A WARNING NOTE TOTHE TORIES

SUBMISSION ON 2015 TRADE UNION BILL & ASSOCIATED CONSULTATIONS 

ON BEHALF OF THE SCOTTISH SOCIALIST PARTY 

by Richie Venton, SSP national trade union organiser 

We submit these comments on the Trade Union Bill and associated 'consultations' in the full knowledge that the Tory regime has little or no intention of heeding the submissions of the trade union movement and its political allies, in their pursuit of crushing the power and influence of working people. 

These pretend-consultations are an exercise in deceit; camouflage for a government with no popular majority mandate to impose the most repressive anti-worker legislation for several decades, certainly since the reviled days of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps even since the notorious 1901 Taff Vale Act. 

Taken separately and together, the measures in the Bill - and supplementary legislation being proposed without having to pass primary legislation - should exclude the UK from being signatories to the ILO, European Human Rights and other declarations of democracy.

As the Cameron government is fully aware - and doubtless proud of - the existing tranche of anti-union laws initiated by their 1980s predecessors, already make the UK the most repressive, in terms of workplace rights, of any western state. Now you threaten to add to the levels of dictatorship by capital suffered by the working people who create society's wealth and frontline services.

The proposed threshold of a 50% turnout in any union ballot is an effrontery to democracy, coming from a Business Secretary who only won 38% of the vote in his seat; a parliament with 331 MPs elected by a minority.

The further high hurdle of 40% of all eligible voters in what has now been redefined as "important public services" - plus workers who are "ancillary" to them - flies in the face of the ILO rulings that "only the votes cast should count".  

The two hurdles combined are especially offensive when, if applied to the recent Westminster elections, would have barred 270 Tory MPs and 50% of the Tory Cabinet from office.

The only countries who apply such multiple obstacles to a simple, democratic vote by majority in the unions are Bulgaria and Romania. Are those now the models to be emulated?   

BALLOT RIGGERS' CHARTER

Instead of throwing up such outrageous obstacles to democratic decision-making, laws should be drafted to facilitate workplace union meetings - during working hours - followed by votes, and safe, secure methods of online voting. Maximizing participation by allowing the unions to meet, debate and function would be true progress. The Trade Union Bill is its mirror opposite. It's a charter for ballot rigging.

Stipulations for ballot forms giving "reasonably clear details of the matters in issue in the trade dispute"; "the types of industrial action"; and "the periods within which action is expected" are all designed to earn fortunes for company lawyers who will crawl all over the ballot process to subvert union members' decisions; to clog up the courts with challenges to majority votes; and to give employers an even greater monopoly of power, by giving them time to prepare counter-measures to undermine the impact of workers exercising their human, democratic right to withhold their labour.

Having to give not just 7, but now 14 days' notice of action likewise hands employers the power to neuter any actions by employees, even when they've overcome the outrageous thresholds imposed on them.

In that context, the proposals to repeal the ban on use of Agency workers as replacement labour during industrial action are particularly pernicious. This ban has been in operation since 1973 - including right throughout the Thatcher days! 

It is designed to dragoon some of the most vulnerable workers - those whose numbers have ballooned during the Coalition and now Tory governments - and put a legal gun to their head with the 'choice' of 'scab or be sacked'. All to undermine wages and conditions, and add to the mass precariousness of work in 'modern' Britain.

CRIMINALIZING PEOPLE OF PRINCIPLE 

Tory government proposals on picketing are measures a police state wouldn't be ashamed of. They aim to make criminals of working people with the courage of their convictions and a readiness to defend their communities and work colleagues. 

Your 'Consultation on Intimidation of Non-Striking Workers' is a grotesque exercise in spin and loaded language. The Carr Inquiry was set up in 2014 to dredge up any evidence of picket line intimidation to justify such criminalization. It failed; no evidence was found!

Now the conversion of Codes of Conduct into criminal law on limits of six to a picket line, plus insistence on Picket Supervisers with ID, letters to give the police "or any other person who reasonably asks", and similar heavy-handed regulations have nothing to do with law, order or social justice, everything to do with trampling on civil and human rights. 

Bogus consultation on a new criminal offense of "intimidation on picket lines", and ludicrous demands for details of what loudspeakers, banners or props are to be used on future protests, are equally dangerous attacks on democracy. 

And to cap it all, the Orwellian demand for 14 days' notice of use of social media and "what blogs and websites will set out", are all too similar to the internationally condemned repressive measures of the likes of regimes in China, Russia or Middle East autocracies.

New draconian powers for the Trade Union Certification Officer to interfere in the internal affairs and decisions of unions, including the power to order seizure of union documents and membership lists, and interrogate union officers, are police measures that not even Thatcher dared to try. And with the added sick joke of this dictatorial exercise being funded from special levies on... the unions!

