Solidarity strikes means McDonalds workers in Denmark won £16/hour

This article, by the US journalist Matt Bruenig, was first published on 20 September on mattbruenig.com. We republish it here as it tells an important story: how solidarity strikes led to a group of low-paid workers winning significant wage increases. Strikes of this type are entirely illegal in the UK. Our campaign exists to resist, and fight for the abolition of, those restrictions.

Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

In these discussions, relatively little is said about how this all came to be. This is sad because it’s a good story and because the story provides a good window into why Nordic labor markets are the way they are.

McDonalds opened its first store in Denmark in 1981. At that point, it was operating in over 20 countries and had successfully avoided unions in all but one, Sweden.

When McDonalds arrived in Denmark, the labor market was governed by a set of sectoral labor agreements that established the wages and conditions for all the workers in a given sector. Under the prevailing norms, McDonalds should have adhered to the hotel and restaurant union agreement. But they didn’t have to do so, legally speaking. The union agreement is not binding on sector employers in the same way that a contract is. You can’t sue a company for ignoring it. It is strictly “voluntary.”

McDonalds decided not to follow the union agreement and thus set up its own pay levels and work rules instead. This was a departure, not just from what Danish companies did, but even from what other similar foreign companies did. For example, Burger King, which is identical to McDonalds in all relevant respects, decided to follow the union agreement when it came to Denmark a few years earlier.

Naturally, this decision from McDonalds drew the attention of the Danish labor movement. According to the press reports, the struggle to get McDonalds to follow the hotel and restaurant workers agreement began in 1982, but the efforts were very slow at first. McDonalds maintained that it had a principled position against unions and negotiations and press overtures were unable to move them off that position.

In late 1988 and early 1989, the unions decided enough was enough and called sympathy strikes in adjacent industries in order to cripple McDonalds operations. Sixteen different sector unions participated in the sympathy strikes.

Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.

In addition to wreaking havoc on McDonalds supply chains, the unions engaged in picketing and leaflet campaigns in front of McDonalds locations, urging consumers to boycott the company.

Once the sympathy strikes got going, McDonalds folded pretty quickly and decided to start following the hotel and restaurant agreement in 1989.

This is why McDonalds workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour.

I bring this up because people say a lot of things about the economies of the Nordic countries and why they are so much more equal than ours. In this discussion, certainly the presence of unions and sector bargaining comes up, but rarely do you get a discussion of just how radically powerful and organized the Nordic unions are and have been. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the Nordic labor market is the way it is because all of the employers and workers came together and agreed that their system is better for everyone. And while it’s true of course that, on a day-to-day basis, labor relations in the countries are peaceful, lurking behind that peace is often a credible threat that the unions will crush an employer that steps out of line, not just by striking at one site or at one company, but by striking every single thing that the company touches.

We saw this most recently in Finland in 2019 when the state-owned postal service decided to cut the pay of 700 package handlers by moving them to a different sector agreement than the one they were currently being paid under. The unions responded by striking airlines, ferries, buses, trains, and ports. In the aftermath of these strikes, the pay cuts were reversed and the prime minister of the country resigned.

When I bring this up, people sometimes respond by saying that these kinds of strikes are illegal in the US. This is a true and worthwhile bit of information, but insofar as it is meant to imply that the different legal environment is what accounts for the labor radicalism, this obviously has things backwards. The laws aren’t driving the labor radicalism, but rather the labor radicalism is driving the laws.

We can see this clearly in another recent example, this time from Finland in 2018. There, the conservative government was preparing to pass a law that would make it easier for employers with 20 or fewer employees to fire workers. The stated purpose of this was to stimulate hiring by making it easier to fire and thus less risky to hire — the usual stuff.

The Finnish labor movement did not like this idea and called a massive political strike that sidelined workers in a bunch of different sectors. In response to the strike wave, the government changed the bill so it only applied to employers with 10 or fewer employees. The strikes continued and they changed the bill again, this time so it just stated generally that courts should consider an employer’s size when adjudicating wrongful dismissal cases. This was acceptable to the unions since, according to them at least, Finnish courts already do this and so the bill was basically moot. So they stopped striking.

