Recognising the great shortcomings in the Government’s current Bill, Unite’s Policy Conference has taken the bold decision to call for an Employment Rights #2 Bill to be introduced and for the current Bill to be subject to Amendment.
We set out here the motion carried at the Unite Policy Conference.
Trade Union & Employment Rights
Conference notes the great anticipation felt across the Trade Union and Labour movement with the publication in 2022 of the Labour Party’s Green Paper New Deal for Working People. The Green Paper held out the promise of major reform of trade union and workers’ rights, possibly resetting rights at work to the position prior to the neo-liberal attack on trade unions and their members of the past 40 years. However, the Conference believes that the Employment Rights Bill currently before Parliament promises to dash those hopes unless subject to significant amendment.
Conference welcomes Labour’s repeal of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 and the ballot thresholds, ballot paper wording prescriptions and appointment of picket supervisors introduced by the Trade Union Act 2016. However, we note with concern that under Labour’s Employment Rights Bill while notice periods for industrial action are reduced from fourteen to ten days, requirements for trade unions to give notice of ballots and to identify numbers of workers, workplace and categories remain in place.
Labour’s Employment Rights Bill does not address the fundamental power imbalance between workers and employers in UK law including the absence of a legal right to strike, the ban on the right to take sympathy action criticised by the ILO in its 2023 report on the P&O Ferries scandal, and the ban on so-called political strikes introduced by Tory governments in the 1980s. Conference deplores Labour’s failure to reinstate workplace ballots. Conference calls on the Executive to call for further legislation within the lifetime of the current Labour government to establish a legal right to strike and remove undemocratic bans on sympathy strikes.
Conference condemns those Labour MPs, donors and business interests who lobby Labour ministers and officials for the original proposals set out in New Deal for Working People to be limited and scaled back. We believe the current Employment Rights Bill must be a beginning, not the end of a process of rebuilding workers’ collective rights in Britain.
Conference calls for an Employment Rights #2 Bill to legislate for at least those areas of New Deal for Working People not currently included in the Employment Rights Bill.
Conference calls upon the Executive Council to work with friends and allies in Parliament to pursue amendments to the Bill in, but not limited to, the following areas:
Collective Bargaining: Conference notes that the proposed bargaining arrangements for adult social care and school support staff are not bargaining but essentially revamped pay review bodies with executive power held by the appropriate Secretary of State. Conference calls for bona fide collective bargaining to be established in these sectors. Further, Conference notes that there is no commitment in the Bill to extend statutory support for collective bargaining into other sectors of the economy. Conference calls for statutory support to be included in the Bill.
Industrial Action: Conference calls for the Bill to be amended to give workers a positive right to strike; to allow for secondary action; to allow for secure electronic balloting; to recognise that immediate walkouts should be permissible where the issue is “perishable” e.g. a safety issue or the dismissal of a union representative. Conference calls for a simplification of the process that was made so complex for the benefit of employers; ideally Conference calls for the restoration of the pre 1980 position.
Union Recognition: Conference calls for any statutory recognition procedures to be applicable only to unions with a Certificate of Independence as issued by the Certification Officer and not any union listed by the Certification Officer; unions merely listed may be under the direct or indirect control or influence or the employer.
Fire & Rehire: Conference believes that the provisions as drafted will not end the scourge of fire and rehire. Conference calls for the text of former Unite General Secretary, Tony Woodley’s Private Members’ Bill on this topic to be incorporated into the Government’s Bill together with provision for the most stringent penalties to be used against those employers that persist with this practice.
Conference welcomes and supports the work of the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom for campaigning on these issues and the Institute of Employment Rights for highlighting the deficiencies in the Bill and making suggestions for amendments that will benefit unions and their members.
By Adrian Weir
A government’s austerity policy is usually multi-faceted, to the extent that it will have a number of policies running simultaneously, in parallel with each other.
It’s clear and very publicly visible that the Starmer Government has the welfare budget in its sights, to make the vulnerable and needy among us suffer even more with its swinging cuts, presumably to pay for the massive Trumpian increase in arms expenditure.
Starmer may have suffered a setback by having to withdraw most of the Personal Independent Payment proposals in the face of an unlikely backbench revolt but of course the withdrawal is only tactical, on the promise of a review and we’ll be back in the struggle next autumn.
The Government has shown no sign that it is prepared to remove the two child benefit cap, which prevents parents from claiming tax credit or universal credit for more than two children. A Tory policy that the “Labour” Government seems very happy to continue with.
Many benefit claimants are of course in work and often have to claim because of poor wages that are impossible to live on especially with a family to raise as well. The welfare budget in many cases subsidies employers’ low pay.
It’s the poor wages aspect of austerity and the government collusion in poor pay during the past 40 years plus of neo-liberalism that has not attracted so much attention in the media and amongst public attention.
Almost the first Act of the Thatcher Government in 1980 was to attack trade unions’ rights to organise, rights to bargain collectively and rights to strike. This line has been continued through the Major Government, the “New” Labour years, the May and Johnson period right up to Starmer as Prime Minister.
In tandem with deindustrialisation and neo-liberal hegemony the legislative attack on the unions has been insidious. The negative legal environment, taken with these other factors, has seen the number of union members halve in the past 40 years.
More importantly, under both Tory and Labour, there has been a deliberate suppression of union led collective bargaining. At the start of the 1980s well over 80% of those at work had their wages and other terms and conditions negotiated by a union, even if they were not members of a union. The union negotiated wage became the norm across the industry.
Today, the number of workers covered by a union negotiated collective agreement has suffered a precipitous decline, it’s now around 20% of the workforce. As a consequence, as Wilkinson and Pickett have shown, the collapse of collective bargaining is causally related to the diminished share of GDP going to wages and salaries. Workers are indeed getting poorer.
Labour in opposition promised much in its 2021 Green Paper New Deal for Working People including statutory support for sector wide collective bargaining and the repeal of the laws that made it almost impossible for unions to organise lawful strikes.
Unfortunately, during the transition from Green Paper to Employment Rights Bill these crucial aspects, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike, that would have gone some way to restore trade union power at work have all but disappeared.
Join us on the fringe in Durham, be part of the call for an Employment Rights #2 Bill that would include the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike, essential parts of an anti-austerity strategy.
This article first appeared on the People’s Assembly website:
