People in Britain are so used to strikes and the inconvenience they cause that we have come to believe ourselves the most strike-prone country in the world. Statistics show that this is not quite true. In Australia strikes are known as 'the English disease', but Australia consistently loses more working days a year through strikes than Britain ! Nevertheless, the extensive news coverage given to strikes convinces us that they are part of the everyday pattern of British life.

It is easier to explain why we have so many strikes than to prevent them. The problems that give rise to them have a long history and affect the whole structure of our national life. In the first place, Britain has always been a class-conscious society. The extremes of wealth and poverty we can see in the United States are not as apparent here; but the subtle distinctions we make between different sections of the middle class, for example, give foreigners the impression that our society is much more rigidly divided on class lines than it really is.

The awareness of class differences, however, is the thing that does most damage to industrial relations. The co-operative relationship managers often have with workers in Scandinavia, for instance, is rare in Britain, and the idea of worker directors who sit on boards of management is equally unpopular with companies and unions. Both have their traditional prejudices against mixing with the other side. For many leading trade unionists the natural relationship be tween worker and employer is confrontation, not co-operation, and they would not like to see this changed.

Union leaders are generally blamed for strikes, but the main cause of strikes is the unions' old-fashioned structure. For one thing, there are far too many of them. Most strikes are unofficial and many result from inter-union disputes that in turn arise from a feeling of being threatened, of insecurity.' The big unions recruit unskilled workers, while the unions whose members are skilled craftsmen have less power to argue with employers and resort to strike action to maintain wage differentials.

Apart from purely British problems, there are international ones common to all industrial societies. Computerised factories create unemployment and the men who lose their jobs are usually the least skilled, so it is more difficult for them to find new work. But on the other hand, sociologists argue that boredom is primarily responsible for a large proportion of strikes where machines could replace monotonous jobs !

The only thing that seems clear from this is the size and complexity of the problem. The traditional confrontation between workers and management is certain to lead to more strikes and distract everyone's attention from the practical measures that could improve the situation. And politicians who emphasise the differences between the two sides are doing their best to ensure that 'the English disease' will never be cured !