And so it begins…

The newly elected Tory government has wasted no time in its assault on working people and the organisations that represent them, as business secretary Sajid Javid announced this morning (May 12) new measures he would put front and centre in the Queen’s Speech that would severely curtail the democratic right to strike.

 
These measures – which would require at least 50 per cent of the eligible workforce to vote in a strike ballot, with at least 40 per cent voting in favour – come in the wake of an election in which the Tories themselves would fail spectacularly to meet this threshold.

 
After all, the Conservative party secured little more than 35 per cent of the national vote last week.

 
When taken together with the numbers of eligible voters who didn’t cast their ballot at all, Cameron’s so-called “mandate” becomes an even more absurd mirage, with the Tories winning over less than a quarter of the eligible electorate.

 
London Mayor Boris Johnson, one of the most outspoken proponents of Tory strike restrictions, would likewise fall far short of the threshold if his own tenuous grip on power were held to the same standards – only 38 per cent of eligible London voters bothered to turn up to the ballot box in 2012.

 
When combined with those who did turn out but didn’t vote for Johnson, nearly 90 per cent of the city’s electorate did not participate in Johnson’s ascendancy to mayor.

UK reputation tarnished

 
The Tories’ plans to quash strike action would further tarnish the UK’s reputation as having one of the most restrictive industrial relations laws in Europe and much of the developed world. In fact, only Bulgaria and Romania have strike thresholds as extreme as what the Tories are proposing, with Bulgaria being criticised by an independent ILO committee of experts as being in breach of international law.

 
As blogger Thomas Clark pointed out last year, the UK is listed as having one of the worst worker protection laws among OECD countries, second only to the USA. It’s no coincidence, Clark points out, that the UK also has much lower productivity compared to its more worker-friendly European neighbours.

 
“It is hardly surprising that an economy with weaker worker protection, harsher anti-trade union laws and lower pay also lags behind in terms of productivity,” Clark writes. “If workers feel protected, secure in their jobs, valued and well paid, they are inevitably inclined to work a bit harder.”

 
Roger Seifert, professor of HR management and industrial relations at Wolverhampton Business School echoed this sentiment when commenting on the Tories’ proposals. Seifert said the restrictions might ultimately backfire.

 
“If there are real grievances over pay, pensions, conditions of service and management style, then staff may individually and collectively seek other means to express their feelings such as quitting, reduced effort, withdrawal of goodwill, and anti-management guerrilla warfare,” he noted. “This can be a more damaging outcome than bargaining and strikes.”

Terrible shame

 
More than anything, Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner argued, these anti-worker proposals put the lie to the Tory line that they will be a party that embraces people from all walks of life.

 
“It is a terrible shame and a big mistake that one of the government’s first acts is to attempt to reduce rights for working people that even past Tory administrations have upheld,” Turner said.

 
“Voters did not put a tick in the box for this, especially as David Cameron has pledged that he wanted to reach out to all corners of Britain in the traditions of One Nation Conservatism,” he added.

 
Indeed, when business secretary Javid announced that implementing strike thresholds would be a top “priority” on the Today programme this morning, he had said only minutes before that the Tories were the party “for working people” – and the blatant contradiction hardly registered.

 
“Many of the electors, who provided the Tories with their slim majority, are working people concerned about justice and fairness in the workplace,” Turner went on to say.

 
This is no idle pronouncement – the vast majority of working people, including Tory, Labour and supporters of other parties, believe their employers have much greater power than they do according to a recent survey, with more than half of respondents saying unfairness in the workplace was avoided rather than addressed.

 
The right to withdraw one’s labour in the face of mistreatment and exploitation– a right that’s enshrined in both domestic and international law – is one of the few tools workers have left to address the enormous imbalance of power between employer and employee. Once this right is compromised, so too, will be the voices of working people, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum.

 
Ultimately, however, strike thresholds, which Javid’s predecessor Vince Cable has himself called “entirely ideologically-led” will not, Turner argued, chime with the electorate.

 
“They won’t understand why this proposal is coming from a new administration with just 36.9 per cent of the vote to underpin its legitimacy,” he said.

 
“Unite urges Sajid Javid and his colleagues think long and hard about this move as there are better ways of improving the mechanisms for industrial action ballots, such as electronic voting and ballots at the workplace.

 
“We are open for constructive discussions with ministers on these issues.”