Great post from TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady on
Touchstone. "The
TUC’s Congress
starts in Liverpool today, and an issue at the top of many minds will be
the threat posed by the Conservative Party’s new proposals on strike
ballots.
These are not just a few bureaucratic obstacles that will make life a
bit more difficult for trade unions. Rather they work together to make
official strikes close to impossible and will open up trade union
activists to increased surveillance by the state.
The Conservative proposals are three-fold.
First they want to impose a turnout threshold of 50% on strike
action, in a ballot conducted by postal votes. This is a level that has
never been met in elections as important as that for the London Mayor.
It is an irrational barrier too as a 49% vote for action with none
against would be invalid, while a narrow 26% to 25% victory for action
would be legal. It actually makes an abstention more powerful than a
vote against, which rather undermines their stated rationale of
increasing turnouts.
Union elections are governed by old legislation introduced when the
post was our main means of distance communication. Now most mail is junk
mail or bills, and life for many has moved online and onto smartphones,
making a 50% target even more difficult. For sure give people a chance
to vote by post, but do not keep denying the right of union members to
vote securely and secretly online.
Secondly, the Conservative proposals impose many new duties on unions
on the conduct of ballots and communications with members. It’s of
course good practice to communicate properly – and members are smart
enough to tell when you are not. But as soon as you start to set it out
in law, in practice all you are doing is giving employers many new ways
of challenging ballots in the courts on technicalities.
Thirdly, they want new specific criminal offences for people on
picket lines. There are already strong public order laws in the UK and I
have no sense that the police want anything extra. Yet the
Conservatives are proposing that if a seventh person joins a peaceful
and good-natured picket line, all seven could be prosecuted and given a
criminal record.
And new specific technology offences will mean strikers will face
tougher legal restrictions on Twitter than other people. They will open
up union activists to enhanced surveillance as potential criminals.
In drawing up these proposals, they seem to have ignored their stated
question of “how can we improve turnout in strike ballots?”, and
instead asked “how can we stop strikes, intimidate staff and help bad
bosses?”
Strikes would become so difficult that there would be no effective
right to strike in the UK. Yet the right to freedom of association is a
fundamental human right. That includes the right to form effective trade
unions. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes routinely suppress
trade unions and lock up strikers – That’s surely not how we want to run
our own society.
But if even that is not a sufficient reason, let’s look at what an
effective ban on official strikes would mean for the workforce.
Politicians often say that the alternative to strikes is talking, but
there is a difference between talking and negotiating. You only get
real negotiation when there is power on both sides of the table.
Collective bargaining works because both sides understand what the other
can realistically deliver. This is why the vast majority of genuine
negotiations don’t result in strikes but an eventual deal between
management and workers.
But take away the right to official strike and one of two things
happens. Either workers end up meekly asking their employer for more,
with as much power as Oliver Twist brought to the negotiating table. Or
you see an increase in hard-to-manage and destabilising unofficial
action, whether wildcat strikes or mass duvet days.
It is not just union members who have suffered the longest decline in
living standards since the 1870s. And it is not just union members that
will lose out. Workplaces that have collective bargaining set pay rates
in non-union workplaces too. Undermine collective bargaining and you
undermine everyone’s pay.
I have seen no polls that suggest the public think strikes and unions
are a concern. Economic commentators don’t point to unions as part of
the problem, but are more likely to see them as part of the solution to a
society in which inequality has grown and wages stagnated. Conservative
MPs have told me in private they see no need for such measures. Perhaps
it appeals to funders or potential UKIP defectors, but it won’t win
votes.
This is an attack on our fundamental civil liberties, but it will
also act to lower living standards for the many – whether or not they
are union members. With these new proposals, the Conservatives seem to
found have a simple slogan for the next election – “
Keeping wages down
for ever”.
