Britain's trade unions are flexing their muscles again after years in the wilderness, threatening a wave of strikes and an explosion in wages that could spell trouble for the Labour government.
Labour leader Tony Blair will be relieved that the Trades Union Congress voted at its annual conference in Blackpool this week to back euro membership.
But he will be less happy with news that working days lost to strikes shot up to a 13-year high in July as thousands of schools and leisure centres shut down in a dispute over pay.
And even as the TUC conference drew to a close on Thursday, firefighters wanting a 40 per cent pay rise were set to approve a ballot for nationwide strike action that could disrupt everything from train services to sporting events.
"It is 90 per cent certain that we will back strike action at our meeting," a spokesman for the Fire Brigades Union said. "The only question is what form the strikes will take."
Some 35 per cent of union leaders expect strikes in public services this autumn and winter, according to a recent survey, while TUC general secretary John Monks - hitherto a confirmed Blairite - has warned that the unions' honeymoon with Labour is well and truly over.
Blair's government is known to be alarmed at the new wave of militancy that appears to be sweeping the unions and threatening its traditional support base, even though the days when union leaders walked in step with Labour ministers are long gone.
"Unless Blair stops cosying up to big business and obeying every command from the warmonger across the Atlantic, he risks causing a meltdown in support from the very people who put Labour into power," said Bob Crow, the RMT rail union boss, last week.
Even more worrying for Labour is the threat of voters recalling the so-called "Winter of Discontent" in 1978/1979 when the streets were strewn with uncollected rubbish for weeks and corpses piled up in morgues as even gravediggers went on strike.
That episode helped usher in the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, who destroyed the unions' grip on power, and 18 years of Conservative rule before Blair managed to convince voters that his Labour party was different or "New".
"(Crow) will become the Conservative party's favourite working-class hero," wrote Labour party veteran Roy Hattersley in the British Times.
"Whenever (the Conservatives) want to damage the government with the claim that it is the creature of trade union dinosaurs who want to return to the years of mindless strikes and flying pickets, it will be Bob Crow's speeches that are quoted to make the floating voters' flesh creep."
The unions' greater muscle also threatens an explosion in public sector pay which could feed through into the rest of the economy, stoke inflation and force the Bank of England to raise interest rates.
This summer's national strike by local government workers, the first since the 1970s, led to the award of a 7.8 pay rise by April 2003, including a 10.9 per cent increase for the lowest paid. The pre-strike offer was three per cent.
The deal covers 1.3 million council workers, or around 20 per cent of all public sector employees, and are sure to raise pay demands elsewhere. Teachers are already demanding a 10 per cent pay rise while firefighters want four times that.
"What more confirmation do we need that big public spending increases always raise the profile of unions and always feeds through into more generous pay increases," said John Butler, UK economist at HSBC Markets.
GMB union boss John Edmonds said as much when he urged Blair this week to join the attack on the excessive pay deals awarded to managers in private firms who have won contracts to rebuild crumbling public services.
"Public sector workers simply cannot be expected to exercise restraint when they see millions of pounds of public money squandered on salary hikes for rich directors, rather than being used to revitalise our schools and hospitals," he said.