The trade union bill must be defeated
The record books will show that this government’s first major act of parliament has to been to attack the right to strike – a fundamental British liberty.
The trade union bill is the biggest threat to unions and collective bargaining for over 30 years and the Trades Union Congress will oppose it each and every step of the way.
We are working across civil society to try and defeat this bill and will do whatever to stop its pernicious laws from coming on the statute book.
It should go without saying that strikes are always a last resort. The decision to lose a day’s pay and escalate a dispute with an employer is not one that anyone takes lightly. What is more, most disputes are settled long before there is any need for industrial action at all.
The number of days lost to strike action each year is now on average less than a tenth of what it was during the 1980s. Last year there were only 151 stoppages – as former business secretary Vince Cable observed this month, the average trade union member takes strike action just once every 15 years.
Ministers and their allies in the rightwing press would like the public to believe that the United Kingdom is being gripped by industrial unrest. But the facts simply do not bear this out.
Nevertheless, the right for employees to withdraw their labour remains a vital one. It prevents the balance of power in the workplace shifting too far towards employers and gives workers the means to stand up for decent services and safety at work, and to defend their jobs and pay.
Recent strikes have seen cinema workers at the Ritzy Cinema fight for a living wage, midwives take industrial action (for the first time in their history) after being refused a one per cent rise and bakery workers taking a stand against the overuse of zero-hours contracts.
Strikes are not about causing workplace problems, they are about sorting them out.
This bill risks poisoning industrial relations and making disputes more bitter and entrenched. For the first time since the 1970s, employers will be able to bus in agency temps to break a strike.
This will make strikes less effective and will give permanent workers less power to defend their rights to defend their pay and conditions at work.
This will also put agency workers themselves in an invidious position, leaving them with the unwelcome choice of walking through a picket line or losing their job.
What is more, asking temporary agency workers to run an entire service, without a proper handover or support from permanent colleagues, is no way to run a business or a public service.
This bill also includes significant new restrictions on peaceful pickets and protests. Striking workers will be required to tell their employer all their plans – including what they propose to post on Facebook or Twitter or whether they will use a loudspeaker or a banner – two weeks before a strike takes place.
Everyone on a picket line may soon be required to wear an identification armband, provide their contact details to the police and carry a letter of authorisation – which they will be required to show to anyone who asks to see it. If union members undertake protest activities that are not listed in the plan, they face fines of up to £20,000 a time.
These draconian provisions have been described by the likes of Amnesty International and Liberty as a major threat to civil liberties and likened to something out of Franco’s Spain by former Conservative party chair David Davis.
They have also received a huge thumbs-down from the public. Over three-quarters of people think making it compulsory for unions to give two weeks’ notice if they intend to use a loudspeaker or carry a banner during a strike is a ‘bad use of police time’.
This is just a flavour of what this bill includes: its reach goes far further. Wider restrictions include reducing the amount of time unions can spend representing members who suffer bullying and harassment and the amount of time unions can spend promoting workplace health and safety and training. The government is also looking to limit the size of unions’ political funds in order to reduce funding to the Labour party.
The TUC will continue to work with members of parliament from all political parties to make the case against its provisions. We are asking politicians from across the House of Commons to see good sense and vote against these proposals, which are an offence to all fair-minded democrats. It is time to call the government out on its thinly veiled attack on the fundamental right to strike.
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Frances O’Grady is general secretary of the Trades Union Congress
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