Introduction

After the uptick in strike activity from the summer of 2022 onwards, it may seem a strange question to ask but, nonetheless: what if there were no strikes in any of the years of the rest of the decade in Britain? What would this mean, and what would its overall significance be? Asking these questions at the very outset helps to get straight to the heart of, arguably, the most salient issue for those studying conflict at work in the present period. This is that the existence of conflict1 within the employment relationship and the expression of that conflict, in whatever form, are not synonymous with each other. They should merely be thought of as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Put even more bluntly, the likes of strikes are but the symptoms of conflict and not its causes.2 Therefore, it is possible to have conflict in the employment relationship without any overt expressions of that conflict, mostly obviously, in the form of strikes. Of course, that does mean that it is often harder to then spot the manifestations of conflict without the overt signs of it. Under capitalism, the primary axis of conflict in the employment relationship is between the material interests of capital (employers and management) and those of labour (employees and workers). Alongside these material interests, power and ideology are the other principal and related components in the employment relationship and thus wider economy and society. They form a mutually reinforcing troika within a system based upon the drive to accumulate profits (surplus value) through the exploitation of labour and in competition with other units of capital.

Asking these initial questions about strikes is not an abstract exercise, as will be argued shortly. Asking them helps form the starting point for trying to cast some fresh light on some age-old issues about conflict at work by asking a number of other questions. One of these is: ‘Why do those studying industrial relations still think that spending time looking at the conflict between capital and labour within the employment relationship under capitalism is worthwhile?’ Another is: ‘Why do the most important expressions of conflict predominantly take collective forms?’