The Common Strike of 1926

Why did the Basic Strike of 1926 fail and what have been the effects the strike had upon industrial relations in Britain?

The General Strike of 1926 lasted only nine days and straight involved around 1.eight million workers. It was the short but ultimate outbreak of a significantly longer conflict in the mining business, which lasted from the privatisation of the mines soon after the First World War till their renewed nationalisation soon after the Second. The roots of the Basic Strike in Britain, in contrast to in France or other continental countries, did not lie in ideological conceptions such as syndicalism but in the gradually changing character of trade union organisation and tactics. On the one hand, unskilled and other unapprenticed workers had been organised into national unions due to the fact the 1880s to combat sectionalism and to strengthen their bargaining power and the effectiveness of the strike weapon. On the other hand, at the exact same time and for the same cause trade unions had created the tactic of industry-wide and ‘sympathetic’ strikes. Later in the course of the pre-war labour unrest these two forms of strike action, ‘national’ and ‘sympathetic’, have been far more usually used collectively which in an intense case could have meant a basic strike. The symbol of this new approach was the triple alliance, formed in 1914, which was a loose, informal agreement among railwaymen, transport workers and miners to assistance each other in case of industrial disputes and strikes. As G.A. Phillips summarised:

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