My eldest daughter wants to go into nursing when she leaves school this summer. I can’t afford to take the children on holiday or anywhere else. “At the weekends we make do with a small chicken and I make a pie. She calculated that after loan payments, utilities and food, she had just £5 a month left for clothes for her and the kids, as well as any other expenses. Penny Hibbins, a single mother to four children, working as a domestic at Starcross Hospital in Devon, told The Guardian of her poverty wages of just £39.50 a week, almost half the median weekly wage for men and less even than the median wage for women manual workers. Prior to the strike, health service workers were telling anyone who would listen about their experiences of poverty. Real wages for NHS and local council employees dropped 19 per cent in this period, pushing many further into poverty. Between 19 attempts by the Labour government, led by Jim Callaghan, to rein in inflation by holding down pay had only made this situation worse. NHS ancillary staff, who worked in support roles like catering, cleaning, laundry and portering services, began the 1970s with average pay not only lower than the average manual worker but lower than the average unskilled worker. This was certainly true of National Health Service staff who participated in strikes during this period. Their actions were disruptive and perceived as a crisis precisely because they were abnormal for the period, not because they were typical of it. Far from their tyrannical unions running the country, their actions in 1979 reflected a howl of protest from some of the most marginalised and worst-paid workers in Britain. Previously the relatively weak collective strength of public sector unions and lorry drivers had seen those groups of workers’ living standards hurt badly by rising inflation. With the exception of the Ford workers’ strike in Autumn 1978 all of the other groups were well below average in terms of how often those workers went on strike. The industrial protests of that winter became a crisis precisely because most of the groups involved hadn’t previously been strike-prone. Yet, the actual events of 1978-79 undermine that story. The Winter of Discontent has come to stand for a wider narrative about the 1970s as a period where everyone was constantly on strike, electricity was rationed and the unions ran the country. The work done by these recollections is peculiar in lots of ways. Newspaper commentators and politicians often invoke the spectre of the 1970s via images of uncollected rubbish piling up in Leciester Square or references to a gravediggers’ strike that affected Liverpool and Tameside for two weeks in 1979. Politicians are still launching arguments, particularly about the role of trade unionism and socialism in British history, based around a folk memory of the period. This phrase, borrowed from Shakespeare’s play Richard III, and the events it described continue to have considerable impact on British culture even now. This series of events came to be known as “the Winter of Discontent”. First Ford workers, then lorry drivers, council workers and NHS staff all walked out causing severe disruption to public services. Between October 1978 and February 1979 Britain experienced a wave of strikes on a scale that hadn’t been seen since the General Strike of 1926.
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