UNDERSTANDABLY, the TUC and individual trade unions have reacted strongly against the Conservative government's Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill.
Introducing the legislation on Monday, Business Secretary Grant Schapps claimed that it is motivated by a desire to protect the health and safety of the public during industrial disputes.
The Bill aims to undermine strikes in any transport services that carry people for work, health or education purposes, or that threaten to damage the economy, the environment or national security.
In short, it could be used to outlaw almost any strike by transport workers.
Employers and trade unions would be compelled by law to operate minimum service levels during an industrial dispute, these having been agreed between them, or determined by arbitration or imposed by the Secretary of State.
Employees would be served a “work notice” obliging them to break a strike on pain of dismissal.
Thus a key provision of the 1992 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act and preceding legislation — protection against unfair dismissal during the first 12 weeks of a lawful strike — would be consigned to the scrap heap.
Employees served with a work notice, whether in a union or not, would face a stark choice from the first day of action: scab or be sacked.
Unions in breach of the proposed law would lose any protection against civil action for damages by employers.
As the Communist Party commented last Sunday, the day before Schapps’s announcement, this amounts to a “slaves charter,” punishing unions and — at a stroke — removing the few remaining protections against dismissal for workers who choose to withdraw their labour.
Nor should the scope of the Bill be underestimated. Although Schapps referred repeatedly to its application to “essential public services,” the draft legislation makes no distinction between transport services in the public, private or voluntary sectors.
The Secretary of State will decide which transport services will be covered by minimum service provisions.
Government statements indicate that these will include not only rail, bus and emergency services but also Border Control, the Environment Agency, oil and gas supplies, utilities, food distribution and nuclear decommissioning.
More seriously still, there is every likelihood that the Bill — should it become law — will be followed by even more drastic curtailments of trade union, democratic and human rights for workers and trade unions.
We now know that our multimillionaire Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and millionaire Business Secretary Schapps were seriously thinking of banning trade union membership altogether in “essential services.”
Such a monstrous extension of the type of ban imposed on the GCHQ spy centre in Cheltenham in 1984 was only ruled out when Civil Service officials cited the European Convention on Human Rights.
After 13 years of campaigning led by the late Mike Grindley, the GCHQ ban was removed by a newly elected Labour government.
We cannot allow the new Bill to pave the way to the attempted destruction of trade unionism in Britain.
The TUC has called striking and balloting unions together to discuss responses to the threat, which will need to go beyond challenges in the courts. The Labour Party leadership is pledged to repeal any new anti-union legislation.
But lessons should also be learned from the victorious “kill the bill” campaign against the 1971 Industrial Relations Act. Unity, militancy and strategy rendered the law unworkable even before it was laid to rest by an incoming Labour government just three years later.
