Photo/Illutration Protesters gather over legislation to widen Japan’s international security role in front of the Diet building in Tokyo on Sept. 15, 2015. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Across Europe, this time of the year is strongly associated in the minds of many people with workers going on strike.

As in other countries that celebrate Christmas, people have all sorts of expenses to meet before the festive season starts. Workers become more discontented when their wages are not being raised appropriately. That especially holds true if commodity prices are surging.

Workers exercise the right to strike in hopes of achieving maximum results when they fail to reach an agreement through bargaining with management.

Major labor unions in Italy, which recently underwent a change of government, staged general strikes in Rome and elsewhere. Protest meetings against the government’s budget bill were also held.

The organizers called for unity, saying the government had already inflicted enough misery on the public through measures to curtail the novel coronavirus pandemic as well as inflation.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) once referred to strikers as “the enemy within.”

This was in the context of the miners’ strike that lasted for a year from 1984, the nation’s biggest labor upheaval of the postwar period and which marked a major turning point for Britain’s labor movement. The strike ended up being crushed by Thatcher, who prepared carefully for the action by passing new laws.

A documentary film “Still the Enemy Within,” released 30 years later, revisited strikers from the time.

The movie has a distinct air of hope about it. One scene at the end shows former strikers joining young people in a protest march and a survivor of the lost struggle saying, “We can still seek to do something about the future.”

This year-end in Britain, large-scale strikes, the first of the sort in quite a while, are in the cards. Among the strikers calling for wage increases are rail workers, ambulance workers and airport immigration control officers.

A union of nurses, who played a key role during the COVID-19 pandemic, went on a national strike for the first time to call for improved treatment.

All of the above made me realize that the culture of raising objections remains alive in Europe.

In Japan, too, people expressed their voices actively during the past decade, in rallies calling for a phase-out of atomic energy in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, and in protest over national security legislation enacted in 2015.

I took a walk outside the Diet building in Tokyo on Dec. 16, the day the government approved a dramatic shift in the nation’s national security policy, which includes allowing the country to possess enemy base strike capability.

The crowd that filled the area on many occasions of the recent past had yet to reassemble there.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 17

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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