Strikes are at an all-time low – and that's because we don't really need trade unions any more

Economic change, structural changes in the workforce and greater competition have all rendered industrial action irrelevant

Strikes, as someone must have remarked by now, are an analogue weapon in a digital age (Rex)

The strike is dead. Or near as dead as makes no difference.

In an unusually excitable press release, the Office for National Statistics has written the obituary. In 2017, there were just 79 industrial disputes involving some 33,000 workers – the lowest ever. The number of days lost was a little above the all-time low, but again as near to nothing as is practical in a free society that still has trade unions. In Wales, once the very crucible of industrial socialism, days lost were so low they were rounded to zero.

The only odd thing is that strikes (measured by working days lost) in the private sector exceeded those in the public sector for the first time since 1999, and actually stood at their highest since 1996. This may have something to do with the number of disputes on the privatised railways; in any case it means that the records being broken now are more down to an improvement in industrial relations in the public sector.

In any case, British industrial stoppages are rare, both by historical and international standards. The two hour delay I experienced in getting a flight back from Barcelona last week, due to action by French air traffic control workers, rather confirmed that picture for me. They were resisting President Macron’s efforts to make the French labour market more flexible. Plus ca change.

The reasons for this historic level of UK industrial calm are well known. Unions are nowhere near as powerful as once they were. That, in turn, is down to structural changes in the workforce, such as casualisation – how does a freelance journalist, for example, go on strike? The gig economy and the rise of self-employment have also destroyed the very concept of a strike, because you can’t go on strike against yourself, or work to rule when it’s you making the rules, can you?

Economic change and greater competition has also rendered strikes irrelevant. When the posties went out in 1971, for example, they virtually crippled the banking system, because bank transfers and cheques and contracts – paper documents – all had to be sent via Royal Mail, which had a stronger monopoly then than now. Today, any strike can be easily broken by emails running through cables under the very feet of the picket line outside. Who now would notice if the postal workers didn’t turn up for work for weeks on end?

Even with the railways and London Underground, the last redoubts of militancy, employers can allow workers to work from home rather than commute, lessening the impact of action. Strikes, as someone must have remarked by now, are an analogue weapon in a digital age.

Since the Thatcher government legislation on the unions has become progressively tighter, it requires (rightly) convincing mandates via secret ballots to take such a step.

The law renders much industrial action useless: giving an employer the best part of a month’s notice of a strike is plenty of time for them to make alternative plans, and especially if the strike is limited to, say, one day. There was a time when strikes were more financially viable because, believe it or not, strikers and their families could claim benefits, including housing benefit, for the duration of a stoppage: today you get your wages docked and there’s no dole for strikers. Those were the days when, for example, the British Leyland car plant at Speke, Merseyside, didn’t produce a single TR7 sports car between October 1977 and March 1978; or The Times and The Sunday Times were not published for virtually the whole of 1979. It was ludicrous.

Once upon a time too, union membership was compulsory if you wanted a job in many workplaces. This was called the “closed shop”, so the union could, if it wanted, sack you by expelling you from the union if you didn’t do as the union wanted. Few would find that believable, let alone acceptable, today. Nor would many workers take “secondary action” to support unrelated disputes, as was once not only legal but commonplace. When the unions had bargaining power, the net effect was that the strong – workers in industries with monopoly power, for example – would grab a bigger share of the national cake for themselves at the expense of the weak – pensioners, people relying on state benefits and those on fixed incomes who found themselves unable to keep up with inflation. Eventually the British realised this was not only damaging the nation’s intentional competitiveness but was building a more unfair, less equal society.

I think, though, that there is another reason, not much remarked upon, why industrial action has gone out of fashion over recent years, and that is that the workforce doesn’t need unions because governments, including this Conservative government, give them much of what they want anyway. So we now have a national minimum wage, thanks to the Blair government, and a national living wage, thanks to George Osborne. Theresa May once even talked about worker directors, though she’s gone a bit quiet about that lately.

We have tough and necessary laws against discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, disability and so on. We still have laws against unfair dismissal (a concept alien to Americans) and employment tribunals – once again virtually free – to pursue claims. There are regulations requiring most employers to provide workplace pensions, with tax breaks still in place to encourage savings. There are laws on health and safety, and in most businesses codes of conduct on bullying and the like. Though they have been stagnating in recent years, it’s also true that real terms wages have hardly ever been higher than they are today.

So a good solicitor or barrister is of more use to the worker of 2018 than a shop steward or a trade union. I wonder too whether many workers have noticed how inefficient and ineffective many trade unions are, and how they are run by and for the benefit of Trotskyist dreamers who imagine the overthrow of capitalism is just around the corner. The real revolution has already happened, brother: we’ve made the strike redundant.