Suppose that every industrial dispute could be signified as a threat to the economic life of the country, and therefore against the 'national interest'. Then such significations would define issues of economic and industrial conflict in terms which would consistently favour current economic strategies, supporting anything which maintains the continuity of production, whilst stigmitizing anything which breaks the continuity of production, favouring the gerneral interests of employers and shareholders who have nothing to gain from production being interrupted and lending credence to the specific policies of governments which seek to curtail the right to strike or to weaken the political power of trade unions - they are predicated on an assumption that we all live in a society where the bonds which bind labour and capital together are stronger, and more legitimate than the greivances which divide us into labour versus capital - to translate a discourse whose subject is 'workers versus empoyers' into a discourse whose subject is the collective ('we, the poeple').

Hall, Stuart; Rediscovery of Ideology