How anti-union laws harm the fight for disabled people’s rights

By Janine Booth, Secretary, RMT Disabled Members’ Advisory Committee

Britain’s anti-trade-union legislation makes it harder for unions to fight for the rights of disabled workers and disabled people more generally. How?

Limiting issues on which unions may lawfully take action

Trade unions may take lawful industrial action only in pursuit of ‘bona fide trade disputes’.

So, unions may strike to defend their members’ jobs, but not for the right to work or benefits for all, including disabled people.

Trade unions are allowed to strike for higher pay for their own members, but not against benefit sanctions against disabled claimants.

In 2014, the Tory-LibDem government announced the closure of the Independent Living Fund that provided grants to high-needs disabled people to enable them to live in the community rather than in residential care. No matter how much this affected workers in our personal lives, no matter how strongly we felt about this blatant injustice, the law barred all but those few who worked in running the fund from striking to defend it.

The law allows trade unions only to act ‘selfishly’, and then when they do, the Tories and the media denounce them for being selfish!

Jumping through hoops

The law allows trade unions to call industrial action on these workplace issues, but only after following an onerous list of procedural requirements.

So, you might have blatant disability discrimination at work, for example a disabled workmate being sacked, or the employer imposing a discriminatory policy. But to take action, you have to hold a postal ballot, give two lots of notice (one of one week, one of two weeks) and hand over a huge volume of information before you can even take action.

If the union makes any errors during this process – even minor ones – then the employer may ask the court to ‘injunct’ the industrial action ie. to order it not to take place until a full hearing can take place.

And even if the union follows the procedure flawlessly, by the time it has done so, your workmate’s been sacked, the policy is in place, and you are fighting a rearguard action.

By contrast, employers don’t have to give notice or hold postal ballots before attacking the workers’ rights or conditions.

Draining the political fund

Similarly, employers may spend money on political donations and political lobbying – for example, against stronger requirements on them to be accessible to disabled people – without workers having to opt in to the product of our labour being spent in this way.

But under the law, we do have to opt in to our own trade unions’ political funds to spend money on political lobbying in the interests of union members and working-class people more generally. The requirement for trade unions to hold separate funds for political campaigning and representation came in an anti-union law passed over a century ago. Unions may only pay for campaigning – for example for stronger laws against disability discrimination – from this fund.

Further legislation weakened these funds by allowing members to opt out of them, then in 2016, the Tory government’s Trade Union Act changed this to a requirement to opt in, so that a union member has to positively assent to make their (very small) contribution to the fund. It is easy to miss this opt-in when signing up to a union. This was a deliberate move by the Tories to limit the resources available to trade unions to campaign against discriminatory and anti-union government policies.

Only by post

The law requires industrial action (and union election) ballots to be conducted solely by post. Despite having a ‘digital by default’ policy for itself, the government will not allow trade unions to use modern technology to enable their members to vote more easily or to take votes in the workplace.

This presents a barrier to some disabled people, particularly those with impairments that making it more difficult to receive, fill in by hand and post a ballot form.

While insisting on an antiquated voting method that reduces turnout, the law now requires industrial action ballot to reach a turnout threshold!

It does not apply this to other areas of political and civil life. In fact, many of the MPs who voted for this legislation would not even be in Parliament if these thresholds had applied to their elections.

Yet more restrictions

Law after law has restricted various aspects of effective trade unionism, for example picketing, and intensified state regulation of trade union affairs.

The Tories introduced most of these laws, not to democratise unions, as they claimed, but in order to shackle and neutralise trade unions.

More to come

The next anti-union law on the Tories’ agenda is to require a minimum service to run during rail and transport strikes. So, even if the union has a bona fide trade dispute, meets all the requirements, and the ballot passes all the thresholds, it will still not be allowed to call an all-out strike. The law will require the union to collaborate in minimising the effect of its own action.

This plan was among the Conservative Party’s pledges in the 2019 general election, and while it has not pursued it so far, we expect that when the pandemic passes its peak, it will bring this unfair and repressive proposal forward. We also expect that it will promote the new law by referring to the rights of passengers, including disabled passengers. This is appalling hypocrisy from a Tory government with a record of systematic attacks on disabled people, and a cynical use of disabled people as a pretext to restrict the right to strike. Contrary to Tory claims, it is in the interests of disabled people to defend the right to strike, and to reject attempts to divide transport workers and passengers against each other.

Know your enemy!

A discussion paper written by right-wing lobbyist Nicholas Finney arguing for further restrictions on strikes, and discussing how these restrictions could work, has been uploaded to the Academia website.

Although the paper is undated, and appears to be unfinished, it has clearly been written in the last few years, since the imposition of the 2016 Trade Union Act.

Free Our Unions encourages supporters to read the paper. It’s always worth knowing how the other side is thinking. Although Finney is not a politician, civil servant, or Tory official, his paper gives some insight into considerations the Tories are likely to be making with regards to their manifesto commitment to introduce “minimum service requirements” to restrict transport workers’ strike.

