Well, publication of the number of days lost to strikes in November 2007 (subscription required) came and went this week and the world did not end. We are, officially, still 24,000 days short of the 1 million mark for 2007.
Not that that is going to deter Alan Duncan, the Tories' chief spokesman on business, enterprise and regulatory affairs, who says the figures show that the unions "have Brown over a barrel".
Perhaps it is because that is such an offputting image, but strangely enough, only the Daily Mail seems to have gone big on this, its story leading with a wholly balanced intro claiming that, "Britain is in the grip of public sector militancy."
It has to be said that if this is what the Mail thinks is a "grip", it must be accustomed to some pretty limp handshakes.
Duncan and the Mail seem to think that the solution is to suspend the Union Modernisation Fund.You never know, perhaps it would help reduce union militancy if they didn't get money to set up migrant workers' support services (TGWU as was), train union activists in partnership working (Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists) or create online talent directories (Equity). But I can't really see how…
Funnily enough, there is nothing in any of the successful applications for funds about fomenting strikes or paying the wages of flying pickets.
In any event, even in terms of recent history (let's put the general strike to one side for now), 2007's loss of 976,000 days to strikes (with one month to go) is pretty small beer – as the table below shows.
As you can see from the figures (drawn from Office for National Statistics reports), it was the Conservative governments of the 1980s that did for strikes and union militancy as en election-winning scare story.
Sorry, Mr Duncan, you are about 20 years too late on this one.
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