Jones feared hyper-inflation, which was, he warned, “no good to the working people of this country”. What is especially haunting for the unions and the Labour Party is the knowledge that all this was followed by Margaret Thatcher’s electoral triumph in May 1979 and her government’s introduction of major restrictions on trade union power.Jones was the main architect of the ‘Social Contract’, which underpinned Labour-TUC relations in the Wilson and Callaghan governments and persuaded a powerful generation of trade unionists to offer wage moderation to “a government prepared to tackle the problem of prices in the shops, rent and housing costs”. But Dr Moher wonders whether Gordon Brown, after bailing out the banking system with tax-payers’ money, might now “see how the ordinary saver or worker might well support some variant of Jones’s ideas”. He warned that the beneficiaries of such action would be Margaret Thatcher and “all the ilk of privilege”. Many of the strikes were initiated at the local level, with national union leaders largely unable to stop them. Many unions have long since taken on board those lessons, but there is still influential left-wing political resistance to doing so.The bitter disputes that followed were crystallised in the media and in modern memory by images of piles of uncollected rubbish and horror stories of grave diggers refusing to bury the dead. In the late 1970s Jones’s calls for continued restraint – a shorter working week and workplace democracy instead of a pay ‘free-for-all’ – were defeated within his own union.
His philosophy was that the rich should be expected to bear a bigger burden when governments were asking for sacrifices from other members of the community”.The original ‘winter of discontent’, as it was dubbed in a line taken from Shakespeare’s Richard III, began in the autumn of 1978. With a very high density of membership in Britain’s then significant manufacturing industry, they were the institutional expressions of a powerful organised working class collective culture, social as well as industrial. Along with other leading union officials and labour historians in the History & Policy Trade Union Forum, he is re-examining past episodes to assist modern unions and public policy towards unions.For governments, especially Labour governments, other broader lessons are evident. Our best wishes for a productive day.If you subscribe to BBC History Magazine Print or Digital Editions then you can unlock 10 years’ worth of archived history material fully searchable by Topic, Location, Period and Person.Please enter your number below.Jack Jones is now in his mid-90s and no longer a public figure. It was characterised by widespread strikes by private, and later public, sector trade unions demanding pay rises greater than the limits Prime Minister James Callaghan and his Labour Party government had been imposing, against Trades Union Congress (TUC) opposition, to control inflation. Today’s legal framework prevents the excesses of those times, but places excessive restrictions on the unions’ legitimate ability to exert pressures on employers.Better ways are needed to reconcile the often conflicting demands of workers and the wider needs of the economy and general social progress. While no one expects him “to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak”, as Labour chancellor Denis Healey was said to have threatened to do, “a government lead on restoring some fairness and proportion to senior executive and their employees’ pay could only restore some of Brown’s standing in the country”.Lord (Denis) Healey, then chancellor of the Exchequer, has since admitted that the government’s pay policy limit was too rigid. Centralised pay restraint policies are unlikely to be sustained for long in the face of the discontents they generate, even where some wider ‘social’ sweeteners (eg.
The United Kingdom is facing the largest cuts in public spending for decades causing widespread protests. Angst about Conservative rule hangs over today’s union strategists too as they decide how far to push a Labour government.Thanks!