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The chapter examines the crucial strikes in the National Health Service (NHS) during the Winter of Discontent and contextualizes them within historic currents in the health service since its foundation. The chapter describes how acute staff shortages, combined with the Government’s need for cheap labour created low-paid, working-class vocations within the NHS and how three major groups were recruited: men left redundant from de-industrialization; white working- class women who were primary and/or essential breadwinners, and overseas workers, particularly from the West Indies, restricted to such work partly by racism. The chapter details how the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) harnessed workers’ dissatisfaction with low pay and the political energy of a new generation of local male and female activists like Celia Newman, Lorraine Donovan, and Robert Gregory during the disputes of 1978-1979. The chapter ends with the Prime Minister James Callaghan’s dramatic defeat in March 1979 with the Conservative Party’s call for a vote of no confidence in the Labour Government and the commencement of the General Election of 1979.

The chapter details the crucial role women played in the local authority strikes of the Winter of Discontent. The chapter examines the numeric dominance of women in public sector work and trade unions and the efforts of trade unions like the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) employed to mobilize the leadership of their female lay majority. The chapter then follows how national leaders in NUPE, like Linda Perks, utilized ideas from the New Left and the Women’s Movement to reshape the focus and trajectory of the trade union movement in the 1970s. More importantly, the chapter follows the politicization of grassroots activists like Betty Hughes and Anne Gardiner to see how these women infused the gendered politics of domestic violence, single motherhood, and sexism into long-standing labour politics. Finally, the chapter argues that the Winter of Discontent provided crucial opportunities for some women like Perks, Hughes, and Gardiner to assert unprecedented leadership roles in the trade union movement.

The chapter examines the most notorious strike of the Winter of Discontent: the Liverpool gravedigger’s strike. The author immediately clarifies the popular claim that the Left-wing National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) led this strike when, in fact, it was the Right-leaning General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU) that led this infamous strike. By following the local trajectory of GMWU convener, Ian Lowes, the reality of grassroots politics, low pay, and harsh working conditions challenge the dominant myth that these striking gravediggers were simply irrational and “bloody-minded.” Moreover, the chapter then focuses on the national leadership of the GMWU by charting the course of national GMWU researcher, Larry Whitty, to further reveal why the national leadership approved of their members taking such an action. On the heels of the road haulage strike, the chapter how the gravediggers’ strike further intensified the media furore surrounding the Winter of Discontent and later places this strike in the larger context of the struggle public sector workers faced in asserting themselves as an increasingly important force in trade union politics.