Tories plan new law to cripple strikes

Submitted by Matthew on 14 January, 2015 - 12:51

Britain already has “the most restrictive trade union laws anywhere in the western world”, as Tony Blair complacently told the Daily Mail in 1997.

If the Tories win in May 2015 the laws will become not just “most restrictive” but crippling, or least crippling for national strikes. The Tories will ban public service strikes unless at least 40% of the workforce vote for the strike in a ballot.

Only 23.5% of the electorate voted Tory in 2010, but they think that’s enough to decide the government!

Wherever a union has less than 40% density, it will become impossible for it to call a lawful strike even if every single union member votes for the strike.

Ballot votes for strikes should follow the same rule as other votes: those who don’t take part aren’t counted. Also, there is hard evidence that postal ballot votes understate support for strikes.

Strike turnouts in the public services are better than ballot turnouts: that is, workers are willing to lose pay to join strikes which they don’t even vote for. Why? They lack confidence, and, tacitly or deliberately, prefer to see whether more confident workmates return a majority for the strike, in which case they’ll join it.

The Tories would count all those workers as anti-strike, even if they’d be willing to lose pay for a strike.

Workplace votes, rather than ballot papers sent to home addresses, would get a better turnout in strike votes. But laws made by the Tories in the 1980s already ban that.

The Tories will also, if elected in May 2015, allow bosses to use agency workers to break strikes, repealing laws which ban that strike-breaking.

The Tories have already said that they will ban all strikes where fewer than 50% of union members have voted. They also suggest, now, that they may legislate to compel workers to provide “minimum service levels” even during a lawful strike.

Solidarity supporters will campaign for a Labour victory in May 2015 — and also for the unions to force Labour to repeal the Thatcher anti-union laws of the 1980s, shamefully left in place for 13 years by Blair and Brown.

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