One can only imagine what would happen if the Finnish government tried to ban sympathy strikes in the same way the US government has here.

If we are ever going to get to Nordic levels of equality, it is really hard to imagine doing it without building a similarly powerful labor movement. You can certainly get some of the way there, such as by copying certain welfare programs, but without the unions, you’ll always be missing a key piece. And while legal and policy reforms can help build the labor movement some, the power of organized labor is not ultimately rooted in the state, but rather in the ability to halt production and wreak havoc even when the state is aligned against it.

McDonalds doesn’t pay Danes high wages because of a statutory wage floor or even because the state stepped in to enforce a collective bargaining agreement. They pay high wages because back in the 1980s, Danish unions flipped a switch and turned the whole business off, and McDonalds doesn’t want to find out whether they would do it again.

This is where we need to get to.

Matt Wrack: “We demand the unshackling of our unions”

We reproduce below the speech given by Matt Wrack, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), at the recent TUC Congress in support of the composite on defending the right to protest. The composite was passed, reaffirming TUC policy to demand the abolition of all legal restrictions on the right to organise and strike.

Thank you, President.

President and Congress, it’s a great privilege to follow Taj [Salam, of Unite] in this important debate on this important composite, about an important attack on our civil liberties and our ability to organise to defend ourselves.

This attack from this government is no accident. They know that they intend to force working people to pay the price of their crisis; they know that will prompt resistance; and they want to limit and attack our right to resist. That’s what this is all about, and we should have no hesitation in making clear that our movement needs to unite to defend the right to protest, to defend and extend trade union rights.

The right to protest is essential for democracy. The right to protest is what won many of our democratic rights: the right to vote was won by people breaking the law and taking direction action… the abolition of child labour, the right to oppose war – exposed so sharply in recent weeks with the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the exposure of a twenty-year failure of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq – and of course the right to support ourselves in strikes… Protest is an essential part of what we do.

These attacks through the current proposed legislation are a threat to our class: they are a threat to trade unionists, they are a threat to climate activists, they are a threat to homeless people, they are a threat to black people, to black activists campaigning and those campaigning against racism, they are a threat particularly to the Gypsy Roma and Traveller community. They will of course allow the rich and powerful to go unchallenged –that’s the whole agenda here, resisting our ability to challenge those in power, our bosses and those in government.

We need to remember also, as mentioned in this composite, that our unions remained shackled. As has been said, we demand the repeal of all the anti-union laws. We need to demand the unshackling of our unions. I remind Congress of existing policy that says workers should:

“be represented by an independent union; strike/take industrial action by a process, at a time and for demands of their own choosing, including in solidarity with any other workers and for broader social and political goals; and picket freely.”

Those are the demands this movement must set out in the face of the attacks we face.

Let’s remind ourselves of some of those battles. When we won freedom for the Pentonville Five. When miners took strike action in support of NHS workers in 1982. And of course the famous case of the Rolls-Royce workers at East Kilbride, who took action to prevent engines from arming the Pinochet regime in Chile.

All these are acts which would be unlawful today – but we don’t apologise for them. We don’t apologise for our history of solidarity; no, we take pride in our history of solidarity which has won such progress over the decades and throughout the history of our movement.

We also know, we know in the FBU, that we have been spied on by undercover police officers. We have been spied on for our trade union activities, but we’ve also been spied on because we take part in anti-racist and anti-fascist activities. The latest attack in the guise in the form of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill would license the extension of those attacks on our right to protest and organise, and enable the role of undercover policing to spy on us in those undemocratic ways.

The ruling class in this society, across the world, has a long history of attacking and undermining democracy. We have had to fight every step of the way, in this movement, and those who went before us, to demand the right to vote; the right to organise in trade unions; the right to education; the right to a health service. None of these things were given to us. They were all campaigned and fought for.

