BRITAIN begins the new year with the threat of widespread unrest as civil servants, tube drivers and rail workers are poised to ballot on strike action.

After a year of factory occupations, indefinite walkouts, postal misery and the debacle of the strike ballot by 12,000 British Airways cabin crew, there is a sense of heightening industrial militancy.

Now, relations between unions and management look likely to be further tested. The Public and Commercial Services union is set to ballot its 270,000 members this month, threatening disruption at jobcentres for the unemployed, revenue and customs, immigration, the coastguard and other bodies in a dispute over redundancy terms.

The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport workers is threatening to ballot 10,000 London Underground workers over pay. It is also locked in dispute with Network Rail over the future of 1,500 track maintenance jobs.

The union has ordered a ballot in the new year for industrial action over compulsory redundancies. General secretary Bob Crow said job cuts were “a reckless gamble with rail safety which would create the perfect conditions for another Hatfield, Paddington, Potters Bar or Grayrigg disaster”.

Meanwhile, 121,000 postal workers, who called off Christmas walkouts but whose strike mandate remains live, are continuing talks with Royal Mail over modernisation plans. As the year progresses, however, experts predict it will be the public sector that bears the jobs brunt.

“We ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the depth of public spending savings that need to be achieved,” said John Cridland, deputy director-general of the CBI.

“I think the period of maximum pain, in terms of public spending reduction, is still some way off. If there was a change in government, then changes in public spending are not going to happen immediately. And the current government is clearly nailing its flag to the mast of not cutting in a way that would put recovery at risk.

“So the moment of maximum peril probably isn't 2010. It is rather more 2011. I think we'll see the biggest challenges with industrial relations at the point when public sector jobs are challenged.”

He said there were differences between private sector culture, where many workplaces were not unionised and there was cooperative spirit over short-time working and pay freezes, and the public sector where “the response to a challenge tends to become adversarial”.

'Winter of Discontent' comparisons, likening the wave of militancy to that of the late 1970s and early 1980s, are not an approriate analogy, according to Ed Sweeney, chairman of the conciliation service Acas.

Union membership stands at about seven million, half that of the 1980s, though three-fifths of public sector jobs are unionised. Manufacturing has declined, and with it union muscle. Indeed, Acas saw a small decrease last year in the number of disputes.

But the size of disputes and the numbers involved, has increased. Acas sees the public sector as the likely flashpoint. Last year, wildcat strikes on construction and industrial sites were sparked by the hiring of foreign labour at the Lindsey oil refinery.

— The Guardian, London