Resisting the latest anti-strike laws
Introduction to Unite London Digital & Tech branch meeting, 14/3/2024
Ian Allinson
Transcribed by Zoom

Thanks very much. Great to be here. It's been while since I've been at one of your branch meetings. It's good to see some familiar names and faces and some new ones as well as always. Always a good always a good mix.

So this is briefly what I'm gonna try and cover. So I'm gonna talk about the minimum service levels. But I want to put them in the context of the wider anti-strike and anti union legislation we've got and then talk a bit about what we can do about it. Towards the end. I do know some of you, but not all of you. So just to introduce myself. I've been a Manchester based workplace activist for an embarrassingly long time.

I've worked most of the life in in IT where I led a number of strikes, including the First National when we had in the industry and I did 10 years on the exact council of what was Amicus, and then became, you know, part way through that period. And I stood General Secretary, didn't win, obviously and I'm currently in involved in Manchester Trades Council, where I organize strikes solidarity. So that's been quite busy for the last couple of years. organizing rallies and protests and picking line visits. And what have you? And now I'm still a united member. But I got a new job, my first public sector job. So I'm now active in in Unison working in public public transport. And I wrote a book a couple of years ago out of frustration. There wasn't one that was a good guide to organizing it. Work, which again, you can see on the slide. And I'm involved in tool like his work, which organized a great conference last year. And he's just starting doing one this year. 

So in terms of the context for the latest anti-strike legislation. I think it's worth being clear that we don't have, and we've never had a right to strike in Britain. But the most we've had is partial immunities for for unions from being sued for organizing industrial action. And those immunities have been steadily restricted by government since 1980. So more and more conditions applied to those immunities, and the main threat for unions isn't being sued, even though that's what the immunity say. They're about. The main threat is injunction. So if an employer can argue that they would be able to sue for damages, they can seek an injunction which is like an order to do or not do something the burden of proof, for those is incredibly low. So we're all used to for criminal things. It's beyond reasonable doubt, isn't it? For employment law? It's balanced of probabilities for employer to get an injunction. All I have to show is that there's a serious question to be tried, which is an incredibly low burden of burden of proof.

And of course the anti union legislation is incredibly complicated, so they can usually find something if they want to. That a judge would think, oh, yes, that needs a bit of a bit of trial. And if the Union breaches an injunction that they can be then taken back to court for contempt of court, which can lead to unlimited fines and unions being seized. So pretty heavy. penalties there, you know, if you compare it to our employers suffer. When they step out of line, which is, rarely more than a slap on the wrist. best. So that's the threat to unions. The threat to workers is dismissal.
But it's worth being clear that up until 1997 there was no automatically unfair route, you know, position, for if you were dismissed for taking part in a strike, so workers had to, for most of our history workers have just had to rely on sticking together to protect ourselves from employers, getting vengeful rather than imagining that the courts can do it, and of course the courts don't do a particularly good job of it. And even now.

So there's there was a change in the 1970s. Early 1970s. Some of the legislation directly threatened strikers. So you might have heard of the Pentonville dockers who got sent to jail for picketing, and then freed by the way by mass protests and strikes. But they were jailed for taking part in a unlawful picket. Since then governments haven't tried that approach at all. You know, ordinary workers getting penalized is too unpopular. So what they do is they threaten the union apparatus, the bank accounts, the buildings, and so on, and then they rely on union staff to police their own members and try and get us to to stay in line and I'll come back to that little bit more later on. So what are the problems we've got with the anti union legislation. I'm sure many of these will be familiar to many of you.

We're required to do postal fully postal ballots. So that's something that you know, I'm old enough to remember before that was the case when you could do balance in a workplace, and obviously it gets a lot more high turnout by doing that than you do. these days. If you're even older, you might remember the days when people just put the hand up and said, Yes, we're gonna do this, and that would go and do it straight away afterwards. One of the consequences of that is that it's incredibly slow, complicated process. The legislation puts in place, and they keep changing the law to make it even slower. So they've increased the notice period from action from one week to 2 in in recent years, and at the same time they've speeded up employees being able to do bad things. So they cut the consultation period for mass redundancies from a minimum of 90 days to minimum 45 days under the coalition government. So in many cases employers can lawfully fire us before we can lawfully strike about it, which is absolutely outrageous.