Unions and CLPs demand Labour commits to repealing ALL anti-union / anti-strike laws

Thirty motions have been submitted to Labour Party conference (25-29 September, Brighton) from trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties specifically demanding that the party commits to “repealing all anti-union laws”. In the workers’ rights section, three of the eight motions submitted go into detail on this and are modelled closely on text from Free Our Unions, particularly the submission we made jointly with the Fire Brigades Union to the policy primary of Momentum.

We emphasise the word “all”. The figure of thirty does not include several other motions which talk ambiguously about “repealing anti-union laws” or similar, interesting and welcome as those are in terms of indicating shifts in the debate.

You can read all the motions submitted to the conference here.

In the “Green New Deal” section, the Fire Brigades Union (see p79 in document above) and the Bakers’ Union (p93) have both submitted motions which say: “Conference resolves to support… repealing all anti-trade union laws, so workers can freely take industrial action over wider social and political issues, from public safety to climate change”.

The FBU has also promoted this demand through Labour for a Green New Deal. As a result, 22 Constituency Labour Parties (p154 and p168) have submitted Green New Deal motions which say: “Resolves to support… repealing all anti-trade union laws”.

Those 22 Green New Deal motions were ruled out by the Conference Arrangements Committee but then reinstated following protests. The “Build Back Fairer” motions from Newark CLP (p158) and Newcastle East CLP (p166) have unfortunately stayed ruled out. They say: “Conference agrees that Labour will [campaign] for… repeal of all anti-union laws”.

In the workers’ rights section, the motion from Derby South CLP (p232) “calls the Labour Party to work closely with the TUC, STUC, and individual unions to campaign for… repealing all anti-trade union laws”.

Then there are the three motions focused specifically on repealing the anti-union laws:

The motion from Aberconwy CLP (p237) says: “Conference commits to repeal all of the Conservatives’ anti-union laws and further commits to their replacement with a progressive code of labour rights using the proposals set out in Labour’s 2017 and 2019 Manifestos as the starting point. This commitment includes repealing anti-strike laws, such as the ban on striking in solidarity with other workers or over political issues; they prevent workers from taking action directly over issues such as climate change, equalities and, the NHS. Conference denounces the Tories’ plan to impose new restrictions on transport workers through a minimum service requirement that may well be extended to other groups of workers.”

The motion from Macclesfield CLP (p239) says: “Conference notes TUC policy that workers should be: represented by an independent union; strike/take industrial action by a process, at a time, and for demands of their own choosing, including in solidarity with any other workers, and for broader social and political goals; and picket freely. Conference reaffirms the commitment to repealing all anti-union laws to ensure that workers have power in their workplaces. This commitment includes repealing anti-strike laws, such as the ban on striking in solidarity with other workers or over political issues – an affront to democracy. These laws prevent workers from taking action directly over issues such as climate change, equality issues, and the NHS. Conference denounces the Tories’ plan to impose new restrictions on transport workers through a minimum service requirement, and any future extension of this plan to other groups of key workers. Conference resolves that the party will… campaign for the repeal of all anti-trade union laws; oppose the introduction of any new anti-trade union laws; and that the next Labour government will repeal all anti-trade union laws.”

The motion from North East Bedfordshire CLP (p240) says: “The pandemic, in which many workers have needed to take fast, decisive action to guarantee safety for themselves, their loved ones, and the wider community, without going through an arduous bureaucratic process, has underscored the need to scrap all anti-strike laws. So does the wave of job cuts and attacks on terms and conditions (e.g., fire and rehire). Other anti-strike laws, such as the ban on workers striking in solidarity with other workers, and on striking over political issues, are also an affront to democracy. They prevent workers from taking action directly over issues such as defence of the NHS, climate change, or racism. Conference denounces the Tories’ plan to impose new restrictions on transport workers’ strikes through a minimum service requirement. It seems likely they will extend this to other groups of key workers. Conference notes TUC Congress 2020 agreed to organise a special conference¦ on opposing the antiunion laws and a national demonstration. The party will encourage CLPs to support and get involved in these when they become possible. Conference reaffirms the party’s opposition to all anti-union and anti-strike legislation, its commitment to repealing all such laws when next in government, and to legislating to enshrine workers’ rights to, as per TUC policy: join, recruit to, and be represented by an independent union; strike/take industrial action by a process, at a time, and for demands of their own choosing, including in solidarity with any other workers, and for broader social and political goals; and picket freely.”

