Anti-union laws

Defend our unions!

The bleating from the bourgeois press about disruption on 10 July strike day has given Cameron an excuse to restate the Tories’ intention to almost ban strikes in the public sector through changes to balloting laws. It does not take much for UK employers and their political representatives in the Tory Party to demand further curbs on employees freedom to organise and take action in their own interests at work. It would be easy to forget that we already have the most anti-worker union laws in the richer capitalist countries. Laws put in during the Thatcher union-bashing years of the 1980s and...

Industrial news in brief

Doncaster Care UK workers struck for 14 days in May in a fight against a 50% cuts in wages and massive reductions in sick pay. A strike committee has now been formed for the 80 out of 120 rank-and-file Unison members who have refused to accept these conditions Gina Beaumont, a member of the committee, told Solidarity how the workers have learned to run the dispute as they have gone along; have for example made decisions about mobilising strikers to demonstrate at Care UK offices across the country from Newcastle to London, while keeping a picket in Doncaster; about gathering support from...

Cameron says Tory 2015 manifesto will include new anti-strike laws

David Cameron has threatened new anti-union laws to make it harder for unions to call lawful strikes. Cameron said: “When strikes are going to take place that are hugely disruptive to other people’s lives they should at least have the support of a good share of the members of that trade union.” He is reported to be considering a proposal from London mayor Boris Johnson that strike ballots must secure an absolute majority, rather than just a majority of those voting, to provide a mandate for legal strike action. New anti-union laws of this kind have long been called for by Boris Johnson, and...

Australian labour on back foot

Australia’s right-wing prime minister Tony Abbott has called for a Royal Commission into union “corruption”, as a way of paving the way for new anti-union laws, which he can’t introduce straight off because he lacks a majority in the Senate (upper house). The comment by former Labor minister and former ACTU [Australian TUC] president Martin Ferguson on Abbott’s anti-union drive focuses some of the problems in the labour movement’s response. He says he is pleased that Abbott is suggesting what he calls “sensible industrial relations reform”. Gas bosses, he says, could lose billions “because of...

The Scab as Hero: The Miners Strike, 1984-5

"BY THEIR heroes ye shall know them... for in the individuals whom they exalt and glorify and hold up to the youth as example every class and every movement unfailingly reveals its standards of worth, its morality, its very soul. Thus, the communist workers of Germany glorified the name of the courageous and incorruptible Liebknecht who sacrificed his life in battle for a great cause. The degenerate Nazis countered with the dedication of their official hymn to Horst Wessel the pimp who was killed in a brawl... "The Southern (USA) slaveholders hanged John Brown. But the feet of the slave...

The Year of the Heroic Scab: The Miners Strike, 1984-5

"BY THEIR heroes ye shall know them... for in the individuals whom they exalt and glorify and hold up to the youth as example every class and every movement unfailingly reveals its standards of worth, its morality, its very soul. Thus, the communist workers of Germany glorified the name of the courageous and incorruptible Liebknecht who sacrificed his life in battle for a great cause. The degenerate Nazis countered with the dedication of their official hymn to Horst Wessel the pimp who was killed in a brawl... "The Southern (USA) slaveholders hanged John Brown. But the feet of the slave...

Tories plan new anti-union offensive

According to reports in the Guardian and elsewhere, the Tories are considering committing to new anti-union laws in their next manifesto.

They want to impose a "minimum service" agreement on the Tube, which would severely limit Tube workers' right to take industrial action. And there's been a...

Tories plan new anti-union laws

The so-called review of industrial relations announced by the Tories on 17 November is a build-up for new attacks on the right of trade unions to take effective action to defend their members. It is also another stage in the Tory campaign against union-Labour links. As a manufactured pretext for the review, the Tories have latched on to Unite’s “leverage” tactics, especially its use of those tactics during its recent dispute with Ineos in Grangemouth. Leverage basically involves trying to put an employer with whom a union is in dispute under pressure from its business partners, ‘‘stakeholders”...

The role of leverage

We continue our discussion of the lessons of the Grangemouth defeat. Here, a contribution from Mark Best discusses how Unite’s “Organising and Leverage Department” can help win disputes. Football pundits are fond of pointing out that it is not so much the defeat itself that teaches you anything meaningful about a team, but how they react to it in the matches that follow. Much the same could be said about Unite and the left following Grangemouth. This was a big defeat. Exactly how big remains to be seen, but the workforce at Grangemouth have accepted massive cuts in terms and conditions and the...

High Court blow for unions

A High Court Judge has ruled that two of the actions in an RMT campaign of industrial action "short of a strike" at East Midlands Trains are unlawful, as they technically compromise strike action and are therefore not covered by the union's ballot for action short. RMT balloted its East Midlands Trains members for the action in a dispute over a range of issues relating to major upgrade work at Nottingham station. As part of the action, members refused to work various turns and duties outside their agreed rosters - effectively a form of "work to rule". East Midlands Trains bosses sought a High...

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