Michael Meacher MP

Judging by the media and the politicians, you’d never know that the trade unions existed, even though they embrace 7 million members and are by far the largest voluntary organisations in Britain.   Yet they’re treated like an unwelcome elderly relative, best seen and not heard, and largely ignored till they begin to demand that their due rights be respected.   Then all hell breaks loose in order to force them back in their box so that life can continue normally again as though they weren’t there. (more…)

With the Tory party poll lead slipping, it is only to be expected that a right-wing press (Telegraph, Mail, Sun, Express) are avid to portray the BA strike as ‘a return to the 1970s’.   It is nothing of the kind as the following facts show: (more…)

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.

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Just when it seemed that workforces across the country might be accepting the privations of the slump, a determination to protect jobs and pay has been gathering strength with marked success in several sectors. It’s true that where companies have been struggling for survival, as in the case of BA, management have imposed conditions on pay or pensions or productivity which would never have been tolerated a year or more ago, but which have now been enforced crudely by fear of loss of job. The request to the BA workforce to work for a month without pay was only accepted for this reason, not because of any supposed new solidarity between employer and employees. The idea that the chief executive Willie Walsh’s ‘sacrifice’ of one month of his £743,000 salary inspired some of his staff on £200 a week to do the same is the stuff of CBI dreams. It wholly misses the point of the far more significant developments in industrial relations that have been taking place elsewhere and tell a very different story.

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