These last three motions are closely modelled on texts promoted by Free Our Unions, and we know our supporters were involved more or less directly in formulating and promoting some of the other motions too.

Labour Party conference passed to policy repeal all the anti-trade union laws in 2015 and 2017 and in passing in motions on other issues in 2018 and 2019 (see here). We should build on those votes by passing strong and detailed policy this year, and demanding the party campaigns for it as part of the “New Deal for Workers” it has started to talk about.

TUC Congress reaffirms policy to “repeal all anti-trade union laws”

TUC Congress, which was held online again this year from 12-14 September, has passed a composite motion which “resolves to campaign for the repeal of all anti-trade union laws and for the positive legal rights for workers to take action”.

The motion was proposed by Unite and seconded by the Fire Brigades Union. The text quoted was submitted by the FBU (full composited motion below; for links to the motions which were composited together see here).

This reaffirms the more detailed policy proposed by the FBU and adopted by TUC Congress in 2019. In 2019 Unite actually got a few words inserted to water the policy down, so this seems like a step forward.

We are also encouraged to see such a clear stance against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which as our briefing by Gregor Gall explains poses a huge threat to workers and trade unions specifically.

But passing policies at conferences can only be the beginning of a fight. The TUC now needs to organise active campaigning to resist the Police Bill, and push back against restrictive anti-union and anti-strike laws.

• See also: The UnionNews report on the TUC policy.

C11 Tory attacks on our rights: defend democracy, trade unions and the right to protest

Congress notes that the increasingly authoritarian legislation introduced by the Conservative government poses a threat to the UK’s democracy, and our fundamental civil and human rights.

Congress believes that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is a huge attack on the right to protest effectively, while the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill licences undercover operatives from state agencies to commit criminal offences in the course of their deployment.

Congress notes that many MPs and civil society groups have raised concerns about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill being rushed through without proper scrutiny, despite being widely seen as harmful to democracy and human rights.

The Tories are centralising wealth and power. They are terrified of the threat of growing discontent and protest against their policies of the vicious cuts that we have seen over the past decade, their cuts to come, and the dangerous ‘divide and rule’ strategy they have embarked on.

There is growing opposition to this draconian agenda throughout the labour movement, civil society and communities, defending the right to resist this government. The trade union movement has a proud history of protesting – and advancing the right to protest – as part of the struggle for worker and democratic rights in this country, from the Suffragettes and Tolpuddle Martyrs to the poll tax revolt, Fridays for Futures and Black Lives Matter.

Congress believes that trade union activity will be targeted by the Tories’ authoritarian measures and that unions must be central to the fight to defend democracy.

Congress resolves to:

i. campaign with civil society groups against specific measures of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, mobilising trade unionists for campaign events, including a joint union rally, and against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

ii. oppose and actively campaign against any attempts to scrap or curb the Human Rights Act

iii. campaign for the repeal of all anti-trade union laws and for the positive legal rights for workers to take action.

Mover: Unite
Seconder: Fire Brigades Union
Supporters: UNISON, Public and Commercial Services Union

Get involved in Free Our Unions: organising meeting, 14 September, 6:30pm

Get involved in Free Our Unions by joining us at our next open organising meeting, at 6:30pm on 14 September, via Zoom.

We’ll be making plans for our next public events, as well as discussing producing new materials and resources. Our organising meetings are open to anyone who supports the aims of our campaign.

Join us via Zoom here, or by using the following log-in details:

Meeting ID: 859 6981 4192
Passcode: 635182

Mobilise Unite against the anti-union laws!

By Free Our Unions supporters in Unite

We publish this article in a spirit of a debate and discussion. We welcome responses from other activists.

During Unite’s recent general secretary election, Free Our Unions supporters in the union campaigned to raise the issue of the anti-union laws and the right to strike – primarily through a statement you can still support here .