We're then restricted that we can only take lawful strike action over what's called a trade dispute with our own employer, and that's quite narrowly defined. So employers are free to divide themselves up, use subcontractors and agencies, and so on, and we're only allowed to strike over issues with our own our own employer.

So all of this meant that even before the latest legislation, lawful action was already impractical in some industries and construction, being probably the most notable of those. If you're on a site where there's massive subcontracting and bogus self employment where different trades are coming up on and off the site all the time. The idea that you could spend a couple of months running a a strike ballot is just a just a joke. So people have had to rely on unofficial and unlawful industrial action in some industries for for many years, because there wasn't the ability to to do things lawfully.

And then, of course, 2016 Act. We got these ballot thresholds, which have been a further attack on workers rights so unlike in local council elections, for example, where quite often turnouts are extremely low. If we don't get high enough turnout, it's almost as if everybody who doesn't vote is treated if they voted against taking action. And that's had a massive impact, particularly on some of the big bargaining units so unite we could think about health and local government, where workers overwhelmingly voted to strike last year. But in very few cases past the ballot thresholds, and were therefore unable to take lawful action. And one of the connected things with this business of the trade dispute with your own employer is the solidarity. Action is generally unlawful, as is action over what's deemed political issues, such as climate change or war, or whether our employer is you know, spending money with companies, complicity in genocide in Gaza. Or you know those kind of things that people might want to do. And it's interesting, isn't it? 

Whenever people do strike we're told we're being selfish, and we're only in it for ourselves. And yet workers are so selfish they actually had to pass a law to stop us doing it for each other and showing each other solidarity. You know, back in the 1980s that were engineering workers who went on strike to demand health workers got a pay rise because they said, much better we go on strike than you have to. Wouldn't it be good. If that was the case again today.

So very, very restrictive. And then we get the latest legislation, the minimum service levels. And I want to just explain how this legislation works. So it's set up to target 6 industries.

There's a bit of a pretence that in the media and from the government. This is about safety, but you can see it's a glance that it's not just about safety. You know, if you're a bus driver, whether you strike or not isn't really a safety issue.

And and in the industries where it is most safety critical like like the NHS health workers provides emergency cover, anyway. In the idea that government ministers care more about patient safety than doctors and nurses is pretty insulting, really. Isn't it? So? The way it works is that the ministers issue these regulations that define a minimum service level. So that's what what part of the service has to run on a strike day. Not all of them are published yet, and some of them are absolutely outrageous. So for non emergency ambulance crew, for example. So this is not emergency. This is just people doing patient transport. The minimum service level on a strike day is the same as on a non strike day.

And of course, we know there's no minimum service levels in most of these services when there aren't strikes, either, you know quite often the services in in health and rail, and so on fall well below. What we'd expect is a decent standard when there aren't strikes, and there's no no legislation to penalize employers for that.

So once the ministers have issued those Minimum Service Level regulations, employers can issue work notices and they name a particular workers. They say, you know James has got to work on this day, and Adam’s got to work on that day, and Adam's got to work on that day, or whatever and then if those workers strike anyway that strike action is unlawful, and they run the risks associated with that. And if the union doesn't make efforts to persuade its members who are named on on the work notices to work, the whole strike becomes unlawful. So they're trying to again use the use the unions to police the members to force us to scab on our own strikes and make them make them ineffective.

So that's the mechanism for it. But you'll notice of course the word ‘can’. Employers can issue work notices they're not obliged to, and so far no employers have, and that's quite important to note.

So what are the union responses? Being so, the TUC had a special congress back in December, which issued a statement which, in my opinion, faced both ways. It had some quite militant sounding stuff in there about refusing to tell members to cross picket lines, and which sounds great. But of course, unions, including Unite, tell members to cross picket lines week in and week out. You know, particularly in multi-employer workplaces. If there's one union on strike and the other one isn't that's a frequent occurrence which I, personally don't think it should be but the statements also talked about innovative actions which was code for will try and avoid doing things which might lead to an employer issuing a workout. And that's how a lot of this legislation works. You know. It's not often that unions do get taken to court for contempt of courts and have that fund seized, and so on, because we self police to comply with the legislation most of the time.

