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John Hendy QC outlines the road to the next election in his
speech to the UC fringe meeting at the TUC Congress
29
September 2009
"Last time TUC Congress met at Liverpool was in September
1906. The first item on the agenda was a Bill which the TUC
promoted and which became the Trade Disputes Act 1906 three
months later.
It protected the right to strike. This milestone was achieved
with a total TUC membership of 1,555,000 and no more than
30 "Labour" MPs - there was no Labour Party - all
of whom attended Congress.
How different today. Faced with Tory restrictions on trade
union rights, a TUC with 6,400,000 members has not been able
to persuade a Labour government with hundreds of Labour MPs
to even debate the "mild, modest and moderate" TUC
Trade Union Rights and Freedoms Bill, let alone establish
the fundamental trade union rights guaranteed by international
law.
It is ironic that the only advances in British trade union
rights in recent times have been in the European Court of
Human Rights. In 2008, in a case against Turkey, the court
held that the right to collective bargaining was an "essential
element" of the right to be a trade union member guaranteed
by the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2009, it upheld
the right to strike.
These laws apply here and indeed British unions have also
won in that court landmark rights denied to them by Conservative
and Labour legislation - protection against anti-union discrimination
in the case of Wilson and Palmer v UK and the right to expel
fascists in ASLEF v UK.
In a situation where British restrictions on the right to
strike cannot be challenged politically by the unions and
most workers cannot disregard the anti-union laws, the European
Convention, for all its limitations, offers the only available
route to assert fundamental trade union rights. Not surprisingly,
the Tories intend to restrict access to the European court.
The absence of the right to strike in UK law was rammed home
in July by the Court of Appeal in Unite v Metrobus.
The court upheld an injunction against strike action on two
grounds. First, though the union had provided accurate information
as to the number, category and workplace of the members in
the pre-strike notices, it had failed to explain that the
information came from the union's central computer. Second,
the union had not informed the employer of the results of
the overwhelming pre-strike ballot as soon as was reasonably
practicable.
The ballot closed at noon on September 1. The scrutineer
faxed the results at 3.15pm on September 2. The local official
faxed them to the union's general secretary at 3.30pm to ask
for authority to call the strike. The GS gave the authority
at 5pm which the local official picked up at about 9.30am
the next morning, on September 3, faxing the employer at 11am.
The process took 47 hours. But this was deemed too long. This
failure was independent of the fact that the strike notice
had been sent in due time.
As one Lord Justice pointed out, "In this country, the
right to strike has never been much more than a slogan or
a legal metaphor."
It is pathetic that after 12 years of a Labour government,
we are still saddled by these offensive restrictions on our
fundamental human rights.
It cannot be doubted that the legal restraints on trade unions
have been the prime cause of the collapse of collective bargaining
from 82 per cent of workers covered when Margaret Thatcher
took power in 1979 to 32 per cent today. Nor that those restraints
have disabled unions from resisting the widening gulf of inequality
under both Conservative and Labour rule since 1979.
Yet trade unions and their members are asked to support Labour
at the next election. In the light of the endorsement of the
People's Charter by Congress, we should take a leaf from the
report of Congress in Liverpool back in 1906.
In explaining how those 30 "Labour" members were
elected the previous year, it was explained that: "Acting
under Standing Order No.11 your Committee endorsed the candidature
of every Labour candidate who furnished a satisfactory answer
to the following questions:
Are you in general agreement with the reforms
endorsed by the TUC?
Has your candidature been endorsed?
By a bona fide trade union?
By the GFTU? Or
By the Labour Representation Committee?
Fifty-one candidates met those criteria. Thirty were elected.
The reforms endorsed by the TUC were very similar to those
it has today endorsed in the People's Charter.
We must now put to every candidate of every party at the
next election the same questions as Congress demanded over
100 years ago. Only those who give "a satisfactory answer"
deserve support in May 2010."
John Hendy QC
National Secretary of the United Campaign
Read more:
This story can be read on the Morning
Star website.
Read a report
from the UC fringe at TUC and view photographs from the
event
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