We hope to continue this initiative and build on the connections we made in the months ahead. Given the importance of Unite in the UK labour movement – it’s the second biggest trade union and by far the biggest in the private sector – and the buzz of discussion now beginning in and around the union, it can play a crucial role here as elsewhere.

During the election, we encountered a fair few responses to what we were raising – usually from people who were supportive – along the lines of: “It’s not enough to raise this issue, as Unite does already. We need active campaigning around it.” This spirit is absolutely right, obviously. It’s true that we need to mobilise Unite activists, bodies, and the whole union in active public campaigning. But it’s not quite right that the union already raises the demand, but not actively enough. In general it hasn’t raised it at all. That’s why it’s so important to get Unite activists talking about the issues.

The policy agreed by Unite members’ representatives at the last Policy Conference, in 2018, is clear, modelled in fact on Free Our Union’s founding statement:

We need abolition of the anti-trade union laws, which hamstring workers organising and taking action, and their replacement with strong legal workers’ rights…

We applaud the 2017 Labour Party conference’s unanimous call for repeal of not just the 2016 Trade Union Act, but also the anti-union laws introduced in the 1980s and 90s by the Tories and maintained after 1997; and for a “strong legal charter of workers’ rights”, “for unions to be effective workers need an effective right to strike”.

… campaign to repeal the Trade Union Act 2016 and previous Tory anti-union legislation in favour of new legislation guaranteeing trade union freedoms… Campaign for strong legal rights for workers to join, recruit to and be represented by a union; strike/take industrial action by a process, at a time and for demands of their own choosing, including in solidarity with any other workers and for broader social and political goals; and picket freely…

(For the full policy and links to the policy conference document, etc., see here.)

But what Unite has said and done as a public campaigning force is not in line with this policy. Like many other unions, Unite has avoided calling for repeal of the all the anti-union laws, instead calling for repeal of only the 2016 Trade Union Act, and calling for measures to promote collective bargaining, including sectoral collective bargaining.

But well over two decades before the 2016 Act was passed, the right to strike had already been radically curtailed, with all the Thatcherite anti-union laws already in place. And, as the Institution of Employment Rights once put it well, “collective bargaining without the right to strike is collective begging”. (For discussions of how collective bargaining, separated out from the ability to organise and strike, has come to be treated as a panacea by some in the labour movement, see here and here.)

In the run up to the 2019 TUC Congress, in response to the growth of Free Our Unions, Unite EC member Andy Green published a criticism of FOU in the Morning Star. Riccardo la Torre and Becky Crocker replied for the campaign here, and Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack replied in the Morning Star.

At the 2019 TUC Congress Unite got words inserted into the FBU’s text which tended to weaken it: “Congress agrees to campaign, and encourage affiliated unions and trades councils to campaign, for the repeal of all anti-union laws, which may be given effect by new permissive legislation [emphasis added], and their replacement with strong legal rights, including to strike and picket; and for a clear commitment on this from Labour.” The extra wording was clearly in line with Andy Green’s argument in the Morning Star that it is not necessary to repeal the Thatcherite laws. (Unfortunately the TUC has anyway not yet acted on the policy its Congress passed.)

It is important to turn Unite around on all this, so Unite members can play our rightful role in getting the broad labour movement to campaign effectively for working-class interests, by seeking with determination to restore workers’ freedom of struggle. And we have a solid base for this stance in the policy passed by our last Policy Conference.

We should call on our new general secretary Sharon Graham and the rest of our leadership to take up this issue with vigour. Most important, though, Unite members should get organised to raise and campaign on it.

Empower the Unions workshop at Extinction Rebellion: How Workers Can Fight Climate Change, Friday 27 August, 1pm

Empower the Unions, the new initiative launched by Earth Strike UK and supported by Free Our Unions, is holding a workshop at Extinction Rebellion’s ongoing protests in central London.

The workshop, entitled “How Workers Can Fight Climate Change”, will take place on Friday 27 August at 13:00. It is currently scheduled to take place near the Bank of England, but as the ExR protests are mobile, this may change. Keep an eye on the Facebook event for up-to-date details.

