The Unions and the State

This March Britain’s Labour government fell in a vote of no confidence after months of industrial strife. Ford machinists, truckers, local-authority manual workers, social workers and civil servants had battered and broken the government’s wage guidelines. Five years ago Heath’s Conservative government fell over the union question. Then, the National Union of Mineworkers declared an overtime ban and later a strike, refusing to settle within the government’s Phase III. Heath called an election, confident he could win on the issue, “Who governs, the unions or the government?”

Colin Crouch’s book The Politics of Industrial Relations is about the increasingly explicit challenge that u...