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.

Previously the role of putting them down was done by strike-breakers, lurid media denunciations  and the police.   Now it’s done by the law, an institution of course that is crafted to serve the interests of the dominant groups in society, and since both the Tories and New Labour (two sides of very largely the same coin) combine in playing to the interests of the rich and powerful – the bankers, the top corporate executives, the media tycoons, and the upper echelons of ‘Middle England’ – the working class and their union representatives don’t get a look in.

That’s why the Unite spat with BA over the airline imposing job cuts to deal with the recession caused by the banks, and then the RMT fight with Network Rail over railway safety and again over job cuts under the specious cover of 21% ‘efficiency savings’, were both snuffed out by the deliberately almost impossibly difficult and complex compliance requirements laid down by Thatcherite law which New Labour has conspicuouly failed to modify.   And notoriously again, in both cases the leadership in all three parties were in unison in condemning the unions’ action.

Nobody wants strikes, least of all trade union members since they suffer the hardship of loss of pay and the threat of job loss or other sanctions.   Yet even the Guardian said that striking was not “the right way of ensuring that staff grievances are properly addressed”.   So what is the right way if top management is implacable, gung-ho, impervious to argument and serious negotiation?   The real sin of trade unions in today’s society is that they undermine the management prerogative and potentially threaten management’s sole right to rule.   And as long as all three political parties are united in this unjust, discriminatory and untenable position of suppressing workers’ rights to protest their interests – and the public interest – whether by force or by arcane legalities, Britain will remain a deeply unjust and profoundly unequal society.   Yet another reason for a fundamental re-alignment of the Left in the aftermath of this election.

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:

• Walsh, BA’ chief executive, unilaterally decided last year to cut 1,000 cabin crew and bring in a whole new fleet on inferior pay and conditions.   The 12,000 BA cabin crew who are members of Unite then balloted and voted overwhelmingly for strike action in December, only to be called off because of technical infringements of procedure.   They balloted again in February, with 80% again voting to strike on a 79% turnout.
• Nevertheless Unite, accepting that some restructuring had to take place in the light of the collapse of business in the credit crunch, proposed alternative means of of achieving the same level of cost savings (£62.5m) while repealing the majority of staff cuts.
• BA rejected these proposals, but then tabled an offer of a partial repeal of the staffing cuts and a 3-year pay deal.   Derek Simpson told Unite’s cabin crew members that this offer would go to consultative ballot while setting strike dates for the second half of March.   Observers have indicated that cabin crew were keen to resolve the dispute and that the BA deal might well have got sufficient support.
• However, the poll never happened because an hour after Unite announced the ballot, Walsh told the BBC he had withdrawn the offer because Unite had announced strike dates.   Tony Woodley then vigorously tried to get Walsh to reinstate the offer in exchange for suspending the strikes.   BA refused.
• Finally, 2 days ago, BA tabled a worse offer: pay increases over 4 years linked to inflation but with lower limits.

It is absolutely clear from this factual course of events that the reason the strike has gone ahead is that Walsh precipitately withdrew his first offer which would almost certainly have been accepted, and then obstinately reused to reinstate it.   The facts speak for themselves.

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.

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.

At the Lindsey oil refinery the success of the unions in getting reinstated not only the original 51 workers made redundant, but also all the 647 who came out in support of them, demonstrates several crucial lessons. One is that even in a deep recession and even in a highly contractualised and fragmented industry, the employers don’t necessarily have the whiphand if a well-organised workforce takes determined action in mutual support of dismissed workers. Another is that such action can succeed also in the face of EU Directives where these are widely perceived as partisan and anti-union. The Lindsey walk-out was portrayed, wrongly and perhaps deliberately so, as anti-foreigner; rather it was aimed at stopping the exploitation of ECJ judgements (Laval and other cases) by employers to lower the terms and conditions of all workers in the industry, British and migrant equally, which is why (crucially) hundreds of Polish workers joined the strike.
A third vital lesson is that the Thatcherite anti-trade union suite of laws which New Labour maintained almost intact is now to a large degree on ice. All of the walk-outs at Lindsey and at many other power stations and refineries were illegal, but no employer even hinted at using the law to curb the strikes. The implications of that will be writ large in future months and years. But there is one other lesson too which is highly significant: the way to negate anti-democratic and discriminatory legislation is not to await change wrought by a feeble and even hostile Labour Party, but to take direct action in the workplace in defence of basic rights. If they had waited for solidarity action, banned by Thatcher’s laws, to be repealed, they would still be waiting. As it is, it is now effectively suspended.
Nor are these seismic movements in the industrial landscape confined to tightly organised sectors like energy and rail. Cases are multiplying around the country where action against lockouts and closures has saved jobs or secured better pay-offs. If politically Labour remains content with what Blair proclaimed to be “the most restrictive union laws in the western world”, and if industrially workers are able to sidestep such laws through their own organised resistance outside the political process, workers and unions will soon be asking what exactly the Labour Party is for.