Why was there a sharp rise in class struggle in Britain in 1943 and 1944?
Basically, family earnings grew greatly with the onset of war. Women suddenly got much better jobs with better pay. The new industries, light engineering and so on, paid vastly better. So family incomes rose substantially. Then there was a systematic attempt to clamp down on wages which by 1943 was beginning to become effective. The strikes weren’t simply about wages. They were commonly short lived and commonly forced the employers to concede, even though wages were regulated by law. They reached their height in 1944. These were big movements. They weren’t anti-war, they were about the specific grievances. There was an explosion. They conceded in part, as indeed they had to. They did against the Kent miners, for example, but they couldn’t do it on a massive scale – particularly in engineering and shipbuilding, which was at the centre of things. The only strike I took part in was much earlier than that, in the spring of 1941. There was a rash of disputes starting in Glasgow, involving a
