6 - Class power, politics, and conflict

Summary

The business cycle is the cause of the main fluctuations, indeed of the very nature of strikes themselves; by itself, however, it cannot explain the depth of certain retreats, the amplitude of certain offensives. Political circumstances weigh very heavily and provide the key to the understanding of the major silences and thrusts.

Perrot(1974, p. 722)

Politics constitutes an important kind of precondition for the eruption of large-scale worker movements, though not being in itself a sufficient one.

Shorter and Tilly (1974, p. 104)

The apolitical nature [of trade unions] is a lie, because it cannot exist. Trade unions must have a political outlook … to protect the interests of all workers of any political party or even without a party. To accomplish their goals, trade unions often need the support of political parties. Trade unions have often turned to popular and democratic parties and to their parliamentary groups, in order to lobby for the approval or rejection of a given law, in the workers' best interests.

Di Vittorio (quoted in CESOS-CISL and IRES-CGIL, 1984, p. 303)

LEFT TO EXPLAIN: THE 1975–78 STRIKE SHAPES

Little by little, chapter by chapter, I have used the available theories about strikes to investigate the meaning of the data presented in Chapter 1 (the pieces of the puzzle). I have fitted almost the entire puzzle. I am left with only one of the original pieces (the 1975–78 strike shapes) and one theory: political exchange. But in fact, do we not already have an explanation for the 1975–78 strike shapes? Did we not see, in Chapter 5, that the 1975 wage escalator agreement between labor and capital could account for the lower frequency,