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8
October 2010
On the day of last week's
Tube strike the Continuity CBI launched yet another missile
in its inimitable version of the class war against working
people and their organisations.
The extremists of the
British business lobby proposed ever more vicious restraints
on the right to strike, including daily financial penalties
on trade unions and a requirement that trade unions give longer
notice to help employers prepare for a walkout. They already
get the best part of a month.
But as any trade unionist
will know only too well, the problem of British strike law
is not that it is too lenient but that it is too tough. One
of Tony Blair's promises at the election in 1997 was that
Britain under new Labour would continue to have the most restrictive
labour laws in Europe. That was the one promise he kept.
Unlike anywhere else in
the world British trade unions are burdened by unnecessarily
tight and disproportionate obligations to give notice to employers
of their intention to hold a strike ballot, notice of the
ballot result to both the employer and union members, and
notice of an intention to strike.
But it is not the unparalleled
number of notices that have to be given so much as the volume
of information that causes difficulty for trade unions, faced
by employers who now hire very expensive lawyers to pick their
way through the legislation line by line and word by word
in a fruitful search for loopholes in badly drafted statutes.
As a result RMT was stopped
from taking action against electricity supplier EDF when it
told the employer that it was planning to ballot engineers
and technicians. The court bent the knee to the employer's
demand that action was unlawful because the union had failed
to provide full job descriptions of the 50 or so workers in
the dispute.
Unite cabin crew were
stopped from going on strike because the union included in
a strike ballot some of the workers who would be taking voluntary
redundancy before the strike started, even though their involvement
would have no impact on the outcome of the ballot in which
over 90 per cent voted in favour in an 80 per cent turnout.
RMT was stopped from taking
action against Network Rail for failing to comply with the
law's demand that the union give notice to the employer of
the location of the workers who are to take part in the strike
- an impossible demand in industries where there is a high
turnover of both workers and workplaces.
And so it goes on and
on. London busworkers were stopped from taking industrial
action when, because of an administrative oversight not wholly
within its control, their union Unite gave notice of the ballot
result to the employer within 48 hours of the ballot result.
This was said by the court not to be "as soon as reasonably
practicable."
BA cabin crew were the
subject of an injunction after a second ballot because Unite
had failed to notify union members that of the 10,000 or so
people who had voted in the ballot - returning yet another
whopping majority in favour of industrial action - 11 had
spoiled their papers.
And finally, in perhaps
the lowest point in a dismal list of cases, Unite members
at Milford Haven were stopped by an injunction from taking
industrial action because the union's notice that it was taking
both continuous and discontinuous industrial action should
have been given on not one but on two pieces of paper.
It is true that in some
of these cases the injunction was lifted on appeal, but they
should never have been granted in the first place on such
flimsy grounds. It is this abuse to which John
McDonnell's extremely modest Lawful Industrial Action (Minor
Errors) Bill is addressed.
The purpose of this very
short Bill is to excuse any accidental failure by a trade
union where "there has been substantial compliance,"
and where the failure is on a scale unlikely to affect the
result of the industrial action ballot or a reasonable recipient's
understanding of the effect of any of the industrial action
notices referred to above.
Otherwise the Bill says
that in any proceedings where it is relied on it will be presumed
that there has been substantial compliance with a procedural
obligation unless the employer can prove otherwise, and prove
also that the failure affected the outcome of the ballot or
the understanding of the effect of the notice.
McDonnell's
Bill is to be introduced for a second reading in the House
of Commons on October 22. It is important that all Labour
MPs are there to support it. Although no doubt terrorised
by the class warriors from the CBI there can be no excuse
for faint hearts on the Labour benches.
The existing law is wholly
indefensible and any suggestion that it needs to be tightened
is both risible and contemptuous. The industrial action notice
requirements have been condemned by the Council of Europe
and even British judges scratch their heads when an employer
tries to stop a strike because a union has failed to notify
its members of the ballot result.
There can be no excuse
either for Labour's new leadership failing to support McDonnell's
Bill.
Ed, you are not being
asked to restore the right to strike, even to minimum international
standards. You are being asked simply to ensure that unions
are not disabled from taking legitimate action when they have
done their best to comply with the most restrictive anti-union
laws in the developed world.
Read this article in its original form on the Morning
Star website
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