So there was a demonstration of 5,000 in Cheltenham which I thought was pretty appalling for a national demonstration. You know there, there are single branches of of Unite that have got more than 5,000 members and some workplaces. So you know. Pretty poor. Response! There's been a court case brought by PCS. Of a Border security staff and the the regulations for them have just been issued, I understand. And then we've had some pledges from some political leaders to say We we won't use work notices.

There's people hoping that Labour will repeal the latest answer union laws. But I think this is one of the reasons it's important to and put them in. The context of what came before is that, you know, even if they honour that pledge, and I don't think we would be wise to assume that will be the case, and there's still all the rest that need to go as well.

But the the biggest problem for me is that if you are talking about not telling members to cross picket lines. You have to prepare workers for that, don't you? You have to explain to them what the issues are, what the risks are, how they might try and mitigate those risks, how to organize around them, and so on, and and try and do the preparation, and I've certainly seen no sign of any union doing serious preparation. For for that kind of action, and that really worries me because that risks, sooner or later all the union leaders I talk to saying they do expect work notices to be issued before the General Election. Somebody is gonna get hit by one of these because the Tories want that to happen as a bit of an electoral electoral stunt. So if somebody does get hit we won't be prepared. And I think that's that's something we need to try and tackle as best we can and asleep had a great success. So London and North Eastern Railways threatened to issue a work notice. ASLEF responded by announcing loads more strike days, and LNER decided maybe that was a bad idea, after all, and didn't issue the work notice. That was a really important victory! But I would ask. how replicable is that, you know? Can every union pull that off?

ASLEF is quite a high density union with a lot of structural power, can everybody do that? And then some of the leaders of the RMT have also been talking about sick outs. So people just calling in sick. If this work notices issued, which, you know, isn't a terrible suggestion, but of course it ducks the question of what the union itself is gonna do if work notices are issued. Are they gonna try and persuade members to to scout their own strike or not.

So finally, I just want to talk a bit about what we can. We can do as as members and as activists. So I think the first and most important thing as always is to strengthen organization in every workplace. Whatever battles come our way. We're better prepared for them. If we've got lots of membership, lots of activity, lots of people involved. I think we need to build traditions of solidarity. If some workers are going to end up outside the law who are in industries not used to doing that, they're gonna need a lot of support. So the more we can get people used to backing each other up, even where action is unofficial or unlawful. That's good, I think. because the dynamic of how the legislation works of pressuring the union apparatus to then police members. That kind of rank and file networks are going to be critical for that type of support as well. So I think the most important ones are the ones that are local or for a particular industry. But I mentioned I'm involved in Troublemakers At Work, which is a kind of more general one attempting to link up some of those other networks as well, and of course we can organize meetings such as this to educate ourselves about the legislation and discuss how we can carry out the defines. The TUC talks about where we have employers who might be covered by, and sometimes it's ambiguous, my own employer. I'm not entirely clear whether or not they would see themselves as covered by a minimum service levels at the moment. But we should be writing to them and demanding commitments not to not to issue work. No, this is better to have that fight now than when we're in the middle of a dispute.

And then similar thing, stripe map is doing a coordinated attempt to target local authorities to make similar pledges. So they've got a tool where you can identify your local council leader and write to them demanding pledges. So that's a great thing to circulate to members and ask loads of people to fire those. Fire those messages in. And finally, you know, we can pressure our unions to actually implement the policy that voted for the TUC Congress. And that that means, you know, doing some serious preparation. I've put a couple of links on there. So there's a Troublemakers have done a model motion about the minimum service levels not to strike laws. Where? Which is worth a look, and I did an article just before New Year about this, which goes into a little bit more depth, if that's useful for any of you, but I'll I'll leave it there and let's have some discussion