EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL FEES TO BE ABOLISHED: a victory for workers' rights

Victories for workers, their unions and their rights at work are all too rare in recent years. 

The unanimous decision of the seven Supreme Court judges (the top legal institution in the UK) that the government's Employment Tribunal fees are illegal, is a precious rarity. 

It ends the criminal policy - introduced by the Tory/LibDem Coalition four years ago, in July 2013 - which has meant workers being charged up to £1,200 in order to even lodge a challenge to unfair dismissal, discrimination and other injustices at work. 

At least tens of thousands of workers have been denied access to a legal hearing against unscrupulous employers, let alone actual justice. Purely because they can't afford to fork out such huge lump sums, non-refundable if their case fails. 

Bosses Emboldened in Exploitation 

Company bosses have been emboldened in their exploitation of workers, arrogant in the knowledge they're very unlikely to ever face the possibility of a Tribunal hearing - which in the past deterred some of them - because it's a public 'court' which thereby exposes malpractices by employers to the full gaze of the wider public. 

Quite often, employers settled 'out of court' through what's called Compromise Agreements - with compensation packages - rather than face the stench of publicity about how they had mistreated workers. 

In the years since this brutal exclusion of workers from justice was imposed, the number of Employment Tribunal cases has collapsed by at least 70%. 

Union figures suggest pregnant women were the worst affected, unable to challenge discrimination at work because they couldn't afford Tribunal fees.

It's stating the obvious that lower-paid workers were especially hammered by the ET  fees system, which meant coughing up more than a full month's wages for full-time workers on the minimum wage, for instance. 

Collapse in Cases Pursued 

Of course, workers who are not union members faced the impossible fees being payable out of their own pockets. 

For those in trade unions, the sad fact is that all too many union leaders and legal departments ran for cover in many potential Employment Tribunal cases, dodging the costs unless they were absolutely 100% confident of winning, and thereby recouping the costs off the bosses found guilty of injustices. On numerous occasions, if there had been no fees the national unions would have pursued a member's case, but the fees served the purpose for which they were designed by the Tories and LibDems: curbing the willingness of the more weak-willed union leaderships to take up legal challenges on behalf of members.

Reimbursement of £27m! 

What price justice? Well, for starters, the Supreme Court has ruled that those who did scrape together the fees should now be reimbursed - to the tune of £27million! That in itself is a phenomenal victory.

It's a victory for the UNISON trade union which took the legal case against Tribunal fees right up to the Supreme Court. 

It's a victory for those political forces like the SSP who fought against Employment Tribunal fees before and since they were imposed. 

It's a victory for all those trade unionists who have demanded abolition of the fees.

This is not a ruling by some neutral, benign body called the Supreme Court. It's a politically calculated move on the part of one powerful arm of the state, made in a living context. 

It's a victory conceded by the judiciary against the Tory government designed to take the political sting out of this outrageous class-ridden system of employment laws, in the face of massive opposition, as shown by the popular support for Jeremy Corbyn's pledge to abolish the fees. His promise was a refreshing break from the spineless stance of Labour for all the previous period, with their feeble offers to reduce the fees, rather than simply scrap them. 

Demand Justice for Workers Priced Out 

This Supreme Court ruling kicks the door ajar for the unions to charge through and demand more far-reaching concessions on workers' rights. 

In addition to the £27million promised in reimbursements to those who paid the fees over the last 4 years, the unions should demand re-opening of cases of injustice at work where the fees prevented workers (or their unions) from pursuing Employment Tribunal challenges. 

The Supreme Court has ruled the government was in breach of other, older, overarching laws, meant to uphold access to justice. That's surely an opening for the organised trade union movement to challenge the government for breaches of human rights at work?

Scrap the Lot! 

This huge victory on this one, narrow, but important link in the chain of anti-union laws should embolden the unions to escalate the fight to repeal all these class-ridden laws. Anti-union, anti-worker laws designed by Thatcher's Tories in the 1980s, retained by 13 years of Labour governments, and made even more repressive by the subsequent Coalition and Tory governments. It's a resounding answer to all the faint-hearts and weaklings in the trade union movement and politics who say "there's nothing you can do about it". 

