Conclusion

Summary

On September 11, 2008, the Daily Mail ran a story warning its readers what would happen if public sector trade unions in Scotland voted to go out on strike:

We ‘could be brought to a standstill later this month’, hard men in cheap suits warn us, and we are at imminent risk of another Winter of Discontent. […] Rubbish will rot uncollected. Grannies will loll, untended, in residential care-homes. Schools will go uncleaned. […] And, yes, the dead will go unburied or unburned. You would not mind nearly so much if the commissars just went before the cameras and said, ‘Well, we're a bunch of opportunists and we just want more money in the shameless knowledge we can bring society to a halt.’ But it is the righteous preachiness that grates. They are, they sigh, ‘forced into action,’ there being no other way to secure a ‘living wage.’

Even 30 years after the fact, the myth of the Winter of Discontent remained firmly entrenched in British culture. However, I have shown that spectres of ‘opportunistic’ workers and bumbling Labour politicians are evocations that contrast with the multitude of motivations and experiences of those involved in the struggles and conflicts that winter of 1978–79.

For workers in Britain, the rampant inflation of the 1970s triggered a precipitous fall in real wages. So dramatic was the decline that from 1975 to 1977, ‘[…] the average wage earner had suffered the biggest cut in [the] standard of living since before the industrial revolution.’ Many of the economic gains the working class had made soon after the Second World War were dissolving under the pressure of inflation at an unprecedented rate, making a third year of wage restraint in 1978 all the more intolerable. This fall in living standards led school meals worker Maureen Groves to supplement her husband's income and prevented one gravedigger from taking his wife out for dinner more often than once every five years. My research shows this depression of real wages was affecting working people across Western industrialized nations, igniting similar acts of militancy in these countries. The Winter of Discontent was, therefore, part of a global wave of industrial militancy against the erosion of working-class living standards. The decision to strike had less to do with the ‘bloody mindedness’ of British workers than with responding to an assault on their livelihoods.