Another Empowering Story from the UK Miners Strike on its 30th Anniversary

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the UK miners strike. The singular watershed event in U.S. labor relations in last the 50 years is arguably the illegal Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981. President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the 11,000 striking air traffic controllers is often cited as the event that made it acceptable for private sector companies to aggressively fight unions in organizing drives, at the bargaining table, and by using replacement workers for strikers. In Great Britain, the analogous watershed event is the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) 12-month strike against the government-run National Coal Board (NCB) in 1984-85, often now referred to simply as the Great Strike.

The strike was extremely divisive. Hard line bargaining stances spilled over into numerous violent clashes between miners and police, with an estimated 10,000 arrests, 1,700 injuries, and a couple of deaths. Politically, the strike highlighted north (poor) – south (rich) divisions within Britain, created fissures within the labor movement and the Labour party, and questioned the fabric of British society. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s opposition was so intense that she labeled the miners “the enemy within.” It was later revealed that MI5, Britain’s domestic CIA, led a widespread surveillance effort which included infiltration of NUM, bugging restaurants frequented by NUM leaders, and tapping the phone of every NUM branch. [For a collection of powerful images, see this Daily Mail retrospective]

Any yet, empowering stories emerge (and not just fictional ones, as in the movie-now-musical Billy Elliot). In stories that parallel the women’s brigade in the General Motors sit-down strike in 1935-36, women became actively involved in the NUM strike in running soup kitchens, speaking to groups around Great Britain to develop support for the strike, and picketing. A daughter, mother, and ex-wife of South Yorkshire miners captured this significant change in a later interview:

The NUM, as far as I can see, put all its eggs in the picketing basket, as they traditionally have, and made no particular provision for dealing with destitution amongst the families. So the women began to see that as well as campaigning there was a need to support the families. That meant going far beyond the traditional housewife role of the mining women. There has been large-scale catering, feeding five and six hundred people in a day; having to raise the money for that, learning to argue for it, to earn it in all sorts of ways, by speaking at meetings and rallies, by collecting on the streets. What they did was to set up an alternative welfare system, and an effective one at that. And these women who had never done anything outside the home before, learning to speak on public platforms to enormous audiences. The change in those women is tremendous. [Source: Vicky Seddon (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Women and the Pit Strike (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 229.]

And now there is a movie, Pride, based on another empowering true story from this strike. A group of gay and lesbian activists in London from a group “Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners” (LGSM) to raise money to support the strikers. One can easily imagine the culture clashes that result when LGSM members travel to a tiny Welsh village (Onllwyn) to personally hand over the donated money, as well as during subsequent reciprocal visits, such as for the “Pits and Perverts” benefit at a London rock club.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone who has the chance to see it. It is a very powerful and uplifting story. Individual struggles among activists and miners as well as the evolution of various relationships are captured with a deft blend of realism and humor. Within the domain of work, the film is a visual reminder that the labor movement can be a champion of social change, but it can be difficult to overcome traditional attitudes. Human resources professionals should also see this movie as a reminder that “diversity” should be very powerfully about human dignity, not superficially about broadening employee demographics to better serve a diverse customer base or enhancing creativity through a mixing of diverse perspectives. But you don't just have to be professionally interested in the domain of work to find this a very good movie. It has it all: human rights and dignity, identity, labor, caring, stunning Welsh scenery, an entertaining soundtrack, and many laughs.

To get you in the mood (or recall it, if you've seen the movie), here is the closing song: Billy Bragg, There is Power in a Union. Which reminds me of Jimmy Barnes, Working Class Man. Though one is British and the other Australian. But I digress. Just go see Pride.

The Metaphor of the Octopus Worker

Being from the United States where work is mostly about money and where organized labor is frequently demonized, when traveling it's quite refreshing to encounter museums devoted to workers. One such museum is Copenhagen's Arbejdermuseet (Workers' Museum). Among the many stimulating items is a plate from the early 1970s depicting a woman who needs eight arms to juggle all of her responsibilities--taking care of her family, tending to her house and household chores, and working outside the home, all with a smile. In the Workers' Museum, this is described as an octopus woman. I was able to find out that this provocative image was used by the Kvindeligt Arbejderforbund (Female Workers Confederation) as part of their fight for equal pay in Denmark in the early 1970s, but it speaks to me today on many levels.

Of course there is the important level of the continuing need to fully respect work done in the home as just that--work. Unpaid care work is work that can be hard, but also rewarding; work that contributes to our families, communities, and economies, and that should be valued because of these contributions, rather than devalued because it does not directly earn a paycheck.

On another level, this image can also be a metaphor for work more generally. What is work? Too often work is looked at as only one thing, specifically as just a way to earn a living. This is not only unduly narrow, it is destructive. Seeing work only in this way means that job quality is reduced to the dollars and cents on a paycheck, and the bidding down of wages and benefits in a global economy is seen as a natural course of events than cannot be checked. When work is thought of as only about money, it creates a culture where it is necessary and acceptable to closely monitor, supervise, and incentivize employees. This is captured by another object in the Workers' Museum--a clipboard with a built-in stopwatch used by managers to break work down into simple, repetitive, mindless tasks.

In my recent book, The Thought of Work (Cornell University Press, 2011), I try to fight the "one best way" approach to thinking about work that frequently dominates not only public and private policies on work, but also scholarly research. While we need to guard against work becoming all-consuming--the octopus woman image also demonstrates how easy it is to become overburdened by work--I try to embrace the metaphor of the octopus woman by recognizing and valuing work as many things. When we work, we do more than earn a living, we also create, care for, and serve others. We hopefully derive some satisfaction, but also a deeper understanding of our own identities. It is time for researchers to do a better job talking with each other across disciplinary lines, and more importantly, it is time for social norms as well as private and public policies on work to truly embrace work's fundamental importance.

Note: I initially published this entry on the No Way to Make a Living blog, September 2011.