A couple of weeks back Mick Lynch, the RMT leader who uses rail passengers as a battering ram for his members unreasonable pay demands, made a largely unreported speech calling for union power to be restored back to the 1970s and 1980s.
I don’t think anybody took him seriously. After all the UK in the Seventies was the sick man of Europe with bodies going unburied, rubbish on the streets and a miners’ strike so severe that we were all put on a three-day week.
Who would want that? The answer, I thought wrongly, was just dinosaurs like Lynch. I now learn from studying the Employment Rights Bill published yesterday by the government, that you can include Starmer and Rayner among the dinosaurs.
This Bill is a shocking document for anybody who thought business had been released from the shackles of union control thanks to 14 years of the Tories. All those chains are being put back again.
Incredibly, a fifth of the 149 pages of the bill is devoted to extending the power of union beasts. This is payback for the unions having handed over £10million to Labour last year.
Here’s a taste of what the new union rights will be;
+ Companies must start formally recognising a union if as few as 2% of staff join, with ballots no longer needing 40% of workers having to agree to collective bargaining. That will kill Amazon’s investment in our country stone dead.
+ Strike will require a simple majority in a ballot, ending a condition of 50% turnout. That means if only 12% voted and 7% voted strike then it would happen. Unions will be able to hold electronic votes for industrial action.
+ Rules enforcing minimum service levels during strikes in key public services will be repealed. So, you can’t force doctors and nurses to work to save your dear old mum. Shocking.
+ Union equality officers will gain the right to time off ‘’ promoting equality in the workplace ‘’ and bosses must give union reps office space. Sounds like a scene from the Fifties movie I’m Alright Jack starring Peter Sellers.
+ Finally the Conservatives in 2016 required union members to op in for political funds- pots raised to contribute to political parties (almost exclusively Labour). Under the bill all union members will pay into that fund automatically. That is scandalous and will send even more millions from working people, who may well vote in another way, towards Starmer. That must be wrong.
Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner
GB News
I guarantee that these changes will lead to more disputes, more unreasonable pay demands and strangely more collisions between union t*****s like Lynch and No.10.
I am sold I can remember Harold Wilson classing the union giants of their time Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon who were staging strikes almost every other day. Eventually even a Leftie like Wilson got tired of their industrial antics and told them; Get you tanks of my lawn.
Six decades later, and with the passing of the bill, we will be saying the same thing. Whoever becomes leader of the Tories I would urge them to announce that they will be repealing this bill when Labour is thrown out.
How Starmer can square handing such power to the unions with his demand for growth is quite beyond me.
I worked in a trade union dominated industry, the newspaper business for decades. It was a nightmare. Any tech change was resisted with all their might. That is what the country will return to.
Very sad for the ambitious youngster. It does guarantee one thing; This will be a one-term Labour government.
That’s the only thing that cheers me up.