This week’s Economist has a useful survey of the state of industrial militancy globally. In it we learn that Paul Nowak, national organiser of the Trades Union Congress, concurs with British capitalism’s leading newspaper and says that industrial relations are “pretty good”.

Let’s see what they mean by that.

The paper says “In virtually all rich countries, union membership and the amount of time lost to strikes has plunged.” It doesn’t require too much insight to work out why a capitalist newspaper and a bureaucrat want to see low strike levels. From the bureaucrat’s point of view declining union membership should be a problem, if only because it is the members who pay for the bureaucracy.

Strike levels are very low across Europe .

In Britain the number of strike days fell to 460,000 in 2009 from 1.04m in 2007. In 1979 the figure was 29m.

In the three months to February this year 34% of firms were getting their workers to accept wage freezes, a slight fall from 37% but indicative of a cautious and demoralised mood among many workers. The median pay rise over the period was 1.8%. Public sector pay awards were much lower than last year, coming in at just 0.4% once long-term wage settlements, such as those in place for National Health Service staff, were excluded.

Elsewhere the picture is not much better or, if you are a fulltime union bureaucrat, worse. In Denmark industrial workers voted last week to accept their union’s recommendation of minimal pay rises. In Poland barely 13,000 workers were involved in strikes last year, compared with 209,000 in 2008.

In the United States union density is shrinking rapidly and is now at the same level as it was in 1900. In 2009 only 7.2% of workers in the private sector were unionised against 37.4% in the public sector. Total union membership in the US is 15.3 million.

High levels of union membership is no guarantee that workers don’t end up bearing the cost of the ruling class offensive. Federal workers in Canada have been promised wage “rises” of 1.5% this year and next but it looks likely that they will be paid for by cutting part time jobs, a move unlikely to have a serious impact on slumming eccentric millionaires.

Ireland’s unions have set a world class example of spinelessness by agreeing to effective pay cuts of 12% and resolutely agreeing that the working class should pay for the capitalists’’ crisis. This is the model advocated by the IMF which relies almost exclusively on slashing the social wage.

The examples of resistance that The Economist uses to imply that Europe’s capitalists are facing a determined fightback are unpersuasive. Irish unions had tens of thousands of workers stroll round Dublin before agreeing to their austerity package. London’s April 10th demo measured 0.0000001 on the electoral Richter scale and Dutch workers will be having a series of one day strikes, the single most ineffective type of industrial action in the cosmos.

What lies ahead?

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has released a report effectively calling the three major parties liars who are concealing the depth of the cuts they will make after the election.

The Tories will make the largest sustained cut to departmental public spending since the Second World War. Labour and the Lib Dems are committed to cuts of a depth not seen since 1976. It’s a choice but not a great one.

Faisal Islam writes:

“On spending, the Conservatives need to find £64 billion in cuts by 2015 from unprotected areas such as education, housing, transport etc. They have not explained 82 per cent of this, or £52 billion of cuts.

Labour need to find a £51 billion cuts from unprotected areas and have not explained 87 per cent, leaving a £44 billion shortfall.

The Liberal Democrats manifesto implies £46.5 billion of non-priority cuts, and have not explained 74 per cent of it – a £34.5 billion shortfall.”

Anyone who works in the public sector will tell you that the predominant mood is not combative militancy or seething anger. Quiet desperation is more common. In large measure this is attributable to the long period of defeats and passivity but there is a more explicitly political aspect too. The absence of a credible mass political expression to the ruling class offensive has added to the sense of working class powerlessness in Britain. That’s one of the big lessons of the past year.