Rights under attack

The Conservatives’ authoritarian trade union Bill will make England’s workers the least protected not only in Europe but also within the British Isles, Unite general secretary Len McCluskey warned yesterday (November 23).

While the administrations in Scotland and Wales have stated that they will not accept the proposed laws, and growing opposition spans the police, human rights bodies and personnel managers, Unite says that the Tory government’s determination to attack trade unions will cause real harm to workers in England.

According to Len McCluskey, the bill is the latest act from a government without popular mandate acting to quash all voices of opposition.

McCluskey was addressing Unite’s workplace reps as they gather in Brighton to set the union’s sectoral industrial priorities.

He argued that prime minister David Cameron is, “determined to use a majority of seats in the House of Commons to tilt the political playing field, way beyond the boundaries of decency,” even though he was returned to office without a popular mandate – his party won only 24 per cent of the total electorate.

“In this country, we already have the most restrictive anti-trade union laws of any of our European neighbours,” McCluskey went on to say.

“Strike action in the last decade has been at one of its lowest levels in any period in the history of this country.

Days lost to injury

He highlighted the vastly greater number of working days lost to work-related ill health or injury than to strike action – 27.3m compared to 788,000 last year.

“Yet where is the government’s all-out attack on poor health and safety and conditions at work?” McCluskey asked.

“Instead we have a 40 per cent hit to the funding of the Health and Safety Executive and the drastic fall in workplace inspections.

“Day-in day-out, unions tackle the scourge of dangerous working conditions – saving thousands, tens of thousands of lives,” he added.

“Instead of assisting us in doing this vital work, this government has put trade unions in the firing line.  Their ideological opposition to trade unions will endanger working people.”

McCluskey condemned the proposal that would legalise the use of agency workers to break strikes, noting that the Chilean government has recently removed striker replacement rules from their statute book because it believed they were an “unfortunate legacy” of General Pinochet.

“The constraints on union political funds are shamefully partisan too,” he added, criticising a part of the Bill that in practice would choke trade union support for the official opposition party, while the secretive business funding of the Tories is left unchecked.

Secure workplace ballots

Len McCluskey repeated his call to the prime minister to introduce secure workplace ballots to combat low turnouts.

“There is one reason above all why turnouts can be low and that is the archaic system of balloting the law imposes on trade unions – the postal ballot,” he said.

“Today there are so many more modern, efficient and entirely secure ways to conduct secret ballots – online, by mobile and so on,” he added.

“Indeed, the Conservative Party itself has just chosen its candidate for London Mayor using those very methods.”

But McCluskey noted that the “real key” is to get balloting “back to where it counts, to where it is relevant – the workplace.

“With workplace balloting, turnout would never be a problem again and a 50 per cent threshold would always be met,” he said, pointing to the fact that workplace balloting in fact already exists – the Central Arbitration Commission uses such ballots in votes on trade union recognition.

“If the government was to reject these modernising proposals, it would expose their real intent, which is an attack on the right to strike and turning trade unions into no more than advisory bodies unable to defend their members,” he argued.

McCluskey pledged, however, that Unite would continue in its fight against the Bill.

“The Tories are not going to put this movement, this union, out of business,” he said.

Stayed tuned on UNITElive for the latest about the trade union Bill as it is set to go up for its second reading in the House of Lords.