As floods and fires devastate large areas of the world, the urgency of tackling climate change has never been clearer. Yet emissions continue to rise higher year after year.

How can we win the change we need? What role can workers and unions play? What historic examples can we look to for inspiration? Come to our meeting this Friday, 1pm, at the “Fight Climate Change, Organise at Work” stall by the Bank of England occupation, for a meeting on these questions — with plenty of time for discussion!

Speaker: Tyrone Falls, National Education Union activist

VIDEO: Discussing anti-strike laws with the Green Party Trade Union Group

On Friday 20 August, Free Our Unions co-organiser Daniel Randall addressed the Green Party Trade Union Group’s monthly meeting. A video of Daniel’s presentation, and the subsequent discussion, is below. Scroll down for an edited transcript of Daniel’s opening speech.

My name’s Daniel Randall, I’m a railway worker and a rep for the RMT union. I’m speaking here as a co-organiser of Free Our Unions. Thanks very much for the invite, I’m looking forward to this discussion.

I’ll start by giving a quick introduction to what Free Our Unions is and what we do, for those that may not have heard of us. We’re a grassroots labour movement campaign against anti-union and anti-strike legislation, that exists to raise awareness of how such legislation makes our lives as workers worse. We organise information campaigns, public events, and direct action, and our supporters are active inside their own unions fighting for those unions to adopt a radical approach to these issues. We’re supported by four trade unions at national level – FBU, RMT, PCS, and IWGB – and dozens of local union branches and committees, as well as some Labour Party organisations.

Free Our Unions organises on a very open basis, via open organising meetings. We produce regular briefings and materials for supporters to use in their workplaces and communities. We don’t want that to be a passive relationship, whereby passive supporters dutifully hand out materials produced by some distant centre, but an active one, whereby supporters themselves are producing materials explaining the relevance of anti-union laws to the spheres of activity they’re involved in. If you want to stay in touch with our campaign on an individual level, there’s a contact form you can fill in on our website.

The Green Party TU Group has already taken a strong stance, in policy terms, against anti-union and anti-strike legislation, so I’m fairly confident I don’t have to spend any time convincing you that it’s necessary to oppose them.

Nevertheless, as trade unionists who organise on a day-to-day basis within the constraints these laws impose on us, including their deadening effecting on consciousness, it can be useful to take a step back and think about the issue in context, in order that we can strengthen the foundations of our opposition. So what I’d like to do with this talk – and I don’t intend to speak for more than 15 minutes – is give a bit of background in terms of how we in Free Our Unions approach the issues, and then talk about why I think there are particular possibilities for collaboration between our campaign and yourselves as Green trade unionists, that I hope we can explore.

As I’m sure many of you know, Britain has what Tony Blair once, proudly, called “the most restrictive union laws in the western world.” How unions organise, when and how we can take industrial action, and over what issues, are all severely restricted by this legislative regime. Any worker aged around 45 or under has spent more or less their entire working life under it. The laws which most constrain us today began to be introduced under Thatcher, and were progressively added throughout the subsequent decades of Tory rule and, disgracefully, were left entirely intact by 13 years of Labour government.

The constraints of these laws seem so solid that it often feels somewhat fantastical to imagine things could ever be any different. The idea, for example, that workers could get together in the staff room or canteen, take a vote there and then to strike, and walk out the door – and for that to be perfectly legal and legitimate – seems unimaginable to many…

…to such an extent that well-meaning figures in our own movement recoil from the ostensible radicalism of demanding the restoration of such rights, and feel it necessary to cringingly preface their comments about anti-union laws with assurances that “no-one wants to go back to the bad old days of the 1970s.”

There was indeed much about the 1970s that was bad – both in general, and in terms of the trade union movement as it was then (or so I’m told: I wasn’t there personally). But we should make no apology for aspiring to least the levels of legislative freedom and social power that organised labour had then – and in fact much greater levels.