Any state claiming to be modern, or democratic, should have the right to be in a union, and the right of that union to freely function on behalf of its members, inscribed in a written constitution. The attacks on union facility time and other functioning, including the checkoff system of collecting union subs, are anathema to democracy. 

DEVOLVE TO DISSOLVE!

The SSP is the socialist contingent of Scotland's trade union movement. We have a vision of a democracy that is real and concrete, with fully functioning, free trade unions; full recognition and negotiating rights for unions in any workplace, regardless of size, where workers join unions; restoration of collective bargaining across the board; the constitutional right to strike after a simple majority vote at union meetings (supplemented by secure online voting measures); the right to show solidarity with fellow workers; the right to strike against political measures that affect workers' lives; freedom of speech without victimization; the right to peaceful protest and picketing; and a whole package of measures to introduce workplace democracy instead of the rule of fear encouraged by this and previous anti-working class governments.

The SSP unashamedly calls not only for outright opposition to your Trade Union Bill and associated regulations, but for the repeal of all existing anti-union laws.

To that end we will continue to demand devolution of employment legislation - as well as the minimum wage - to the Scottish parliament. That would be a democratic advance on parliamentary dictatorship over Scotland by a Tory government that only won the support of 10% of the Scottish registered electorate.

A WARNING NOTE

We have no belief that a Tory party and Tory MPs with absolutely no understanding of the daily lives and struggles to survive endured by millions of people have any ability or intention of listening to pleas for mercy.

So this submission is in part more of a public notice that we will do all in our powers as trade unionists and community activists to obstruct, defy and defeat any of the vicious, repressive measures proposed by the Trade Union Bill and its subsidiary regulations.

The government has no mandate. There is not a shred of evidence that any of these laws are necessary. The past 30 years of brutal repression of workers' rights in Britain have been instrumental in creating one shocking fact: GDP has doubled in the past 30 years, and the number of people living below the breadline in that same time-span has likewise doubled.

Just as the arrogance of Tory mis-rule stirred up the mass politicization of the Scottish people during and since the Referendum, so too we are confident your attacks on the trade union movement and working people will trigger resistance that will leave the architects of these Tory attacks to rue the day they tried to wipe out workers' rights.

KILL THE BILL: stop Tory wipe-out of workers' rights!

Even before the election of the Tories - by a mere 24% of registered UK voters - Britain boasted the reprehensible record of having some of the most repressive anti-worker, anti-union laws in the western world. Now David Cameron and his Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, have declared a war on workers' rights that exceeds even the worst assaults the hated Maggie Thatcher dared impose.

Their Trade Union Bill - and three accompanying so-called 'consultations' designed to add an additional dose of repression to existing laws without having to pass primary legislation - are potentially the biggest threat to rights at work in at least 50 years, and possibly since the infamous Taff Vale Act of 1901.

The latter came about in the wake of powerful collective action by railway workers, but was aimed at crushing the power of all unions to function, by making them liable for any loss of profits caused by a strike. It triggered a wave of strikes and the formation of what became the Labour Party, to give workers a political arm to fight with. Waves of united action won repeal of the Taff Vale Act in 1906.

THATCHER'S ACTS - KEPT BY LABOUR

Fast forward to the 1980s, where Thatcher's Tory regime imposed six major anti-union Acts. They were a coldly calculated reaction to the growth of workers' militancy in the 1970s and early 1980s, when millions took collective action to defend themselves and their communities from a concerted onslaught by successive governments seeking to restore the profit margins of the capitalist minority.

Thatcher's laws - which are intact to this day, left undisturbed by the 13 years of Labour in government - throw up multiple obstacles to the functioning of unions as a defense force for workers.

They insist on secret postal ballots (with full media interference on behalf of the employers) prior to any industrial action, rather than the fulsome debate of workers mass meetings and a vote on the spot. They incorporate the legal requirement to give employers at least 7 days notice of a ballot and another 7 days notice of any industrial action arising from a ballot.

They tightly restrict the definition of a trade dispute, banning 'secondary' solidarity strikes or any deemed 'political', such as against privatization.

They include multiple legal hurdles on the wording and conduct of industrial action ballots, which employers' lawyers have crawled all over for years, winning numerous injunctions in the Courts to outlaw democratically agreed strikes.

They make unions prey to seizure of their funds and assets, which has made many union leaders quivering wrecks in the face of demands by members to take action when it's the only means of self-defense.

