There were great hopes on the left for what the 2022 strike wave could achieve. Kevin Crane analyses why it fell short, and what must be done to make the next one successful

The strikes that followed the Covid-19 pandemic and the attendant cost-of-living crisis are officially over, except that they may not be. It’s a contradictory picture in which the neither the unions, nor the government, have got the decisive outcome for which they say they set out. It doesn’t really feel like a conclusion at all.

For an incoming Labour government, the play was simple: Rachel Reeves has declared she will impose further austerity throughout the economy, and part of smoothing the path towards doing that was ending the remnant parts of the major strike wave from two years prior: the junior doctors and the train drivers. To this end, she simply proposed to offer both camps cash on a scale that the Tories had refused to do.

Both these sections of the workforce have had a strategy of sustaining industrial action over a long period of time vindicated. The junior doctors have secured a deal of 22% over two years, which is still less than by which they estimate doctors’ wages have dropped, but objectively a win despite that. The train drivers got an inflation-plus settlement for 2024 that goes some way to restoring relative losses for the preceding two years, but also importantly saw employer-mandated attacks on shift patterns dropped. Not bad, in either case.

Now, on the surface of it, junior doctors and train drivers do not appear to have that much in common, given the vast difference between the jobs, the qualifications and the employers, but industrially there are actually strong comparisons. Firstly, they are overwhelmingly represented not by big ‘general’ unions representing a diverse range of employments: the British Medical Association and Aslef are both ‘craft’ unions representing only a single trade. But the more important detail has simply been persistence, with the two unions correctly calculating that they would obtain substantial pay improvements for their members by holding out against government intransigence.

The fact is that the vast majority of workers participating in the mass strikes haven’t received deals on that scale, with some groups – notably postal workers – going down to defeat. One can do very detailed breakdowns of why these happened, but this would be to miss the wood for the trees. The problem is that despite the fact that we were getting a lot of talk about unity in the movement at the time, with so many thousands of workers involved in action in a single period, the energy was actually diffused by a bad case of what socialists call ‘sectionalism’: viewing each group of workers’ disputes entirely through the very specific details of bargaining points, thus losing sight of the big-picture conflict with the government, big business and the financial institutions.

Failure (or refusal) to generalise and escalate the strikes as a class position against the government immediately resulted in sectoral and fragmented settlements, but the problems don’t stop there. A general sense from the upper classes that they can squeeze the working class without much risk has left weaker sections of our class open to attack: most immediately this is currently pensioners, but Labour’s gleeful retention of the two-child benefit cap is also an example. Elites at the top of the state and big business believe that they can restore capitalist growth by reducing working-class living standards, and also that they will get away with it.

Strategic failures

Union leaderships, even the most leftwing ones, will regress back into this procedural mindset over time, and one of the fundamental weaknesses of the 2022 campaigns is that there was a total absence of a counterweight that could provide a different lead, which needed to come from organised union members and the left. Indeed, trade-union leaders like the CWU’s Dave Ward and the RMT’s Mick Lynch helped to completely pull the rug from under the wider left’s feet by lending their support to the ‘Enough Is Enough’ campaign, which purported to be a mass anti-austerity movement that wider layers of people could join, but which actually just sucked the energy out of the movement and then was quietly dropped once the union leaders no longer wished to put forward the same militant position as they had in the early days of the strikes.

So, the movement just progressively ran out of energy over the course of 2023, and although there were brave efforts at turning the situation round – most radically by a rank-and-file organisation amongst nurses – most of the disputes ended up being settled without much fanfare as the months ran on. By the time the election happened, the junior doctors and train drivers were essentially all that was left.

Right-wing propaganda by the anti-working-class media has responded very negatively to the big pay settlements, on the grounds that they will only encourage other workers to strike. They may actually not be wrong: there are plans for strikes in parts of the civil service, and Aslef is back in dispute with one of the train operators – London Northeastern Railway – over terms and conditions. Mick Lynch of the RMT – which is the largest union representing rail workers other than drivers – now expects pay offers to be ‘parallel and synchronised’ across the sector, which is a welcome thing for him to say, but it does need to be pointed out that his strategy for two years was not to seek that.

Several important things are likely to be going on here. The first is that Rachel Reeves’ attempt to buy off union action in order to pursue austerity has been somewhat exposed as a situation in which workers have an either/or choice in which militancy is one option, and austerity is the other. The second is that, realising this, unions that had otherwise been going to hunker down for the first few years of the Labour government are now under pressure to act.

But the most important things for the left to grasp is that we cannot allow the strategic failures of 2022 simply to carry on. Unions can’t just be in dispute in the same month and call it united action. Broad, sectoral approaches to obtaining more pay and better conditions for workers like what Lynch now advocates, is the only way to secure outcomes from which the majority will benefit. We cannot, however, rely on the union leaderships to deliver those outcomes, because even if they think they are leading a generalised fightback – which they probably did believe in July 2022 – the pressure on them to revert back to a business-as-usual approach will always be too great. The only place that an alternative lead can come from is organised groups of the unions’ members – in other words to rely on a rank-and-file approach to organising – and pulling these together that needs to be the focus of the left.

This article is only intended as an initial assessment of a situation that has not stopped shifting, but we will be following it with more analysis in the coming months.