It's a platform to launch a serious struggle to challenge, defy and defeat the whole panoply of anti-union laws which currently make capitalist Britain home of the most repressive set of employment laws in the western world - and for a Charter of Workers' Rights which would also help empower workers through their unions to reverse the obscene levels of exploitation and inequality that the anti-union laws have helped employers and their pet governments impose. 

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.

WORKERS ASK: WHOSE SIDE ARE THE PARTIES ON?

You could be forgiven for forgetting that the working class make up the vast majority of the population, judging by how our interests and aspirations are ignored or trampled on by politicians representing the tiny minority who have grabbed most of the country's wealth - the 1%.
Then the election looms, so mainstream politicians who hold the working class in contempt suddenly spout nice-sounding promises in a cynical drive for votes.
Last week we suffered the spectacle of Old Etonian George Osborne declaiming that "Britain is the comeback country", "Britain is walking tall", "Jobs up, unemployment down, wages up"...etc.
Even this remote, upper-class snob has been advised by his focus groups that jobs and pay are critical factors in how most people vote.

JOBS - REAL JOBS!
Jobs is one of the critical issues to judge the competing political parties on.
The Tory/LibDem Coalition makes hay of falling unemployment. But scratch the shiny surface and you find an ugly reality. Unemployment figures have fallen as a result of 1.5 million new jobs since 2010. But a new wave of self-employed makes up an incredible 32% of these. Far from this signaling a flourishing of entrepreneurial genius and affluence, new research shows 80% of the self-employed are living in poverty! These are mostly people who would rather have a secure job but can't find one and end up self-employed rather than rely on insecure, part-time and temporary jobs - the main types created since 2010.
As the TUC reported, only one in 40 of the new jobs are full-time and permanent. There are still 80,000 fewer full-time jobs in Scotland than before the 2008 recession.
The working class have been plagued by the curse of casualisation over the past 30 years, and this has accelerated with dizzying speed in recent years.
Many of those removed from the unemployment figures are eking out an existence on low-hour contracts, typically of 8-12 hours a week. This gives all the power to the employers, who can tap into this ready-made pool of reserve labour to do extra hours - but with no premium rates of pay for 'overtime' - when busy spells in their business demands it.
Underemployment has become the new variation on unemployment.
All too often workers rely on two or three different part-time jobs to try and pay the bills. They miss out on breaks and mealtimes as they rush from one job to the next, dreading the day they get sick, as they usually don't qualify for sick pay.

ZERO HOURS CONTRACTS - ZERO RIGHTS
The ultimate in casualised labour, the pinnacle of job insecurity and lack of workplace rights, are Zero Hours Contracts.

An estimated 200,000 workers in Scotland alone are living the cruel insecurity of Zero Hours Contracts (ZHCs). This gives all the flexibility to the employers, all the risk and low incomes to those working for them. It means being contracted to work for a particular employer, but with absolutely no guarantee of how many hours of work you will get each week - if any!
Workers on ZHCs have absolutely no automatic entitlements to sick pay, holiday pay or redundancy pay. They are expected to be on call, unpaid, waiting by their phone or emails to find out when they're wanted. And real life experience proves that contrary to the baloney about the flexibility afforded to workers, when people decline a shift offered to them, they frequently aren't offered any more for days or weeks after, as bosses exercise their power to punish them.
These obnoxious forms of modern serfdom are not isolated to the outer fringes of the economy: they are rife and spreading in every High Street and retail park.
Over 90% of McDonalds workers are on them: 82,000 in total. Boots employ at least 4,000; 80% of JD Wetherspoons staff; Burger King; Dominos Pizza; Sports Direct; Pizza Hut; Subway; Next; Cineworld; universities... Social care relies on a vast army of ZHC workers - including the social care wing of the Church of Scotland!

