The latest Tory anti-union law – the Minimum Services Levels Act – coming on top of the Public Order and the Retained EU Law Acts, means that the UK has the most draconian anti-trade union laws of any of the main capitalist countries. The MSL Act takes union legislation back over a hundred and twenty years to the Taff Vale case, which for the first time made unions liable to being sued for industrial action by their members.
The new law effectively makes it illegal for some workers to go on strike.If an industry or sector is deemed by the government to be an ‘essential’ service, and eight have been so far, then employers in that sector can insist that during a ‘legal’ strike there will be a minimum requirement for a tenth of the workforce to remain at work. It will be the bosses who decide who can and cannot strike, and they will no doubt ‘select’ trade union activists, to undermine the strike.
Any failure to abide by the management’s selection will leave workers open to being sacked. Trade unions that refuse to instruct members to cross their own picket lines, under the terms of a ‘minimum service’ level, will be open to being sued by employers or having funds sequestered.
The Act is a direct political attack on the ability of trade unions to defend the interests of members, at a time when living standards are under attack on a scale not seen for generations. It is legislation prompted solely by the needs of British capitalism to drive down living standards and to pauperise British workers in the interests of profit.
The net result is legislation far more restrictive than anywhere else in the main countries of capitalism, and it is hardly a surprise that the leaders of the trade union movement are horrified to see it sail through Parliament.
Labour should repeal all anti-union legislation
The TUC Congress last week passed an important composite motion opposing the Act and calling action to oppose it, “up to and including defiance” of the law. Socialists will not oppose attempts to derail this law through the courts, and it goes without saying that affiliated unions and Labour Party members should demand, unconditionally, that an incoming Labour government immediately repeals this legislation and other anti-union laws.
But the most important means of nullifying the effects of the Act are in the hands of the trade union leaders themselves. The threat against the finances of the trade unions is an attempt to intimidate the general secretaries and the top echelons of the trade union movement. It is an unfortunate fact that too many top officers and officials see the unions through the lens of their apparatus and not through the members who make up the unions.
The generous salaries and lifestyles of top union officials, will always tend to insulate them from the day-to-day problems – and therefore the outlook – of members, but they still depend ultimately on the financial stability of the unions. That sometimes leads them to forget that a union is essentially its members, not its administrative machinery. Some union heads, when push comes to shove, may, indeed, be intimidated by legal threats of sequestration and if that were to happen, then opposition to the legislation will be seriously undermined.
Threats to sequester trade union funds
On the other hand, the more the trade union movement, starting at the top, is prepared to show that it will take militant and coordinated action against the operation of this law, the less likely it will be that trade unions will have their funds sequestered or their members sacked. Weakness will invite aggression but strength will induce the Tories to retreat.
There are many examples in modern British history where anti-trade union legislation has been overridden by the actions of trade union members. The most celebrated example was that of the ‘Pentonville Five’ in July 1972. Five dockers’ leaders in East London were named in a court action as having defied legal restrictions on picketing and they were arrested and taken to Pentonville Prison.
Within hours, there were walk-outs of workers all over London. Buses were abandoned in the street by drivers – in the same union as the dockers – and factory workers began to come out. The protest strike quickly spread outside London and the TUC leadership – trailing behind a massive spontaneous movement – called for a national strike on July 31. Meanwhile, a permanent 24-hour picket of hundreds of workers stopped all the traffic around Pentonville Prison.
As the strike began to snowball, affecting docks, factories, transport, mines and millions of workers, the government got themselves off the hook by digging up the ‘Official Solicitor’ – a government legal officer no-one had ever heard of before. He claimed to represent anyone incarcerated and unable to represent themselves and, on his appeal, the five dockers – thereafter known as the Pentonville Five – were released after only a week in jail.
Even Len Murray defied Thatcher’s anti-union laws
Ten years later, almost to the day, and again under a Tory government, there was growing militancy among NHS workers and a wave of sympathy for them among non-NHS trade unions. Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, was anything but a union ‘firebrand’, but even he was obliged by the pressure of the trade union rank and file to call for strike action in support of NHS workers, even though under the terms of the Tories’ anti-union ‘Employment’ laws, it was ‘illegal’.
The editorial of that great Establishment newspaper, The Times (not then a Murdoch paper) bleated helplessly about the TUC’s defiance of Thatcher’s anti-union laws. “Len Murray’s action” it said, “in writing to General Secretaries to encourage their members outside the National Health Service to take sympathetic action with those employed inside is quite unprecedented. It is most clearly a breach of the [Employment Secretary, James] Prior Act on secondary picketing…here is one of its (the government’s) very own laws being held up to ridicule on every secondary picket line” (The Times, June 28)
No workers’ rights – even the right to vote – were freely given
The defiance that the trade union movement showed when it was necessary in the past, including a willingness to defy the law, is a pointer to what must be done in the future. None of the rights of the trade union movement – and in fact, no democratic rights whatsoever – were given gratis to working people. They all had to be fought for by our forebears, and in the modern era, in the midst of a crushing crisis of capitalism, those rights will need to be fought for, and won, over and over again.
The composite passed at TUC conference last week is a beginning. The key paragraph states that “Congress agrees that we have no choice but to build mass opposition to the MSLs laws, up to and including a strategy of non-compliance and non-cooperation to make them unworkable, including industrial action”.
The organisation of a national demonstration, also mentioned in the composite, must not be seen as an end in itself – ‘letting off steam’ – but the culmination of a massive exercise in the education and mobilisation of trade union members. There needs to be a campaign of education and preparation going down to every level of trade union organisation, so trade union members are aware in every depot, shop, factory, office, school, hospital and college around the country.
Trade unions are primarily the membership, not the apparatus
It is only that basis that the trade union movement can feel secure in its strength and organisation. It would be folly to disregard the importance to members of union offices, full-time officials and the apparatus of the unions, but a campaign among the union rank and file would be a timely reminder that the unions are primarily based on the membership, not the apparatus that sits above them.
It is to the members that the union leaders must turn, in the event that there are threats to sequester the members’ funds or cripple the members’ union apparatus. As the TUC resolution makes clear, deployment of the Act in any form must lead immediately to strike actions across all sectors.
On at least two occasions since the Tories were elected in 2010, the TUC has been able to organise huge demonstrations: the first against anti-union legislation and the second in defence of the NHS. The leadership of the TUC has only to lift its little finger and workers respond in their millions.
The TUC is an organisation of nearly six million members, across nearly fifty unions. There is no question that the workers in those unions have a huge social and industrial weight. Without their participation and cooperation, society would grind to a halt, which is something that cannot be said for MPs, bankers and hedge-fund managers.
Militant and coordinated industrial action could crush the MSL Act and stop it dead in its tracks. But the decisive factor in whether or not it is deployed and implemented is that of leadership. No-one else will do it for them: the trade union and TUC tops have a responsibility to provide it.
