate its economy — and of prime concern to voters, who want Mr. Blair to stick to last year’s election promises of delivering better public services.
Mr. Blair’s job has been made more difficult by the botched privatization of the railroads and the tendency of the public to blame that for having produced the worst transportation system in Western Europe.
In a sign of the new militancy of organized labor, the 60,000-member Rail, Maritime and Transport union on Wednesday elected as its new leader Bob Crow, 42, a former Communist who campaigned on a platform advocating an aggressive strike policy and the renationalization of the transportation industry.
“The Revolution Starts Here” said a banner in the North London pub where Mr. Crow’s supporters celebrated his victory on Wednesday.
Mr. Crow and other hard-liners coming into power profess contempt for Labor, the party organized a century ago to represent the working class but recast by Mr. Blair and his reform group as a more centrist political force stripped of its socialist ideology and hostility to business.
“I am a socialist and proud of it,” Mr. Crow said. “I am the first general secretary for over 100 years who is not affiliated with the Labor Party.”
Mr. Blair drew the battle lines with the militants in a combative speech to a Labor convention in Cardiff on Feb. 2. He told delegates the party’s progressive agenda was under attack from “wreckers” whom he likened to the Trotskyite radicals known as the Militant Tendency that Labor had to expel from its ranks to become credible and electable.
Bill Speirs, general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, said: “When I heard it, I thought, `When was the last time I heard a prime minister use language like this?’ It was when Margaret Thatcher talked about the unions as `the enemy within’ in 1984.”
Mr. Blair is less accepting of union assertiveness than past Labor prime ministers. The party has deliberately reduced its dependence on the unions. In the 1980’s, unions provided 80 percent of the party’s funds compared with less than 40 percent now, and party officials changed internal voting procedures to minimize workers’ influence on policy.
But while less than 30 percent of the work force is unionized today compared with more than 55 percent at the start of the Thatcher era, the changed composition of the membership and the effectiveness of the moderate leaders have attracted public support even for actions that cause disruptions in people’s lives.
“The typical union member in 1979 was a male worker in the manufacturing industry where today that person is likely to be white collar, a public service worker and often a woman,” said John Kelly, a professor of industrial relations at the London School of Economics. “The public services are the most heavily unionized group today, and these people deal with the public much more often than workers did before so their strikes get sympathy where before they inspired public anger.”
There are only 250 strikes a year now compared with 2,000 in the 1970’s, but the effect is disproportionate to the numbers involved. “When you think that 5,000 railroad workers can keep a million and half commuters out of London, that’s power,” Mr. Kelly said.
Although a wave of strikes in 1979 have not faded from public memory and gave the labor movement a black eye, the two decades of relative calm since have gained it public regard.
“The leaders today are generally smarter guys, they’re college graduates, and winning over public opinion is a key part of their strategy,” said Mr. Kelly.
“The older leaders feel that it’s always better to talk, that once you start mobilizing, the government will stop listening,” he said. “The new guys will fight, they will take their members out, they are looking for confrontation.”