Minimum Service Levels law passes: demand repeal, prepare defiance!

The Tories’ Minimum Service Levels bill has now passed into law. That means the government, in collaboration with employers, now has the power to set “minimum service levels” in rail, health, education services, fire and rescue, border security and nuclear decommissioning.

In the event of strikes by workers in those sectors, employers can then issue “work notices” compelling workers to attend work to provide the minimum service. Unions which do not make “reasonable efforts” to ensure their members comply with work notices could face injunctions and possible fines. Individual workers could also be open to dismissal.

Free Our Unions believes the labour movement must continue and intensify campaigning against the law, on the basis of three key priorities:

Demands on employers to refuse to issue “work notices”

The legislation says employers “may” issue work notices, but not that they are legally obligated to do so. The SNP First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, has already said the Scottish government will “never issue or enforce” work notices. Unions must demand that other employers make similar commitments.

An obvious first target for such demands is places where the employer either directly is, or is administered by, a political authority controlled by a party which opposes the law. So, local authorities controlled by anti-Tory parties could refuse to issue work notices in the event of strikes by education workers in local authority schools. The Labour-led Greater London Assembly under Mayor Sadiq Khan could refuse to issue work notices in the event of strikes by Transport for London workers. Labour mayoralties in Greater Manchester and Merseyside, which are directly involved in transport provision, could do likewise.

Islington’s Labour council has already passed a motion in support of “the right to strike”, although it stops short of an explicit commitment not to issue work notices.

These demands can be campaigned for politically, via union links to Labour and campaigns of lobbying and protest. But unions could also launch disputes and industrial action ballots, and potentially strikes, to pursue the demand. Such strikes would test the limits of existing laws designed to outlaw “political” strikes, which stipulate that strikes must arise from a “trade dispute” over workers’ terms and conditions between a union and an employer. But there is a strong legal argument that a strike to demand an employer in a sector covered by the minimum service law commits to refusing to issue work notices would be legitimate.

Prepare direct defiance

The first time a strike is called in an affected sector and a work notice issued, the union in question will be faced with a stark and unavoidable choice: will it make “reasonable efforts” to ensure its members comply, or will it refuse, and call on its members (all of them) to strike anyway, despite the risk of injunctions and fines?

Free Our Unions believes we must organise to ensure our unions choose the latter option. The only reliable way to make the law unworkable is to directly defy it. Mass collective action is also the best form of protection from reprisals for individual workers.

Continue to campaign politically for the repeal of all anti-strike laws

Most trade unions have longstanding policies opposing all anti-union laws and supporting their repeal. But there has been remarkably little active campaigning on the issue. Apart from a demonstration in October 2022 organised by Free Our Unions in conjunction with Earth Strike UK, some hastily-organised midweek demonstrations called by the RMT, and one by the TUC, have been the only public, on-the-streets activity in opposition to the Minimum Service Levels Bill.

Despite several unions having policies to call a national demonstration against anti-strike laws, none have done so. Such a demonstration if properly mobilised for, could still have an impact. It would send a message to the government that our movement will not simply accept the new law as a fait accompli, nor simply shrug and hope its impact is not too severe.

Specific campaigning to demand an incoming Labour government makes the widest possible commitment to repeal not only the newest law but all anti-strike laws is also needed. Without significant pressure, a Starmer-led Labour government is certain to compromise as much as possible with the status quo.

We must fight for a full right to strike – in the manner of our choosing, over issues of our choosing, at a time of our choosing.