Expert commentary

Martin O’Neill

Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York

The data presented in these polling results gives us a striking, and strikingly bleak, snapshot of a country that is now systematically failing to deliver for its citizens on even the most basic standards of fairness and social justice. 86% of those surveyed think that the UK has a problem with people being unable to meet their most basic needs due to low pay and bad housing, with the proportion holding this view being almost 80% even for those who are Conservative voters (among Labour voters the proportion is over 90%). 81% of those surveyed believe that the UK faces a problem with people not being able to get a fair day’s pay for a day’s work, in which opinion they are joined by over 70% of those voting Conservative (90% for Labour voters). And concern for the manifestly poor standard of the UK’s public services is at over 80% for the population in general.

This is a picture of a society in which the social contract between individuals and the state has effectively broken down. The failures of government – and the perceptions of those failures – are not marginal but fundamental. The sense here is that the conditions of reciprocity between the individual and the broader economic and political system have been worn away: people no longer sense that they are getting a fair reward for their social contribution, either in terms of pay or in terms of the public services that they can access. What is perhaps even more remarkable here is that these immensely bleak survey responses are those that are captured ‘cold’ in polling with an audience who have not been primed with further data about the levels of inequality in the United Kingdom today. One can only imagine that responses would have been even angrier and more despairing if those polled had first been told about the increases in billionaire wealth in the UK since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Research from the Equality Trust shows that the number of UK billionaires has increased by around 20% since the pandemic, with their combined wealth rising by around £150bn between 2020 and 2022. The clear evidence that we are certainly not ‘all in this together’ could only intensify these perceptions of the fundamental unfairness of British society.

When we think about issues relating to the fairness of strike action, we have to bear in mind this appalling background vista of underlying injustice and unfairness. The survey data suggests that, as one would expect, people do generally keep these background facts in mind when they think about the justification of strikes, as we see with the remarkably high levels of support for the arguments that strikes are justified when workers can’t otherwise manage to support a decent standard of living, alongside the level of support for arguments that stress growing inequality, and the pay gaps between ordinary workers and those, such as chief executives, at the top of the income distribution. In a society where the rewards generated by workers’ social and economic contribution were already shared reasonably fairly, where a decent social minimum was guaranteed for all, where inequality was kept in check, and where opportunities were broadly distributed, questions about the justification of industrial action might be rather more complicated, and people’s responses and reactions to strikes might be very different. But that is not our world. In the UK in 2023, the high prevalence of strikes is best understood as an understandable surface symptom of a deeper social malaise caused by a society that has continued to devolve towards higher levels of inequality and unfairness.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these survey results, though, are what is shown about perceptions of the strongest reasons against strikes. Many of the considerations that seem most compelling to people here are interestingly double-edged. For example, one could agree that “it is not fair that some workers are able to go on strike while others cannot”, but that could just as easily be read as a call for robust protections of rights of union membership as it could be read as a consideration straightforwardly against current industrial action. Similarly the point that some striking workers are already paid more than many others in the economy: one could just as easily think that this could develop into a train of thought that takes seriously the idea that some workers are able to defend their relative position precisely because they are organised and unionised, and that one way of resolving this apparent unfairness would be for others to follow their lead in exercising their democratic rights to unionise and to take collective action.

This double-edged character of people’s thinking is perhaps especially poignant when one looks at the high level of support for the claim that “everyone should be able to access essential public services”. Of course this claim is one to which most people would and should assent, as it captures a core idea in how we think about social justice, that very idea of reciprocity and the sense that the provision of high-quality public services is something that all citizens should be able to expect in a successful and well-functioning society. But again this is hardly the basis for a coherent argument against strike action taken by those whose jobs is to provide those services, because the systematic failures in the provision of essential public services pre-dates this strike action, and has other causes. It is precisely because essential public services have been run down through underfunding that those working within the NHS (to take the most prominent example) have been forced into strike action. As the slogan heard on many of the picket lines of the Royal College of Nursing in recent weeks rightly has it, “people aren’t dying because nurses are striking; nurses are striking because people are dying”. When striking workers are taking action not only to try to improve their own unfairly bad pay and conditions, but also to address the underlying injustices that sit behind and explain those forms of unfairness, then they certainly merit the solidarity and support of all of those who are troubled by our unjust and unfair society, and retain the hope for something better.