Fact check: No direct comparison available between French and UK strikes

In a Government announcement, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said that “unbelievably the UK has lost more days due to strike action than France”.

This is a claim the Labour Party has repeated on social media while promoting the party’s Employment Rights Bill, specifying that it relates to Rishi Sunak’s premiership.

Evaluation

Labour has compared the number of days lost to strikes in the UK between October 2022 and July 2024 with the average number of days lost in France between 2012 and 2022.

No official French statistics have yet been released covering the period of Rishi Sunak’s tenure as Prime Minister, making a direct comparison impossible. For previous years where comparisons are available, French strike action outnumbers British action.

The facts

Rishi Sunak was appointed Prime Minister on October 25 2022 and left office following the general election on July 4 2024. During this period, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) recorded monthly figures for “days lost” to strike action in the UK, totalling 4,343,000 if you exclude the month of October 2022, or 4,766,000 if that month is included.

To justify its claim, the Labour Party wrote in press briefing notes that dividing the latter figure by the number of months (21), it had calculated a monthly average of 226,952 days lost per month and thus (multiplied by 12) 2,723,428 over an “average” year. (This compares with 2,624,000 actual working days lost in 2023, according to ONS data.)

This was then compared with figures from Ilostat, the International Labour Organisation’s statistical database, which show 15,973,218 days lost to strike action in France from 2012 to 2022. Divided into an annual average, this is 1,452,110.

This is significantly below the UK figure for the period Mr Sunak was in office, although because the data is from different years, it makes them difficult to compare.

Ilostat has data for the UK between 2012 to 2022 (although it records zero data between February 2020 and December 2021 because of Covid-19). That reveals that the UK lost 5,245,503 days to strike action in that time, less than a third of the French total.

Data from the ONS differ slightly from the Ilostat figures, showing that 5,283,000 days were lost in that period. That is still less than a third of the French total.

Data for days lost to French strikes is not yet available beyond 2022, with the Directorate of Research, Economic Studies and Statistics (Dares) most recently publishing figures in May 2024 for individual days not worked in 2022.

Eurofound, an EU agency providing information on industrial relations, published a report on working life in France covering 2023 in July 2024. This report notes a 71% increase in industrial action from 2021 to 2022, and said “future data for 2023 is likely to show an increase in conflicts” because of strikes protesting against contentious pensions reforms.

Links

Public services “back on track” as Strikes Act to be repealed – GOV.UK (archived)

@UKLabour post on X (archived)

Labour disputes; working days lost due to strike action; UK (thousands) – Office for National Statistics (archived)

Policy Mogul – Labour will boost pay and productivity to ensure economic growth felt by working people (archived)

Ilostat Data Explorer (archived data for France and the UK)

Strikes and other industrial action on the increase across EU | LRD (archived)

Les journees individuelles non travaillees (JINT) | Dares (archived)

France: Developments in working life 2023 | European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (archived)