Category: UK Employment Rights

By Adrian Weir, Campaign For Trade Union Freedom

We now have a Labour Government that has promised to legislate to improve trade union and workers’ rights within 100 days of taking office. The movement will therefore be looking forward to the publication of the Employment Rights Bill in October.

It’s clear that Labour will repeal the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023. Not only were the railway workers able to face down the employers when threatened with a work notice being issued under the terms of the Act but most serious commentators realised that the Act would have been unworkable, so much so that Labour was able to dismiss it as a “gimmick.”

Labour also says that no further action is necessary after the High Court struck down the previous government’s attempt to change the law that would have allowed employers to use agency labour as strike breakers when confronted with industrial action by their workforce.

It is understood that Labour will also repeal the Trade Union Act, 2016. This was the law that introduced, among other things, thresholds for ballots for industrial action, super thresholds in “important public services,” increased notice to be given to the employer of industrial action and the creation of “picket supervisors.”

In a partisan move, it also changed the way that unions’ political funds were collected from an “opt out” system to a more difficult to achieve “opt in” system. It is not clear that this provision will be included in the repeal of the 2016 Act.

The repeal of the 2023 and 2016 Act will go some way to meeting the objectives set out in Labour’s plan to make work pay – delivering a new deal for working people, that latest version of New Deal for Working People originally published in 2021.

Labour is seeking to promote workers’ voice at work; it believes that strong unions and collective bargaining are key to delivering a strong economy and raising wages and that collective bargaining is important in dealing with insecurity, inequality, discrimination and enforcement of rights.

The anti-union laws dating from the Thatcher and Major period of course aimed to do the opposite, to limit workers’ voice and most clearly to limit unions’ rights to organise, rights to bargain collectively and rights to strike.

This of course was an essential part of the neo-liberal project of restoring to the 1% that which they had lost in the years of social democratic advance and strong trade unions in the post war period. The 1970s were the most equal on record in terms of income distribution, all of which has been turned around in the 40 plus years of neo-liberalism.

The 1970s were also the high point in the coverage of collective bargaining in Britain. It has been shown that the decline in the coverage of union led collective bargaining is causally related to the decline in the wages and salaries share of national income.

It will be a measure of how far the newly minted Labour Government intends to break with neo-liberalism – for such a break will be needed to raise the general level of wages and salaries – by how far, it at all, it intends to repeal the Thatcher era laws. The last Labour Government declined to tackle this issue; in fact Tony Blair celebrated the fact that Britain had the most restrictive laws on trade unions rights.

Repeal will be necessary if, for example, there is to be a serious effort to stop a repetition of the fire and replace of workers seen at P&O Ferries in 2022. To have meaningfully damaged the employer, who was dispensing with the existing labour force, other groups of workers, dockers for example, would have to have been mobilised to take action, say by refusing to moor P&O Ferries’ ships. Workers at chandleries and food and drink suppliers, could have been mobilised to take solidarity action in support of the sacked seafarers – all such action would have been, and remains, unlawful.

More generally, repeal of the Thatcher era laws will be necessary if there is to be a restoration of union led collective bargaining. To have a meaningful right to collective bargaining there must be a corresponding meaningful right to strike.

Rights to organise, to bargain collectively and to strike are set out in any number of international statutes that the UK Government has ratified but have been universally ignored in the neo-liberal period.

The 2021 version of New Deal for Working People set out that UK industrial action law would comply with international obligations, which includes solidarity action. This commitment does not appear in the current version although it has not been repudiated by responsible Government ministers.

If the Government wants to reap the benefits that it acknowledges collective bargaining brings it will have to look beyond repeal of the 2023 and 2016 Acts and take a wider view of necessary and vital changes to industrial relations law in Britain.

These issues and more will be discussed on the fringe at this year’s TUC Congress in Brighton at the Institute of Employment Rights in partnership with the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom fringe on Sunday 8th September at 6:00 pm (or close of Congress) at Brighton i360, BN1 2LN and at the Sussex Morning Star Supporters’ Group on Tuesday 10th September at 2:30 pm in Wagner Hall, BN1 2RU.

See you there.

This blog was first published on Labour Outlook, September 2nd.

By Shelly Asquith, Health, Safety & Wellbeing Officer in the TUC Organisation, Skills and Services Department.

50 years ago today, one of the first new laws of a newly elected Labour government was the Health and Safety at Work Act.Half a century on, what is the legacy? And what do we need now as another Labour government takes office?
Ever since the Trades Union Congress was established, in 1868, we have fought to protect workers.
When, just over a century later, we saw health and safety at work regulation enshrined in law, it was a welcome move: A new agency that could prosecute employers who failed to keep work safe represented a serious deterrent, and one we would not have seen were it not for union pressure.
Since then, the number of fatal injuries at work has fallen by over 80 per cent, from 651 deaths in 1974 to 138 this year.
A foundation to build on, one might think.  Instead, over time, the main work safety regulators have been systematically de-funded and defanged.
So much so that you are now more likely to win the lottery than have a safety inspector visit your workplace. Fewer inspectors, inspections and actions against employers – especially so during the Covid crisis, that saw thousands of workers die following exposure at work. The austerity-hit HSE has had a 54 per cent cut in funding, and in local authorities the picture is even worse.
In turn, we are seeing a surge in occupational ill-health. While fewer workers die from injuries on the job, many suffer the effects of occupational cancers or work-related stress. In fact, an estimated 50,000 people in Britain lose their life to work causes every year. Despite all the rules and regulations, employers still cut corners, prioritising profit over people’s lives.
All the while, it has remained our unions that we rely on to keep work safe. As our formal protections are undermined and eroded, it’s not the law we turn to, but each other.
When the TUC undertook a study in the Covid pandemic, comparing workplaces with safety reps and those without, we found workplaces with union reps were 20 per cent more likely to have the right PPE, and 40 per cent more likely to have had a risk assessment shared with the workforce.
Trade union health and safety reps are the most effective guard against hazardous work, the only reliable regulation in the workplace. Much of the activities of safety reps goes on in the background, and it cannot be overstated the difference we can make, influencing risk management and representing colleagues.
Sometimes, too, we demonstrate that the right to withdraw our labour is our ultimate leverage, far beyond the words of an Act or the warnings of an unlikely inspection.
In the last year we have seen industrial action get the goods. Where management failed to recognise safety concerns raised by unions, we saw housing workers strike over asbestos exposure, on the railways a strike over long hours causing fatigue, and in one local authority, an indefinite walkout over access to sick pay.
In all these cases, the workers won.
The 1974 Act was not a magic wand, and the existing legislation does not go far enough. For example, unions are still seeking greater rights for reps, guaranteed access to workplaces where we have members, explicit protection from specific hazards like working in extreme heat, the recognition of work-related suicide.
The list goes on. The TUC will continue to make the case for more resources in workplace health and safety – strong unions, effective regulation, and justice for all those entitled to it.
What’s more, if the Act, in its 50th year, is going to be worth more than the paper it’s written on, then we need a regulator, an enforcer, that functions. We need a properly funded HSE and stronger rights for union safety reps, starting with repealing the anti-strike laws that limit our ability to act in the face of danger.
While governments and Ministers can be reshuffled or unseated overnight, an organised working class is far harder to replace or beat.
Legislation is important, but unions are vital. That’s why, to mark the 50th year of a law designed to improve our safety, we are focusing our efforts on engaging the frontline, not the frontbench: By finding, training and retaining hundreds of new union health and safety reps.
With an ageing profile of existing reps, we are especially looking for young union members to take on the role, so that they might play their part in keeping workers safe for the next 50 years.