Many dinosaur trades union leaderships don’t seem to have woken up to the fact yet, but the strike weapon is rapidly becoming a very two-edged sword: the News International printers were stunned when the company took them at their word and fired them when they walked out on the job, and now the 110,000 members of the National Communications Union must be wondering whether it was really such a good idea to demonstrate so dramatically the reliability of modern telecommunications equipment when they went on strike for two weeks earlier in the year; according to the Financial Times, by the end of the dispute, all the faults that showed up during the strike had been fixed, and there is now pressure from within British Telecom for a dramatic speed-up of its 5,500-a-year job reduction programme, which was to have been achieved by attrition.
