Unions must fight for the right to strike

Submitted by dalcassian on 10 May, 2011 - 6:44

Tory mayor of London Boris Johnson is campaigning for new laws to make it even more difficult for workers to defend our interests by striking. Prime minister David Cameron has said that he is "open to the idea".

Tory transport minister Philip Hammond responded to the Tube drivers' recent vote to strike against victimisation of union reps by saying (5 May) that "this is only strengthening the hand of those including the Mayor who are calling for tougher industrial relations laws".

Not in the rail union RMT, but elsewhere in the union movement, the word is increasingly heard from officials that strikes should be avoided because they will "play into the hands of the Tories" and bring on new laws.

Or the officials say that strikes can't be ruled out, but must be delayed - and delayed again - because someone (the officials?) has let the union membership database get out of date, and it must be "cleansed" before the ballot to fend off court challenges.

If you cower, crouched down, long enough, then you end by not being able to stand upright!

For workers, the right to strike is the right to stand upright. Without it, workers are better off than slaves or serfs only to the extent of having the chance to leave one employer and try to find another, which with today's unemployment rates is not much extent.

Workers lost large dimensions of our right to strike under the Thatcher government. Strikes are legal now only on a limited range of issues, only on direct issues and not in solidarity, only after ballots in prescribed form, only after set delays.

The court judgement against BA workers last year shows that current law can be interpreted by courts to give an injunction against almost any large strike on grounds of the inevitable minor discrepancies or errors in any large ballot.

Left Labour MP John McDonnell brought a Bill to parliament to protect workers' ballots against being invalidated by minor errors. The Tories opposed it, and the Labour front bench did not even give the Bill the support it needed to get beyond its first stage in Parliament. Union leaders were silent.

Boris Johnson's plan is make strikes illegal unless more than 50% of all workers eligible to vote in a ballot - rather than 50% of those voting - go for a strike.

Johnson himself got just 19% of people eligible to vote when he won the London mayoral election in 2008... So, 19% is enough to put him in office, but everyone who doesn't cast a vote in a strike ballot should be counted as voting against a strike?

In the days when strikes were voted in mass meetings, few people abstained. But usually some people were slower to put their hands up than others.

Workers do not abstain in strike ballots because they don't care about the loss of wages which a strike will bring! They abstain because they're not sure.

Anyone who abstains must be at least partly, unsurely, in favour of striking - otherwise they would vote no, straight off, because of the loss of wages.

But often they feel unsure about whether the union, or the workforce, is strong and determined enough to make the strike effective, and not a futile gesture.

In a mass meeting those unsure workers decide by looking. If there's a large enough body of workers who put their hands up for a strike straight away, then they go for a strike. If not, not.

With postal ballots, unsure workers tend instead not to vote, and to wait to see what the balance of opinion is among workers more sure of themselves.

The outrage against democracy of counting all non-voters as votes against a strike is one option the coalition government is considering. Another is the Lib-Dem policy - reaffirmed by Vince Cable during the 2010 election campaign - of giving the government powers to ban strikes in "essential services". The "50% of eligible voters" option is the front-runner at present.

Unions have been retreating on this issue for many years. From 1906 through to 1971 - with only slight variations, and except during the World Wars, when there were emergency anti-strike regulations, but widely defied - the right to strike seemed solid.

The Tory government of 1971 brought in an Industrial Relations Act, limiting industrial action, At first the unions said they would defy Thatcher's anti-union laws. Then in 1983 the print union NGA was abandoned by the TUC when it came up against the law.

After the miners' defeat in 1985, union opposition to the laws became a matter of speeches, not of action. The Tories added more and more restrictions. The union leaders told activists that the only answer was to wait and vote in a Labour government that would repeal the laws.

Before the 1997 election Tony Blair told the Daily Mail that: "Laws banning secondary and flying pickets, on secondary action, on ballots before strikes and for union elections – all the essential elements of the 1980s laws – will stay... Even after the changes the Labour Party is proposing in this area, Britain will remain with the most restrictive trade union laws anywhere in the western world".

The union leaders were silent. They complained slightly over the details of the changes in union law which the Blair government did introduce - making union recognition slightly easier - but made no agitation for the wholesale repeal of Tory laws.

From around 2001, a new generation of trade-union leaders came in, more combative and left-wing in rhetoric. Still no campaign on the union laws. Formal union policy was for a thorough restoration of the right to strike, but no union campaigned actively for it.

Despite Blair and Brown's determination to make New Labour a "party of business", with a effort the unions could have forced the Labour government into at least some loosening of the anti-strike laws. They didn't.

When the coalition government took office, Tory leaders told the press that they had "no plans" for new anti-union laws. Unsure about what their cuts would provoke, they didn't want to take on another difficult issue at that stage.

The unions' docility has made the Tories bolder. More docility will make them even bolder.

Unless the unions rise up now, they will be forced to crouch even lower, with an even heavier weight of law pinning us down.

The first step is simply to start agitating, demonstrating, and demanding commitments from the Labour Party leaders. That can lay the basis for decisive action to push the Tories back.

The government could give the nod to one employer or another to seek an injunction against the big public sector strike over pensions set for 30 June. The more the union leaders signal that they would then cancel the strike, with only a murmur of complaint, the more likely that option is.

The fight against the cuts has to go together with a fight for the right to strike.

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