Finney is an arch-Thatcherite, and the former director of the National Association of Port Employers. In this capacity he led campaigning to scrap the Dock Labour Scheme, which enshrined certain workplace and union rights for dockers.

The paper can also be directly downloaded here (NB: clicking the link will download a .doc file to your computer).

Support Myanmar’s workers, striking for democracy

Free Our Unions salutes the struggle of workers in Myanmar for their rights and for democracy, and calls on the British labour movement to step up to support their fight.

We note and urge others to note the central role being played there by a political general strike against the military coup and for democracy, the “Civil Disobedience Movement”. The strike and associated protests have already faced repression: two people were killed at a protest by striking shipyard workers.

Workers everywhere in the world need the right to form, join and organise through independent unions; to strike by a process, at a time and for any demands of their own choosing, including in solidarity with any other workers and for wider social and political goals; and to picket freely, anywhere.

We must fight for free trade unions, untrammeled by state control, anti-union laws and employer interference, everywhere.

• One of Myanmar’s union federations, the All Burma Federation of Trade Unions, has launched an appeal for funds to support the “Civil Disobedience Movement” – see here. Please donate and share!

• Several UK trade unions and campaign groups including No Sweat and War on Want have published a statement supporting Myanmar’s workers’ struggle. Read the statement on the No Sweat website here.

Model motion for Labour Party conference

Free Our Unions encourages supporters active in the Labour Party to submit motions based on the below model text to their local parties, for submission to Labour Party conference 2021. The deadline for CLPs to submit motions to the conference is 13 September. If the motion is endorsed by your branch or CLP, email us at freeourunions@gmail.com to let us know!

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 anti-union 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”.

(248 words)

A letter to the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs

Dear comrades,

We’re writing in response to your recent pamphlet Winning the Future: Socialist Responses to the Coronavirus Crisis. Well done on producing it – it’s a contribution to the urgent task of raising the labour movement’s ambitiousness and confidence in difficult times.

In the spirit of your call for the pamphlet to be “widely read and debated in the labour and trade union movement”, we’d like to propose a way in which its demands could be strengthened. As the pamphlet indicates, workers’ rights are key. In turn, the right to strike is key – both to underpinning all workers’ rights and to the fight for all our movement’s demands.

In the articles by Claudia Webbe and John McDonnell, the pamphlet calls for repeal of the 2016 Trade Union Act and other important changes. But it is less clear on repealing the other anti-union/anti-strike laws, those introduced in the 1980s and 90s under Thatcher and Major. The Covid crisis has highlighted how it is not just the Trade Union Act which stymies workers taking action. The ability of workers to act quickly and decisively to defend safety and rights is curbed by the earlier laws which created arduous procedures for strikes to be legal. The Trade Union Act of course made these procedures more arduous still.

Moreover these earlier anti-union laws prevent industrial action for anything other than narrowly defined “trade dispute” issues. It was illegal for unions in the UK to organise strikes alongside the student climate strikers; it would be illegal for unions to organise strikes to say Black Lives Matter (as some workers in the US have done).

Solidarity action between different groups of workers, which the Institute of Employment Rights rightly called fundamental to “the whole ethos of the trade union movement”, is also banned. The laws even before 2016 were a bosses’ charter to prevent strikes from happening in various ways. And while reasserting collective bargaining is crucial, it is surely true that “collective bargaining without the right to strike is collective begging”.

Yet over the years, a norm has developed in the labour movement of demanding repeal only of the 2016 Act and either saying nothing about the earlier anti-union laws or suggesting in an unclear way that they can be dealt with without repealing them. Greater clarity and radicalism is necessary.

We need positive legal rights to strike, to picket and so on. But we should be clear that these rights are not compatible with the restrictions contained in the Thatcherite laws. Those laws also need to be repealed. The formula popularised by Bob Crow of the RMT, “repeal and replace”, is still right.

This is also an issue of Labour Party and labour movement democracy. Labour conference has voted repeatedly for repeal of all the anti-union laws, most recently in 2019, when it voted in two separate motions that “in power Labour will… repeal all anti-union laws”. Conference 2017 made explicit that it was demanding “repeal” not just of the Trade Union Act, but also “anti-union laws introduced in the 1980s and 90s”.

Polling by Rebecca Long-Bailey’s leadership campaign found that Labour members supported this stance by a ratio of 5-1. TUC Congress 2019 noted that “the anti-trade union laws – not just the 2016 Trade Union Act, but multiple laws going back to 1980 – continually undermine workers’ ability to organise and campaign”; and voted “to campaign, and encourage affiliated unions and trades councils to campaign, for the repeal of all anti-union laws”. The left should be championing this policy decided democratically by party and union members.

Again, winning a strong right to strike is essential not just to guaranteeing workers’ rights but to the labour movement’s ability to fight for all its demands, and for social change more generally. We look forward to discussing and working with you on these issues.

Riccardo la Torre, for the Free Our Unions campaign

Free Our Unions public meeting, Tuesday 2 March, 6:30pm

CONFRONTING ANTI-UNION LAWS

Tuesday 2 March, 6:30pm-8pm

Log in via Zoom here.

