Analysis
Are there too many strikes? No, too few
Italy is not alone. All over the world, many different parties in government have expressed open hostility toward strikes. Yet from 1992 to the present day there has been an enormous drop in the number of strikes.
On the matter of strikes, the Meloni government and its mouthpieces resort to a well-trodden propaganda line: there are supposedly too many work stoppages, caused by a minority of irresponsible trade unionists going against a majority of aggrieved citizens, and they are organized only when the right is in power. Thus, they argue, the employers' associations are right that there is a need to further regulate, regiment, and narrow the already limited practical scope of the constitutional right to strike.
It’s not just the current Italian government taking this position. All over the world, many different parties in government have expressed open hostility toward strikes. From the U.K. to France, Austria, the Netherlands, a number of U.S. states – the tendency of governments to believe that there are too many strikes and that they should be repressed is a hallmark of the era in which we live.
However, no matter how widespread it is, the claim that there are “too many” strikes is blatantly false. If we look at official data from the International Labor Organization (ILO) on the working hours spent on strike mobilization in relatively “developed” countries – from the United States to South Korea, members of the European Union, Turkey and so on – we find that from 1992 to the present day there has been an enormous drop in strikes: on average, they have plummeted by more than 40 percent, with a record of more than 80 percent in the United Kingdom. And if we compare current data to the 1970s, we see an even steeper overall collapse in strikes, estimated at no less than 70 percent on average.
Moreover, the data also show a drop of more than 80 percent in the differences in strike data between nations. This means that there has been a trend of downward international convergence, in the sense that countries where strikes tended to be more common in the past have come to look more and more like those where strikes are rare. Denmark, Germany, Spain and other nations, where the number of work stoppages used to be in the three figures annually, are increasingly drifting down towards the averages of the United States and Australia, where there are no more than a few dozen strikes each year overall.
What about Italy? Our country has a serious information gap. The ILO was unable to update the strike data for Italy, since official ISTAT surveys on strikes stopped in 2009. In the late 19th century, Francesco Saverio Nitti lamented that “there are no good statistics on Italian strikes.” More than a century later, things don’t seem to have improved on this front. The new president of ISTAT, Francesco Maria Chelli, would do well to resolve this embarrassing situation.
Fortunately, while we’re waiting for ISTAT to step up, there has been no shortage of researchers to help fill the statistical gap. A recent research paper by Ilaria Maroccia and Gilberto Turati from the Catholic University shows that Italy is slavishly following the trend of the international decline in strikes. Indeed, in some ways it could be counted among the top countries that show this collapse.
Between 1973 and 2009, labor conflicts in Italy fell from 5,598 per year to less than 1,000, a drop of more than 80 percent. For the subsequent period, one available figure is provided by the ISTAT Survey of Large Enterprises in Industry and Services, which shows that the fall is even more pronounced: between 2005 and 2022, it went from about 30 hours of strikes per 1,000 hours worked to less than 10 hours per 1,000, a drop of another two-thirds.
Health care and other essential public services are no exception to this trend, same as transportation: all these sectors have seen dramatic reductions in strikes, especially since the pandemic. According to data from the Strike Guarantee Commission, the decline has been between 25 and 40 percent over the past five years.
The data also belie the self-victimization of the right. The accounting of strike hours by sector shows that there are no significant differences between the times when the right, the center-left, the “populist” yellow-green executive, or the “technocratic” administrations of Monti and Draghi were in power: in all cases, the same long-term trend of a decline in strikes can be seen.
The data paint a clear picture. There aren’t too many strikes after all; if anything, there are too few. Especially in Italy, where the degradation of real wages and working and living conditions has now reached record levels when compared to its peers.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/gli-scioperi-sono-troppi-no-troppo-pochi on 2024-11-29