They’re calling it a ‘hot strike summer’ in Britain. But are the unions up to the task?

theguardian.com:

The strength of the trade union movement, the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, cannot be fully understood by looking at curves on a graph that show membership. Instead, there are “jumps,” “leaps” and “explosions” in activity. For him, these unpredictable peaks and sudden moments of upsurge are produced by “accumulations of inflammable material which only ignite periodically, as it were under compression”. Britain is experiencing a moment of ignition right now. Welcome to what many have already dubbed “hot strike summer”.

Clearly, what’s happening to our pay packets is a big part of the story. If you take inflation into account, wages are set to shrink by £1,750 over the next two years. The only group of workers whose wages are rising in line with prices are those earning more than £170,000 a year.

But that’s not all. For the first time since records began, a shrinking of the labour force has meant there are more job vacancies than there are unemployed people. Struggling to attract individuals into unfilled roles, some employers have sought to impose compulsory overtime on their existing staff – this has been one of the disputed matters in the Caterpillar strike in northern Ireland.

Then there’s the pandemic. While it disrupted and reorganised our patterns of work, Covid-19 was also laying the foundations for today’s unforeseen uptick in workers’ self-confidence. Pandemic fights over fire and rehire tactics and the reopening of schools provided workers with an opportunity to flex their muscles and build their collective confidence. A key point of leverage in many of the disputes we’re seeing now – the Communication Workers Union action against Royal Mail and the BT Group, RMT action against Network Rail, or the number of