How have recent and ongoing workers’ struggles confronted restrictive anti-strike and anti-union legislation, and what effect would it have on those struggles if those restrictions were removed?

We’ll hear from speakers involved in disputes and campaigns about how they’ve dealt with these issues, and how the labour movement can step up our fight for a real right to strike and organise.

Speakers:

Gerry Carroll MLA will discuss his “Trade Union Freedom Bill” in the Stormont Assembly, which aims to repeal Thatcherite anti-union laws in the north of Ireland.

Mark Porter, Unite convenor at the Rolls Royce plant in Barnoldswick, will discuss the recent “Battle for Barnoldswick”, sustained strikes which succeeded in staving off job cuts, and will discuss how the campaign dealt with the challenges posed by anti-union laws.

Michelle Rodgers, National President of the RMT union, will discuss the Tories’ proposed laws which will mandate “minimum service requirements” during transport workers’ strikes.

Also invited:

A striker from the Sage care home in north London, where the United Voices of the World union is navigating laws on union recognition which are weighted in favour of employers.

Log in via Zoom here.

Overturn Shrewsbury convictions – and scrap today’s anti-strike laws!

The Free Our Unions campaign sends its full support to the trade unionists currently pursuing a Court of Appeal case to overturn their 1972 convictions for their role in a construction workers’ strike over pay and health and safety issues.

The appellants are the 14 surviving members of the “Shrewsbury 24”. One of the long-running campaigns in their defence writes: “Our campaign is seeking to overturn the unjust prosecution of 24 building workers who were charged following the first ever national building workers strike in 1972. They picketed building sites in Shrewsbury during the dispute and were prosecuted in Shrewsbury Crown Court in 1973. They became known as the ‘Shrewsbury 24’.”

The court has heard how state departments, including MI5, colluded in securing the conviction, on grounds including affray, unlawful assembly, and conspiracy to intimidate.

These convictions predate the anti-union and anti-strike legislation introduced by the Thatcher and Major governments. MI5’s involvement is an indication of how worried the British state was about the power of organised labour. Today, our movement is weaker and less combative, but faces significantly greater formal legal shackles – which are both a product of, and a contributing factor to, the much lower levels of militancy.

As part of a campaign to support the overturning of these convictions, the movement must renew campaigning against all existing and proposed anti-strike and anti-union laws. As the Shrewsbury case shows, in periods of high class struggle, the state will seek to use the judiciary system to undermine effective trade unionism, whether or not it is equipped with specifically anti-strike/anti-union legislation. But the existence of such legislation gives the state and the ruling class significant additional weapons, and forces our side to fight with one hand behind our backs.

Solidarity with the Shrewsbury pickets – scrap all anti-strike and anti-union laws!

Labour Unions consultation

Labour Unions, the network of trade unions which affiliate to the Labour Party, is conducting a consultation on its future campaigning, and is inviting trade unionists to make suggestions for campaigns.

Free Our Unions encourages supporters, particularly those in Labour-affiliated unions (although members of non-affiliated unions can also participate), to respond to the consultation, and propose campaigning around the issue of anti-strike/anti-union legislation.

Supporters are welcome to use this model text in the “Do you have any other suggestions for us?” box:

Successive Labour Party conferences, and the TUC Congress, have passed policies calling for the abolition of anti-union and anti-union legislation, and supporting campaigning to achieve this. Labour Unions should campaign within the party for these policies to be acted on, as well as organising its own activity around this issue. This activityshould emphasise the need to scrap all anti-union/anti-strike legislation, not only the most recent, and replace it with positive legislation enshrining a full right to strike and organise at work.

Take part in the consultation here.

Enact TUC policy!

For the past two years, TUC Congress has passed radical policy on the anti-union laws. The 2019 policy stated: “Congress believes workers need strong rights to 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.”

It also agreed 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 and their replacement with strong legal rights, including to strike and picket; and for a clear commitment on this from Labour.”

A policy passed at the September 2020 congress urged the TUC to “organise a special conference open to workplace reps and shop stewards on opposing the anti-union laws”, and to “organise a Saturday London demonstration as soon as possible on the demands:

  • ‘Stop the Tory anti-union laws.’
  • ‘Defend the transport unions.’
  • ‘For workers’ unity against the Tories'”.

Despite these radical policies, the TUC has done little to activate them. Pandemic conditions make many forms of collective mass action unviable, but the TUC could organise online events and produce material to fulfil its commitments to step up campaigning against the anti-union laws.

Free Our Unions will be working with supporters in TUC-affiliated unions to press for these policies to be enacted.

Picketing is still lawful

Prior to the first day of the Sage care workers strike on 15 January, legal advice obtained by the United Voices of the World union suggested that picketing may be unlawful under the new lockdown.

After a physical picket line planned for the first day of the strike was called off, picket lines on subsequent strike days happened without obstruction. British Gas workers have also been picketing during their ongoing strikes.

Further legal advice has clarified that picketing remains lawful, and the confusion stemmed from the Crown Prosecution Service including misleading and out-of-date information on their website.

A court action pursued by the Unite union in November had previously established that picketing remains legal under lockdown restrictions.