That contraction of horizons also leads to a tendency to think of anti-union laws really only in terms of the most recent – the 2016 Trade Union Act, which included the imposition of turnout thresholds in industrial action ballots. But that law is only one facet of the legislative restrictions on our rights to organise and take action, and in many ways not the worst. So a big focus of our work in Free Our Unions has been to try and resist, and push back against, that ideological retreat to only talking about the most recent anti-union laws, and maintain a perspective of confronting the older laws – the laws which prohibit workplace balloting, which prohibit striking in solidarity with other workers, and which prohibit striking over political issues.

It’s an important moment for the labour movement to step up our campaign against these laws now because this legislative regime is set to get worse. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the Police Bill; that bill will restrict yet further our rights to protest and dissent. Free Our Unions has published an extensive briefing examining the effect the bill will have on unions and workplace organising, which you can read on our website, freeourunions.org.

Beyond this, the Tories also have a manifesto commitment to implement so-called “minimum service requirements” during transport strikes, something that will obviously directly affect me and my workmates, and you and yours if you work in the transport industry. It’s not yet clear exactly how they envisage the system working here, but in other countries with similar laws, they often involve transport unions designating a section of their membership as exempt from striking so those workers can provide the legally-stipulated “minimum service”, meaning unions essentially have to facilitate scabbing. The political aim here is very clear: to minimise the impact of strikes, and essentially reduce them to the status of a protest rather than a leveraging of workers’ power.

We don’t know what the timescale for the implementation of the new law is yet. Government priorities have obviously been recalibrated by the pandemic, but this is something the government is still committed to and could decide to bring forward at any time. If these new laws are passed, they won’t stop with transport workers. The government already has a list of “essential services” which are subject to additional restrictions under the 2016 Trade Union Act, which includes education, healthcare, and the fire service. If they impose “minimum service requirements” on transport workers, I have no doubt those sectors will be next.

I want to talk now about some specific points of convergence between the fight against anti-union laws and your potential political priorities as Green trade unionists. In the interests of full disclosure, I myself am a Labour Party member and a supporter of the revolutionary socialist group Workers’ Liberty. But, although some of our activity historically has been oriented to policy issues within Labour, Free Our Unions isn’t a solely Labour-focused campaign.

The first point of convergence I want to suggest is around the question of democracy. I know the Green Party is strongly committed to democratic reform; I would argue that restrictions on the right to strike are one of the most significant brakes on meaningful democratic action in Britain today, and that repealing anti-union and anti-strike laws would represent as meaningful an expansion of democracy as reforming the electoral system.

Without a full right to strike, we’re essentially subject to the dictatorship of the boss. Democracy ends as soon as we set foot in the workplace. In a context in which our hard-right, nationalist government is proposing legislation to restrict the right to protest, to further restrict workers’ rights to organise and strike, gerrymandering constituency boundaries, and more, I think you have to say that this adds up to a serious assault on democracy. The first mass workers’ movement in this country, Chartism, was a movement for democracy, a movement against the dictatorship of the rich. The contemporary labour movement needs to reclaim some of that spirit today, and I think you, as members of a party strongly committed to an expansion of democracy, could help to leaven that by making campaigning against anti-union laws a strategic priority.

The second point of convergence is around the obviously central question of climate change. As I’m sure many of you know, the origin of the term “green” as a political label lies in a trade union struggle – the “Green Bans” movement of Australian construction workers in the 1970s, who leveraged their class power, their power over production, to shut down environmentally and socially destructive construction projects. If you’re not familiar with this episode I strongly urge you to learn about it; in my view it is one of the world-historic high-points of rank-and-file-led trade unionism that was both politically and industrially radical. So, if only in a nominative sense, the Green tradition is linked to a class-based, workplace-based, union-based struggle.

