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It's too easy to strike. We need further cuts in union power

Across the Channel, the French have taken to the boulevards with placards reading “Strike 'til you retire!” and “Let’s paralyse the economy!” in protest against Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. There have been violent clashes between protestors, many of them students, and police, and blockades of petrol refineries and depots threaten to induce a crippling petrol shortage.

And in Britain, where some seven million people are members of unions, strikes look set to play a bigger and bigger role in people's lives, with George Osborne's Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) having outlined plans to cut 490,000 public sector jobs. Unison, Britain's biggest public sector union with some 1.3 million members, released a statement saying that Osborne "has condemned the country to decades of hardship and the people to unnecessary wholesale unemployment," with his “ideologically driven, no hope, no ideas, cuts CSR.” Bob Crow, of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), suggested that British people should follow the French in taking to the streets to demonstrate against austerity measures. Brendan Barber, the leader of the TUC, said these cuts would make Britain "a more unequal, more squalid and nastier country," and urged his members to oppose them.

So should we applaud striking workers for exercising their right to seek fairer pay and better working conditions? Or do their protests represent nothing more than counter-productive petulance?