No direct comparison is available between the French and UK strikes

In a government announcement, business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said “incredibly the UK has lost more days to strike action than France”.

That’s a claim the Labor Party has repeated on social media as it promotes the party’s labor rights bill, specifying that it relates to Rishi Sunak’s premiership.

Workers compared the number of days lost on strike in the UK between October 2022 and July 2024 with the average number of days lost in France between 2012 and 2022.

Official French statistics on Rishi Sunak’s tenure as Prime Minister have not yet been released, making a direct comparison impossible. For previous years where comparisons are available, French strike action outnumbers British strike action.

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

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

It was then compared with figures from Ilostat, the International Labor Organization’s statistical database, which show 15,973,218 days lost to strike action in France from 2012 to 2022. Divided by an annual average, it is of 1,452,110.

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

Ilostat has data for the UK between 2012 and 2022 (although it does not record data between February 2020 and December 2021 due to Covid-19). This reveals that the UK lost 5,245,503 strike days during this time, less than a third of the French total.

The ONS figures differ slightly from the Ilostat figures, which show that 5,283,000 days were lost in this period. This is still less than a third of the French total.

Data on days lost due to French strikes is not yet available beyond 2022, and the Directorate for Research, Economic Studies and Statistics (Dares) published data as recently as May 2024 for individual days not worked in 2022 .

Eurofound, an EU agency that provides 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 between 2021 and 2022 , and said that “future data for 2023 is likely to show increased conflict” due to strikes protesting controversial pension reforms.

Public services ‘get back on track’ as Strikes Act to be repealed – GOV.UK (archived)

@UKLabour post on X (archived)

Labor conflicts; working days lost due to strike action; United Kingdom (thousands) – Office for National Statistics (archived)

Policy mogul: Labor will raise wages and productivity to ensure economic growth felt by workers (archived)

Ilostat Data Explorer (archived data for France and UK)

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

Individual non-working days (JINT) | Dares (archived)

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