UNION WEAKNESS INVITES TORY AGGRESSION

But now we witness the ultimate paradox; the terrible consequences for workers of the failure of the majority of union leaderships to resist and defy this legal straitjacket for decades. The subsequent weakening of the trade union movement means the state and employers feel far less need to accommodate the unions than if they'd put up a concerted fight. The TUC and individual unions' readiness to embrace 'social partnership' with the employers, instead of independently standing up for workers' rights and distinctive class interests, has reduced the employers' need for social partnership!

They instead feel confident in resorting to brutal, undisguised class warfare. Not because there's been a massive wave of strikes, as the Tories try to tell the more gullible population in their 'justifications' for their new Trade Union Bill; last year saw 788,000 days of strike action across the whole of the UK, which was a rise compared to recent years, but on a puny scale compared with the 11.9 million strike days in the 1980s.
No, this new onslaught is born of a recognition that the unions - with 6.5 million members in Britain, 630,000 in Scotland alone - still represents a powerful foe as the Tories plunge the knife into benefits, jobs, services and pay...provided union leaders stop pussy-footing around with empty rhetoric and apply themselves to a coordinated plan of action to halt austerity.

So the Tory Trade Union Bill is not the result of some public clamour for action against already-existing strikes and protests by organized workers, but rather a savage attempt to cut off that path to working class people who are increasingly furious at the poverty and inequality we face.

BALLOT RIGGING

The measures included in their Bill and accompanying 'consultations' are a full-frontal assault on the human and democratic rights of working class people, and indeed in breach of various European Court of Human Rights articles - which is a core reason the Tories aim to scrap the Human Rights Act of 1998, and seek to negotiate Britain's exclusion from many European legal directives.

In flagrant breach of ECHR rulings that "only the votes cast should count", the Tory Bill insists on a threshold of at least 50% of all who are eligible to vote in any union ballot for action. So those abstaining are counted as a vote against the action.

In a move that goes even further in its attacks on democracy than even those mentioned in the Tory manifesto or subsequent Queen's Speech, they insist on another hurdle of 40% of all those eligible having to vote for the action in the case of what is now dubbed "important public services". This adds to their original list of "essential public services", so it now includes workers in health, transport, education (of all those aged up to 17), fire services, border security and nuclear decommissioning and waste disposal. A pernicious added clause includes workers who are ancillary to such "important public services".

So for the millions thus affected, it's not enough to get a majority of the votes cast, but it must also be at least 40% of all the members eligible to vote, regardless of whether many of them abstained.

This ballot rigging is from a Business Secretary elected by only 38% of his local electorate; in a parliament with 331 MPs elected without a majority; by a Cabinet whose number would be cut by half, and the number of Tory MPs would drop by 270, if they'd had to win the 50% and 40% votes they now want to impose on workers and their unions.

The only other countries with similar outrageous barriers in ballots on the right to strike are Bulgaria and Romania - states not frequently quoted as a model for progress by the Tories!

LEGAL MINEFIELD & ARMY OF STRIKE-BREAKERS

But those outrageous 'high hurdles' are just the start of the effrontery to the free functioning of unions in the Bill.

Ballot forms will have to give "reasonably clear details of the matters in issue in the trade dispute" (so bosses' lawyers can challenge whether they are 'reasonably clear'); "the types of industrial action" when it's not a strike (again, a recipe for legal challenges compared with the current 'action short of strike action'); and "the period or periods within which action is expected to take place" (so employers can plan to undermine its effectiveness, and legally challenge it if dates change because the situation demands tactical changes - and in any case, how in hell are unions expected to know the exact dates of action well over a month beforehand?).
Instead of giving 7 days' notice to employers, 14 days' notice will now be required; again, neutering the impact by giving bosses ample time to plan counter-measures. And among the latter options will be the hiring of Agency workers to do strikers' jobs, as the Tories plan to scrap the ban on that which has been in place since 1973 - including right through Thatcher's years!

So they are arming employers with a legal minefield to stop action, and an army of vulnerable Agency workers issued the choice of 'scab or be sacked'.

ORWELLIAN POLICE REGIME

If, despite all this, a strike goes ahead, new laws on picketing aim to criminalize workers with the courage to fight back. The current Code of Conduct on picketing that limits it to six will become a law, so any more than that would be committing a criminal offense. So the more popular a strike, and the bigger the show of support on a picket line, the larger the number of workers to be branded criminals!
Unions are to be legally obliged to have a Picket Superviser, named to the police, with a badge or other ID, always either on or near the picket line, and in possession of a letter to produce to the police "or any other person who reasonably asks". An outrageous intrusion on the privacy and civil rights of union activists, and a trampling on the autonomy of unions.

Unions will have to inform the government of pickets and protests in advance, and "whether there will be loudspeakers, props, banners, etc"!

