The Large Pattern of Industrial Conflict — A Comparative Study of 18 Countries, 1919–79

Only around 0.01 per cent of all working‐days are lost due to industrial conflict in the average western economy. Nevertheless, conflicts are highly visible phenomena and it was one of the first areas most statistical agencies started covering. Therefore, long conflict series exist for most developed Western economies. These series are of a poor quality compared to most series analysed by economists, but they have, nevertheless, a lot to tell. In a number of papers we have tried to cover different parts of the story — in the present article we shall concentrate on the large shifts (often 5–10 times) in the conflict levels over time and the remarkable differences (often 10–20 times) in conflict levels between countries, even when we look only at developed Western economies.