ABOLISH ALL ZERO HOURS CONTRACTS 
The Tories and LibDems have shown in action they are parties that view cheap, casualised, insecure jobs as a virtue.
Labour has belatedly tried to appease the demands of the working class voters they rely on by promising measures on youth employment. And they repeatedly trot out the same two phrases about Zero Hours Contracts, phrases that should be seen for the cruel deceit they are!
Labour promises to "tackle Zero Hours Contracts". What the hell does that mean? Why not say clearly they will ABOLISH them?
Their other phrase, especially used when they are targeting trade unionists for votes, is that Labour will "abolish exploitative Zero Hours Contracts". Unfortunately, that same phrase has also been repeatedly used by the SNP leadership. Watch out for the deceit in that word 'exploitative'. Does that mean they'll keep 'good, non-exploitative Zero Hours Contracts'?!

WHEN ARE THEY NOT EXPLOITATIVE?

In fact, Labour has sometimes elaborated that they will reform ZHCs so that if a worker actually works an average of, say, 15 hours a week over 12 weeks, that should then become their contracted hours. A mild improvement indeed, but one which the experience of new Agency Workers' rights should warn us about; bosses find ways of dodging these averages, or for instance could simply cut the average hours they offer each ZHC worker over the 12 weeks.
The SSP has an honest, simple alternative to the dodgy word-games played by both Labour and the SNP: abolish ALL Zero Hours Contracts. They're ALL exploitative, so scrap the lot and instead offer secure contracts, with guaranteed hours, whether part-time or full-time.

JOB CREATION PLANS
When it comes to job creation, the SSP again stands out a mile compared to the rest.
With 157,000 families on the housing waiting list in Scotland, there's a crying need for a massive housebuilding plan of at least 100,000 new social sector homes over the lifetime of the parliament. Houses for affordable rent, built to the highest environmental standards, thereby tackling fuel poverty and helping combat climate change - as well as creating thousands of jobs and apprenticeships, giving decent wages and dignity to young and older workers alike.

A GREEN SAUDI ARABIA!

Another potential area of vast job expansion is green energy. Scotland's offshore energy potential alone has been rightly described as the Saudi Arabia of green energy.
Osborne's recent Budget handed over £1.3billion in tax cuts to North Sea Oil operators - some of the biggest corporations on the planet. If they'd been taxed at the same level as in Norway, that would have raised an extra £118bn over the last decade for investment in clean green energy.
The SSP unashamedly demands public ownership of all forms of energy, including renewables, to democratically plan investment, job creation and production that would benefit both people and planet.
Another unique policy pioneered by the SSP is free public transport. That would overcome the poverty and social isolation suffered by hundreds of thousands of Scots who can't afford the rising fares in the privatized, profiteering transport system. It would also create skilled manufacturing jobs to build fleets of trains, buses and ferries, as well as direct jobs on an integrated transport network.

BANISH POVERTY PAY 
Jobs are not the only issue working class people need to judge the rival parties on. Pay is equally important.
The much vaunted new jobs are overwhelmingly low paid, as well as insecure. Two-thirds of people who found a job in 2014 are paid less than £7.65-an-hour.
The government - and its allegedly impartial adviser, the Low Pay Commission - have the audacity to boast that a full 1.2 million workers will 'enjoy' the 20p rise on the over-21s national minimum wage next October, rising to the giddy heights of £6.70 an hour. That should be a source of shame, not boastfulness.
But what do the other parties offer?

LABOUR WAGE CON-TRICK
Labour is trying to work the biggest con-trick in modern times with their pledge cards promising an £8 minimum wage. What they coyly hide from the casual reader or listener is that they won't introduce it until 2020!
So what do they expect millions to survive on for the next 5 years? And how much better than today's £6.50 will that be worth by 2020, if any? And what about the fact they make no promises of scrapping the lower youth rates?

SNP OPPOSE £10 - EVEN IN 2020!
The SNP headline their support for the so-called Living Wage, currently £7.85. For workers on or just above the miserly £6.50 minimum wage, this would be a very welcome pay rise. But apart from the fact it is still too low to be accurately described as a 'living wage', it is entirely voluntary, not legally enforceable, which of course allows the SNP to sound good to workers whilst not offending businesses who have no intention of voluntarily paying that rate.

