Conga-dancing dockers show that Britain’s become holiday camp of the world – and that’s how unions want us to stay

IS there any sight which better shows the worrying return of union militancy than that of striking workers at Felixstowe docks doing karaoke and the conga?

Normally, this is one of the better-functioning parts of Britain’s creaking infrastructure.

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The port works around the clock, quietly handling half of all the goods which are shipped into the UK via container.

But now 1,900 members of the Unite union — who make up around three- quarters of the dock workforce — have come out on a week-long strike after rejecting a pay rise of seven per cent plus £500.

It won’t be long before we all start to notice the difference as gaps appear on supermarket shelves.

This comes on top, of course, of strikes by railway workers, criminal barristers, Post Office workers, BT staff and employees at the AQA examination board.

Brought Britain to its knees

If we are not careful we will soon be rapidly heading back towards something resembling the grim early months of 1979 — the Winter Of Discontent — when copycat strikes spread from one industry to another and, famously, the rubbish piled up on the streets and the dead went unburied.

The people of Edinburgh have already had a foretaste as a strike by refuse workers — also represented by Unite — has led to streets full of uncollected bin bags.

This is the time of year when Edinburgh is on show to the world through its month-long festival. It is a fair guess that many tourists will be so disgusted that they will not be coming back.

We can all sympathise with workers who find that their pay this year is not quite keeping up with inflation.

Indeed, this will be the experience of most of us this year.

The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) currently stands at more than ten per cent — and very few employers have the money to afford pay rises at that level.

Many companies will find themselves struggling just to keep afloat as the surge in global energy prices forces up costs.

We are going to have to accept that living standards are going to fall for most of us this year.

But it simply isn’t true that the rich are getting richer while the workers see living standards eroded.

Just at the moment, we are nearly all getting poorer in real terms.

We can’t reverse that by all giving ourselves fat pay rises.

On the contrary, a wave of above-inflation pay rises at the moment would threaten the kind of inflationary spiral which brought Britain to its knees in the 1970s — where pay rises feed through to price rises which in turn lead to further pay demands and so on.

Britain’s underlying problem is its lousy productivity.

For most of the past decade the value of goods and services produced by the average worker has been static, and the pandemic has made things worse.

lousy productivity

While productivity did seem to recover at first, in the first three months of 2022 it then fell by 0.6 per cent.

The decline in productivity is especially alarming in the public sector, where in the first three months of this year output per worker was 6.8 per cent lower than in 2019.

If a country cannot improve productivity, it cannot grow richer — however loudly its unions demand pay rises.

The sight of workers doing the conga on the picket line says it all.

Britain once had a reputation as the “workshop of the world”.

Now, post-Covid, we’re more like the holiday camp of the world.

We want to cut our hours, work from home, take time off whenever our “wellbeing” demands it — and yet still we think we have a right to a fat pay rise.

Trouble is, the dinosaurs of the trade union movement just don’t get the link between productivity and pay.

So often when a company proposes the modernisation of working practices to improve productivity, the kneejerk reaction of the unions is to oppose it.

They simply can’t see that by improving efficiency in the workplace, they will be paving the way to better pay.

Scream blue murder

That is why we still have railways employing some of the same practices as they did in the 19th Century.

Driver-only-operated trains have been running safely in Britain since 1982 — and yet still unions try to preserve the jobs of superfluous guards.

More than 100 metro systems around the world run perfectly safely without any drivers — yet the unions scream blue murder at the very idea of bringing automation to the London Underground.

We can either try to save every job, long after technology has rendered them obsolete — or we can accept change, improve productivity and so grow richer as a country.

That is the choice facing the unions.

Sadly, like Arthur Scargill 40 years ago, whose militancy hastened the end of the coal industry, they seem intent on the former course.

Through their short-term greed, they are attacking the long-term interests of their own members — not to mention wrecking the prospects of the entire country.