LONDON: The Government published its Trade Unions Bill – a grossly unfair package of measures that will tip the balance of power in the workplace.
The proposals will make getting a much-needed pay rise, stopping job losses or negotiating better conditions at work much more difficult. They’ll make it harder for unions to do their day-to-day job of dealing with problems in the workplace before they escalate into disputes.
And they’ll stifle protests against cuts to public services, like closures of SureStart centres, libraries and care services.
The increased ballot thresholds made much of the headlines back in July and as you would expect, the TUC will be opposing the bill in its entirety.
We will also be highlighting with employers and their organisations shared concerns over a number of aspects of the bill, for instance:
The new powers of the Certification Officer to gather information on industrial action. We don’t think employers would want information about disputes published online or held as a permanent record, where competitors and customers can access it.
Levying of a charge on unions and employers associations to cover the running costs of the Certification Officer.
Removing the ban on the use of agency workers to replace strikers. We do not believe there is a strong demand from employers for this change, and we think that most employers’ priority in an industrial dispute is to resolve the dispute. It also goes against practices across Europe where many large agencies have signed voluntary joint statements recommending that agency workers should not be used to replace striking workers.
The Trade Union Bill keeps growing as the Government find more ways they can rebalance power away from the workforce. The rapidly increasing package of measures contained in the Bill seeks to reduce the capacity of unions to represent people at work and to undermine the basic right to strike.
The latest last-minute addition (on August 6) to the Bill is a move to make it easier for the Government to end union membership check-off arrangements in the public sector. This is the process by which employers deduct union subscriptions from wages directly – following the written agreement of workers that they want the employer to do so. It’s widely used in the public sector, but also in many large private sector employers.
This new announcement is part of an ongoing move to reduce check-off and other union organising mechanisms in the public sector.
A number of Government departments have changed check-off systems so far on an individual basis for their civil servants this year, and this new change (including legal provisions to end check-off in the Trade Union Bill) will make it much easier to do this wholesale across all public services.