SSP SAYS £10 NOW!
And to underline their stance, for anyone not paying proper attention to the policy of the SNP, they blocked and amended a Motion in the Scottish parliament last week which called for a minimum wage of £10 an hour - not now, but in five years' time, 2020. Even that modest plan, put by the Greens, was far too much for the SNP, as well as - predictably - Labour MSPs.
By way of contrast with all the pro-big business parties, the SSP has persistently demanded a war on poverty pay by the introduction of a living minimum wage - currently of £10 an hour, for all over 16, abolishing the lower youth rates. We call for that £10 NOW, in 2015, not 2020 or some other distant date - based on the modest formula of a legally enforced minimum set at two-thirds median male wages in Scotland.
It's a policy we share with the Bakers' union (BFAWU) and indeed the entire TUC. It's time the trade union leaders fought for this fine policy, instead of handing members' funds - and trying to hand members' votes - to a Labour Party that has neither a track record nor any intention of seriously banishing poverty pay.

WORKPLACE REPRESSION 
This general election comes just after the 30th anniversary of the 1984/5 miners' strike. That defeat for the NUM, at the hands of Thatcher and the entire state apparatus, was a decisive turning point in the fortunes of the working class - a defeat that could easily have been an historic victory if the leaders of other unions and the Labour Party had shown an ounce of the courage displayed by the miners, their families and communities.
It is no accident that the 30 years since have been marked by growing poverty and inequality in the midst of vastly increased wealth for the 1%. One of the chief weapons fashioned and used by the employers and their governments to drive down workers' wages is the battery of anti-trade union laws - devised by Thatcher's Tories, retained by New Labour during their 13 years in government, and added to by David Cameron, Vince Cable et al since 2010.
Where is the hue and cry about this vicious apparatus for keeping the working class in 'their place'?

LAWS TO DRIVE DOWN WAGES
The Tories are increasingly shrill in their threats of making it virtually impossible to exercise the basic human right to withdraw your labour, to strike in defense of wages, jobs or rights at work. They openly talk of legislating for a 50% threshold for the turnout before any majority vote for action is legal. This from the Tories who seized power in 2010 after only 23% of the UK electorate voted for them!
Labour's silence says it all. They have absolutely no intention of repealing the worst, most repressive employment legislation in the western world. They kept it intact for 13 years in office. They have just as much desire to help boost business profits by holding workers in check as the Tories do.
The SNP make welcome statements about embracing trade unionism and 'the benefits of collective bargaining'. But nowhere have they ever unequivocally pledged to repeal all the anti-union laws.

CHARTER OF WORKERS' RIGHTS 
In contrast, the SSP shares the demands of most trade unions for outright repeal of these laws. Laws which price workers out of justice through £1,200-plus fees for Employment Tribunal hearings; make it virtually impossible to recruit openly to the unions in most workplaces; hamper the ability of union reps to function and represent members; and ban united action, including solidarity strikes and those deemed 'political'.
We want to collaborate with workers and their unions to instead demand a Charter of Workers' Rights, including the right to join, be active in and organise unions without fear of victimization; for full, open access to workers for union reps and officials; full legal rights from the first day of employment (not after two years!); the re-establishment of free collective bargaining; the right to strike after a majority vote, including the right to take solidarity action with fellow workers; and ultimately for boards of directors to have a majority of elected workers' representatives on them, for real workplace democracy.

JUDGE THEM BY THEIR DEEDS! 
Jobs, pay and workplace rights are central issues to judge any party by. And on their track record, not just their election-time promises! These issues put them to a central test: whose side are they on? Working people, or the profiteers?
The working class majority population will remain when the general election circus moves on after May 7th. We should put the politicians on the spot, spear their falsehoods and vague words, and resolve to build a mass, working class socialist party that stands up for decent, secure, well-paid jobs and workplace democracy.
Scotland's socialist party, the SSP, is here to stay beyond May 7th, to play our part in that struggle.