And contrary to the loaded language of the Tories' 'Consultation on Intimidation of Non-Striking Workers', these police-measures are not aimed at some rash of threats by pickets in the past. In fact, they set up the 2014 Carr Inquiry to try and find some evidence of this, to justify themselves, but none was found!

It's purely to intimidate workers into not exercising the right to withdraw their labour - a right that should be enshrined in any democracy's constitution. On top of that, they are 'consulting' on a new criminal offense of 'intimidation on picket lines'.

In a further Orwellian outrage, unions will have to give 14 days' notice of intent to use social media during industrial action, and "what blogs and websites will set out", or face fines.

Local authorities are expected to use Community Protection Notices against protesters - a measure aimed at successful pressure campaigns in support of workers in struggle.

INTERFERENCE IN UNION AFFAIRS

A whole raft of other measures likewise not only seek to effectively abolish the right to strike, but are a gross invasion of the internal democracy of unions, and of union reps ability to actually represent members at work.
Public sector employers will be forced to account in minute detail for every hour of union facility time granted to the elected union reps, every penny in wages paid to them, and the government will accrue the power to overrule agreements between such employers and unions, with the power to stop all facility time for union reps. And this will not only apply to shop stewards/reps, but also Learning Reps and Health & Safety reps.
The trade union Certification Officer is to be granted vast new powers to interfere in union affairs - even when not a single member has complained or demanded intervention. These include membership registers; union elections; ballots on mergers; political funds and rules; power to demand handover of union documents; and to question union staff and officers. All on pain of a £20,000 fine for failure to fully comply. All the entire policing exercise on behalf of the state is to be funded by a special levy on the unions!

CATACLYSMIC ATTACKS REQUIRE DEFIANT ACTION

This battery of new measures is a cataclysmic attack on the right to be in a union that is in any way effective as a collective defense of workers' rights and conditions; the right to strike; the right to free speech and freedom of association.

Those union and Labour leaders who spent two years telling workers to vote against Scottish independence and wait for 'justice with Labour' have a lot to answer for. But waiting for independence is not an option either, given the scale of wipeout of workers' rights we face here and now.

Urgent, immediate action in confrontation with the Tories, combined with a clear vision of an alternative future, is the order of the day.

The Tories' bogus 'consultation' ends in early September, followed by a second reading of the Trade Union Bill.

The TUC has promised a day of action when that debate in Westminster happens, and a demo at the Tory party conference on 4 October.

Each trade union, the STUC and TUC need to act with utmost urgency, calling meetings and forums of trade unionists to arm them with the facts, motivate them into taking action with a harsh warning of what is threatened.

They should call a genuine day of action as an opening salvo, with strikes and rallies in every region or city, appealing not only to those workers most immediately in the firing line - those in 'important public services' - but all trade union members, and indeed non-unionized workers, such as Agency staff, who face the horrendous choice of being ordered to cross picket lines to undermine fellow-workers' jobs and conditions, or lose their own job.

DEFY ANTI-UNION LAWS!

Such strikes would often be in defiance of existing anti-union laws, let alone the new additional repressive measures being grafted onto them; so be it! Unless union leaderships have the courage to take such action, the Tories will continue to feel emboldened into pursuing their dictatorial measures against workers. And unless such a lead is given, workers will lack belief in the ability of the movement to defy and defeat the Tories.
On the other hand, bold united action would win widespread support and involvement from working class people not yet even in a union. They need a vehicle to resist austerity.

SCRAP ALL THE REPRESSIVE LAWS

In fighting to kill off the Bill, the trade union movement and its allies need to make two other things crystal clear: a readiness to defy the Bill's measures even if the Tories ignore opposition and implement it; and a call not only to Kill the Bill, but also to repeal the entire package of already-existing anti-union laws that these new measures are being grafted onto.

It's widespread failure by most union leaders to defy the previous 30 years of anti-union laws that has emboldened Cameron et al. In contrast, those groups of workers who have defied these laws have always won huge concessions e.g. oil refinery construction workers.

DEVOLVE TO DISSOLVE!

The battle to confront and finish off the Bill should be combined with the demand for power over employment laws to be devolved to the Scottish parliament. That will unify workers who voted Yes and No in the Referendum. It points to an escape route from Tory Westminster dictatorship. And whilst the SNP leadership have never once publicly pledged to repeal the anti-union laws - the most vicious in the western world - the unions have the potential power to pound Holyrood into traveling that road, with the demand for a Charter of Workers' Rights to be ushered in as an example to the rest of the UK and beyond.

That's what the Scottish Socialist Party has consistently fought for. That's what the 630,000-strong trade union movement in Scotland needs to take decisive action in pursuit of.