We desperately need a new “Green Bans” movement today. We need workers to have the freedom to strike not only over narrow economic issues – so-called “official trade disputes” – but over political issues, so that they could leverage their class power to demand radical climate action from the government. We need the freedom to strike in solidarity with others, including with youth climate strikers. And workers in high-emissions industries need to the freedom to strike to demand transition and conversion, recapturing the spirit of the Lucas Aerospace workers who, in the 1970s, developed a plan to repurpose their employer’s productive capacity away from making military hardware in order to make medical equipment and renewable energy technology. I imagine that the statement “climate change is caused by capitalism” is uncontroversial in this room; if that’s the case, and if we see the working class as a key anti-capitalist actor – the key anti-capitalist actor, I would argue – then we are impelled to confront the legal shackles the capitalist state has placed on us, in order to protect itself.

Free Our Unions is currently supporting Earth Strike, a network of anti-capitalist activists that emerged from the climate strike movement, in a new initiative called “Empower the Unions”. This initiative aims to connect trade unionists and climate activists, drawing on traditions of working-class direct action for the environment, such as the Green Bans movement, the Lucas Plan, and more recent struggles like the occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight in 2009, in order to highlighting how anti-union laws inhibit such action today. That’s one specific area of activity in which I’d invite Green Party trade unionists to work alongside us.

The formal political situation in this country is very bleak, and I’m sure none of us expect, on any kind of short or medium-term timescale, the election of a government likely to repeal these laws. I think it will be a social imperative to break and defy these laws much sooner than we have any prospect of seeing them repealed. In fact, I believe that’s already the case. But I also believe that continually highlighting these laws, raising consciousness around them, and explaining their essential nature as statutory weapons of class warfare in the hands of the bosses and their state, which menace the future of the planet as well as constraining our democratic rights, and demanding their abolition – even when that demand isn’t immediately likely to be won… these are all essential parts of the means by which our movement can develop the confidence to defy the laws.

That, ultimately, is what Free Our Unions exists to do, and if you agree with the perspective I’ve sketched out today, I hope we can discuss how we might work together to advance it.

Andy McDonald MP says: “Labour is committed to repealing anti-union laws”.

Andy McDonald MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Employment Rights and Protections, has said “Labour is committed to repealing anti-trade union laws”. This is a welcome commitment; we urge Andy and the Labour Party to go further, and state concretely what this commitment means.

Even under Jeremy Corbyn and even at the high point, policy-wise, of the 2019 manifesto, the Labour leadership’s stance on repealing the anti-union laws and promoting the right to strike remained unclear and inadequate. (See here for what we said in some detail at the time.) There is no reason to thinking that the Starmer leadership will do better without a lot more pressure.

Here are some of the issues:

• At the moment the party’s official announcements say nothing about the anti-union laws or about the right to strike. A tweet from a Shadow Cabinet member and an article on LabourList are no substitute for the whole leadership arguing for this vocally. Again, it is worth noting that even Corbyn’s leadership was reticent to talk about the anti-union laws (except the 2016 Trade Union Act) and even more reticent to talk about, let alone enthusiastically champion, the right to strike. We need clarity and we need vocal and active campaigning.

• “Repeal anti-trade union laws”? Which ones? There were nine in place before Tony Blair came to office in 1997 (for a list and review of them, see here; for a summary of their impact here). The 2016 Trade Union Act added another storey to an already very tall building.

• Under Labour’s plans, will workers be any more restricted in their rights to strike, picket, etc., than they were before 1979, when anti-strike laws were imposed by Thatcher? If so, in what ways? And why?

• Will workers still have to go through slow, carefully regulated balloting procedures? What is wrong with – among other possible methods – simply meeting together and voting to strike, as was possible before the 1980s? Why shouldn’t workers decide themselves how they want to take decisions about industrial action?

• Will 1980s restrictions on picketing, in terms of numbers and which workplaces can be picketed, remain?

• Will the ban on striking in solidarity with other workers remain? (Note that before Thatcher workers could strike in solidarity with any other workers, not just those separate from but connected to them in some degree.)

• Will the ban on striking over wider social and political issues than just industrial disputes remain?

The labour movement should push for clarity on these questions. It should demand they are answered in line with the clear policies passed at Labour Party conference and TUC Congress (see here) for repeal of all anti-union laws and their replacement with strong positive rights, including to strike and picket.