2 January 1980: National steelworkers' strike
For the first time in over 50 years, Britain’s steelmaking industry saw the start of a national strike on this day in 1980, as unions demanded a 20% pay rise.
In 1967, the Iron and Steel Act nationalised Britain's steelmaking industry, leading to the formation of the British Steel Corporation (BSC), with some 268,500 employees. But by the end of the 1970s, the industry was making a loss, and plans were in hand to close plants and make large scale redundancies.
Workers had been offered a pay rise of 2%. The unions wanted 20%. Talks quickly broke down. And so, for the first time in over 50 years, the steelworkers began a national strike.
The strike lasted 13 weeks and soon spread to the private sector, with flying pickets' protesting at plants around the country. After much talking, workers accepted a 16% pay rise in return for increased productivity and changes in working practices. The strike ended on 3 April.
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But by the end of the year, the Consett Works in County Durham closed and steelmaking operations stopped at the Shotton works in North Wales.
Eventually, however, the restructuring bore fruit, and the BSC returned to profit. In 1988, it was privatised, and in 1999, it merged with Dutch steel producer Koninklijke Hoogovens to form Corus Group, to become the world's third-largest steel producer.
In March 2007, Corus was taken over by India's Tata Steel in a deal worth $13bn, and became Tata Steel Europe, with plants in Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Ijmuiden. Tata sold its Scunthorpe plant to Greybull Capital, which rebranded it as British Steel. It was placed into insolvency in 2019 and was bought up by China's Jingye Group in 2020.
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Ben studied modern languages at London University's Queen Mary College. After dabbling unhappily in local government finance for a while, he went to work for The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh. The launch of the paper's website, scotsman.com, in the early years of the dotcom craze, saw Ben move online to manage the Business and Motors channels before becoming deputy editor with responsibility for all aspects of online production for The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening News websites, along with the papers' Edinburgh Festivals website.
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