Low strike levels can indicate strong rather than weak labour power

Evidence

Contrary to what has been argued by many, a high level of industrial conflict in a country need not necessarily reflect a strong working class. In some countries, political parties on the left have been in positions of power which have enabled them to redirect important parts of distributive conflicts from the labour market into democratic politics, thereby making industrial conflict temporarily ‘wither away’ (Korpi, 1978; Korpi and Shalev, 1980). — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface, 8

Categorization

• XREF: A powerful measurement warning for the reader’s design: the same observable outcome (quiescence) indexes opposite underlying power states. — connects to: Strike frequency builds professions’ public status and prestige — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2191
• DEEPTHINKING: Dissolves the natural inference from visible contestation to underlying capacity — the very confusion at the heart of using felt grievance as a proxy for control deficits.