Skip to main content

Star Comment: The lifeline of the people

Trade unions are the biggest democratic and voluntary organisations in Britain. They have been so for the past 150 years. 

This includes times past when the Conservative Party opposed all women and many working men having the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

Although the Tories lost those battles, they have long waged an almost incessant struggle to resist and roll back those democratic rights that ensure trade unions can act effectively. Above all, Tory governments have taken every opportunity to restrict the fundamental right of workers collectively to withdraw their labour without penalty except the loss of pay.

So it should come as no surprise to see that messrs Cameron and Johnson are at it again.

Shaken by the continuing refusal of working people to lie down in front of the austerity and privatisation steamroller, demonstrated again so forcefully on July 10, it seems the Tories want to place yet another obstacle in the way of unions taking legal industrial action.

Already, workers’ mass organisations have to jump through numerous hoops to comply with some of the most repressive anti-union laws in the Western world in order to take action that doesn’t fall foul of statute or common law. 

Demanding that ballots should achieve a turnout of at least 50 per cent of the relevant workforce might seem a reasonable requirement. Indeed, unions work very hard to secure just such levels of participation.

But if this principle is so important, why don’t the Tories propose changing the law to allow workplace balloting? At a stroke, that would all but guarantee far higher turnouts than any postal system.

To ask the question is to answer it. Tories have never supported workers standing up for themselves against oppressive or exploitative bosses, especially when so many of the latter fund the Conservative Party by hook or by crook.

The Tories have never willingly recognised the legitimacy of industrial action, whatever the turnout or the size of the majority in favour.

However, with this latest threat they may be misjudging the shift in public mood that was evident on July 10 and on the national People’s Assembly demonstration shortly before.

Bashing Britain’s teachers, firefighters and other public servants is losing some of the public appeal it had in the past, whipped up by the tabloid papers and their more respectable media stable-mates.

What’s more, in raising the principle of democracy for their own narrow and hypocritical purposes, the Tories are presenting the Labour opposition with a series of open goals.

Why not propose, for example, that all corporate donations to political parties be subject to a ballot of the workforce which creates the profit from whence the money comes?

How about challenging this government to hold a referendum on public ownership of the railways or the gas, electricity and water industries?

And why doesn’t the Labour leadership take the battle over workers’ collective rights to the Tories by proposing an updated Trade Union Freedom Bill to enshrine basic collective rights in law? Labour should bear in mind that there are more than seven million trade unionists in Britain — and almost all of them will have a vote at next May’s general election.

As for the trade union movement’s response to this latest threat, lessons need to be learnt from the 1980s when most of the anti-union laws were imposed.
The choice now is the same as then — mass united defiance or divided demoralising defeat.

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 13,288
We need:£ 4,712
3 Days remaining
Donate today