Janos:
Usual story, workers being led like lambs to the slaughter by militant shop stewards to try and score wider political points. The shipping lines won’t be dictated to by the union. The work will go elsewhere, and port will turn into another northern wasteland like so many other steel and dock yards.
Dockers in Seaforth were whinging about Dock Board imposing 24hr working at Liverpool when they had their last big strike…see a lot of them driving taxis now.
this was my point to an extent - striking has done all of our wonderful institutions so much good - miners/ shipbuilders / car industry so now we go onto the dockers, yes as someone has said above its not always as black and white as it will be put across but hiding to nothing springs to mind.
I have been on strikes/work to rule all the ‘union’ ideas that in the end worked out totally pointless - did we come out of it any better? hell no, look recently at royal mail another place where people lost out despite striking, best of luck but I cant see the point other than a lot of dockers will lose 2 weeks wages and find other ports can manage whilst they are on strike.