AN OPINION piece in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph pointed to yet further attacks on the trade unions’ rights to organise and represent their members.
According to the paper it has only been ‘discovered’ in the last few months that elected local trade union representatives in the public sector are given paid time off to represent their members at meetings with management.
In fact, as anyone with even a passing acquaintance with trade unions and industrial relations knows, the granting of facility time to recognised trade unions is a widespread practice not just in the public sector but the private sector as well.
Contrary to the impression being given by the press and Tory MPs, paid time-off for elected union representatives has been a common feature of industry for decades and, despite their inferences to the contrary, such facilities are only granted for the purposes of joint negotiations with the employer.
Any trade union work not involving joint negotiations, such as recruitment and organising, has to be carried out in a rep’s own time and at his or her expense.
In calling to end these facilities, what is actually being proposed is to dispense entirely with the requirement of employers to even pretend to negotiate with unions at all.
This follows a whole pattern of attacks on the right of unions to organise and fight for the interests of their members.
These attacks have ranged from the threat to ban strikes in the public sector, moves to end the right of workers to take an employer to an industrial tribunal for wrongful dismissal, and most recently the introduction of legislation to make occupations of workplaces illegal under the criminal law.
In the case of the right to ‘legally’ call industrial action, a whole section of the Tory Party, led by London Mayor Boris Johnson, has been demanding the imposition of impossible balloting targets for unions voting for strikes.
Johnson has been demanding changes to the anti-union laws that would require at least a 50 per cent turn out as well as a majority in favour before a legal strike could be called – a figure rarely reached in general elections.
On the issue of industrial tribunals, the Tories are proposing new legislation that would mean workers would have to have been employed for two years, instead of one, before they could bring a case for unfair dismissal against an employer.
Also it is proposed that a charge be introduced to deter anyone from going to a tribunal.
This will give employers the right to hire and fire without any fear of being held to account legally.
Yet another attack on trade unions and students is contained in the proposal to take the issue of ‘squatting’ out of the civil justice arena and to make it subject to the criminal law.
The criminalisation of ‘squatting’, which is popularly associated with the homeless occupying empty property, would also apply to occupations carried out by trade unions or students to prevent the closure of facilities like hospitals or the closure of factories or university courses.
With the banks on the very edge of collapsing, the Tory-led coalition and its cheerleaders in the bourgeois press are demanding the capitalist state gear itself up for an inevitable confrontation with the working class and especially the youth.
What they forget is that the working class built its trade unions in the 19th century under conditions of complete illegality and in the face of the most extreme state repression.
Today, these unions and the right to fight for every job and against every closure can only be defended through the political struggle to bring down this government through the general strike and replace it with a workers’ government.
