25 years after the miners’ strike (2)
March 4, 2009
… continued from yesterday’s post 25 years after the miners’ strike (1)
We often see footage from the time of violent clashes between strikers and the police, or depictions of this in TV programmes and Film. This violence was initially between the workers picketing at pits and local police forces, such as the clash at Orgreave in South Yorkshire in June 1984, where 5,000 miners intending to stop lorries carrying coke leaving the site (they did not succeed), met 5,000 police officers carrying batons and riot shields. Later on in the year-long strike there were clashes on the picket line when miners started to return to work at the end of 1984 because of the hardship caused by not earning a wage for months on end. Soup kitchens were opened to help many families who could not afford to feed themselves, and food donations became commonplace.
In March 1985 the strike finally ended as the NUM gave in and voted to call it off, and history was made:
“From 1985 onwards the pit closure programme picked up speed. Margaret Thatcher had taken on the strongest union in the land and won” (BBC)
These days Trade Unionism has a very different face, with many of the traditionally unionised industries in decline, and the majority of union members are now in the public sector. Whilst we have seen quite a lot of industrial action in the last year or so, gone are the days of flying pickets, although we did recently see ‘sympathetic’ industrial action with a number of oil refineries staging unofficial strikes in support of the Lindsey Refinery’s foreign worker dispute; although this support action (i.e. not directly related to the workplace where it takes place) is not lawful under current legislation.
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