Many years ago when union members at the BBC were threatening to take the Wimbledon tournament off the air, one of the sleazier tabloids decided to doorstep the Head Office official who was in charge of the dispute.
Having failed dismally to capture this "enemy of the people" on film, the desperate hacks politely invited his wife if she would be so kind as to pose for a photograph on the front lawn, perhaps holding a tennis raquet which they had found, by complete accident, under a nearby hedge.
Unknown to them, the diminutive woman who managed to trap a size 9 black oxford in her front door was as much of a class warrior as her partner, and they were packed off with their tripods between their legs.
Strikes are back in the news once more, with railworkers leading a wave of discontent in the public services, and as usual we are being treated to all the wrong information.
There's no shortage of detail about the previous political affiliations of the union leaders involved, their disciplinary records when on the tools, and even where some of them sit during football matches at Millwall. Luckily, none of them has yet been caught out posing for photographers holding a footplateman's shovel, thought it's likely that a few more Fleet Street feet have been jammed against door frames along the way.
Little seems to have been said about the reasons for unrest on the rails, even thought they are asininely simple. It's all about privatisation, when the entire rail network was sold off at a price barely higher than the then value of Netscape, the first major dotcom to float on the stock market before sinking with the rest of them a few years later.
Not content with this massive property heist, the new owners embarked on a process that many of us have learned is "the usual" after privatisations. Costs were cut by laying off experienced staff right left and centre, and a freeze was imposed on recruitment and training.
Guess what happened next? Yup...with too few drivers and no trainees in the pipeline the operating companies ended up at each others' throats, poaching staff from rival companies.
On offer as bait were salaries significantly higher than Railtrack used to pay, and it was only a matter of time before other hard-working rail staff began to feel they had been left stranded at the bottom of the wage ladder.
Net result - trouble at t'station.
Maybe the reason we don't hear the story told this way is that it runs counter to an establishment view of industrial action which became a creed under Margaret Thatcher, and sadly seems to have won a few converts in the Labour government.
The eighties' doctrine was don't ever blame the management, warn gloomily that the economy will be brought down, and always assume that strikes are the result of workforces being bullied into action by politically obsessed union leaders whose eyes are too close together.
This crude analysis ignores a few key realities which apply in our industries just as much as on the railways.
First, managers are just as capable of causing strikes as trade unionists, sometimes deliberately a la coal strike or Wapping, but more often through sheer pig-headedness.
Secondly, while strikes are obviously not good for national economies, they aren't fatal. Countries whose standard of living has grown faster than the UK over the last two decades have managed their transformations despite levels of industrial action that dwarf the half-million days we lost in 2000. In Spain workers take 14 times more action than in the UK, in Ireland, the tiger economy of Europe, they are on picket lines 17 times more often than us, and in Canada a stunning 19 times more days are lost per worker through industrial action than here.
Lastly, no amount of political rhetoric will persuade the majority of workers to go on strike unless they really feel aggrieved or unfairly treated at work. Compulsory strike ballots, which were intended to give members a chance to vote down the bullies who allegedly kept ordering them out of the door, have almost had the opposite effect, as workers have instead used thumping majorities in favour of action as messages of discontent to their employers.
Labour, who publicly at least seem to be "leaving it to the market" to sort out problems on the railways, ought to pay attention to the key issue at stake - inequalities of pay. Only by keeping control of wage differentials will unions, and the government if it cares to, prevent Britain's gulf between rich and poor from widening even further.
As a union we have our own low pay battles at the moment, notably in the theatre and entertainment section where the poverty wages for some workers are a scandal.
If industrial action is the only solution BECTU will stand by its members no matter how unfashionable it might be in establishment circles. And to prove that the union can learn the lessons of history, we'll also make sure that there are no photo opportunities involving officials clutching Yorrick's skull.
Tony Lennon
March 2002
