especially France and Italy, strikes have most often been political actions called
to highlight the unions’ opposition to general government policies rather than
being pragmatic negotiating tools. In the UK, particularly during the Con-
servative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, labour-relations laws
have tended to put constraints on trade-union activities. Complex issues such
as the conducting of ballots of trade union members before the leadership may
call a strike, the right of striking union members preventing other workers
(union members or not) from working, and the legality of strikes called by local
or factory leadership, but without support from the central union leadership,
have been difficult to resolve. There are many conflicting elements at play:
should balloting and ‘cooling off’ periods be compulsory before a strike can
legitimately commence?; the validity of ballot results has been questioned
when they are largely supervised by the union itself, and continued member-
ship of the union is sometimes necessary for employment in the industry
because of the ‘closed shop’; far from opposing the closed shop for the power it
gives to unions, some employers actually favour it as it simplifies the negotiat-
ing procedure. In general labour-relations law in the UK has weakened unions,
and made strikes much less common, and less effective when held. The 1984–
85 miners’ strike was a particularly heavy symbolic defeat for the trade union
movement. As trade unions became increasingly unpopular it was inevitable
that they would be less willing to risk major strike action. But the real cause of
the general decline of strikes throughout the Western economies has been the
decline in the size of the industrial working class, and the even faster decline in
the proportion of that class which is unionized. Similarly, the huge increase in
the importance of part-time work in the Western economies has made the
strike weapon largely anachronistic. Where strikes continue to be frequent, for
example Italy, it is because they have always had more of a political and
symbolic role than their pragmatic effect on employers justified. Italy may be
the only country, for example, where self-employed taxi drivers have gone on
strike. Nevertheless, the right to strike, if limited in law, is by now one of the
basiccivil libertiesany modern society would be expected to guarantee.
Structural Functionalism
Structural functionalism is one variant of a general theoretical approach to the
analysis of political systems, and is not easily distinguishable fromfunction-
alismor systems theory. It has principally been used by students of
comparative governmentto make intelligent comparisons between very
different societies at different levels of socio-economic orpolitical develop-
ment. Essentially the theory consists of identifying a set of necessary functions
or ‘tasks’ that any social system must fulfil for survival, and then researching
Structural Functionalism