Perhaps the most important intervention in the postal strike so far has been widely missed. It isn’t just that the Tories intend, if they win the election, to privatise the whole of Royal Mail. Even more significant is that they have let slip that they will change the requirements for the legitimation of strikes so as virtually to rule them out altogether. They have indicated that they will legislate to make strikes illegal unless they have secured in a prior ballot, not only a majority in favour from those voting, but a majority in favour out of all those called out on strike. In the case of the present postal dispute, the CWU received a 76% vote in favour of a strike from the 67% who voted. That means that the CWU actually received a majority (to be precise 50.5%) from all the members of the union, including those who did not vote. However, in addition to all the members of the union who total around 121,000, there are also some 20,000 postal workers who are not members of the CWU. If these were also to be included, then given that the CWU contains an extremely high proportion of the workforce who are unionised (i.e. 86%), it would be virtually impossible for any union under proposed Tory legislation to obtain a majority ever to hold a legal strike. This amounts to a rigging of the rules in the marketplace to de-legitimize strikes in any circumstances.

Basically this is an attempt to rule out strikes by administrative means, as though deep grievances in the workplace can be capped merely by fixing a formula. It is in fact a thinly veiled attempt to ban strikes without the legal odium of passing a law expressly prohibiting them. But it will have precisely the same effect as it did when strikes were indeed banned during the Second World War – it won’t work. No amount of legal oppressiveness or devious administrative rules are going to force people to work if they have been angered beyond endurance in the workplace. But what this episode does draw attention to is the Tories’ determination, not to try to resolve industrial disputes by negotiation, but to suppress them by dictat.
It need hardly be said as well that this proposal is grossly discriminate. If the Tories were to win the next election, it would probably be by obtaining between 40-44% of the vote, which would probably amount to about 25% of the electorate as a whole. They would not even get a majority of those voting, let alone a majority of those entitled to vote. By contrast, the CWU did get a (large) majority of those voting, it did also get a majority of those entitled to vote, and it nearly even got a majority beyond its own membership of the totality in the workplace. By that criterion no government since the war has had the authority to exercise a mandate. And there are other respects too in which the Tory proposal is flagrantly discriminatory. First, there is no justification in assuming that all non-voters are against the strike and then counting them as opposed. Second, even the most weighted of votes never demand a majority of more than two-thirds or, as an extreme, three-quarters, yet the CWU vote exceeded both these hurdles. And third, no vote of a representative organisation is ever expected to embrace within its ambit outsiders who were entitled to join the organisation but voluntarily decided not to do so. The Tories should think – the electorate certainly will.

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