This comes from the Conservative manifesto:
We will protect you from disruptive and undemocratic strike action
Strikes should only ever be the result of a clear, positive decision based on a ballot in which at least half the workforce has voted. This turnout threshold will be an important and fair step to rebalance the interests of employers, employees, the public and the rights of trade unions.
We will, in addition, tackle the disproportionate impact of strikes in essential public services by introducing a tougher threshold in health, education, fire and transport. Industrial action in these essential services would require the support of at least 40 per cent of all those entitled to take part in strike ballots — as well as a majority of those who actually turn out to vote.
We will also repeal nonsensical restrictions banning employers from hiring agency staff to provide essential cover during strikes; and ensure strikes cannot be called on the basis of ballots conducted years before.
We will tackle intimidation of non-striking workers; legislate to ensure trade unions use a transparent opt-in process for union subscriptions; tighten the rules around taxpayer-funded paid ‘facility time' for union representatives; and reform the role of the Certification Officer.
Let's be clear, I work with trade unions: I lay my cards face up on the table. I am proud to do so. I do so by choice. That choice is motivated by the fact that I believe that unions are essential for three reasons. The first is to ensure fair pay and conditions. Many of the things that people take for granted now, from sick pay to holiday pay to employment rights inly happened because of trade unions.
Secondly, collective bargaining is essential if working people are to stand up to employers who can otherwise use their relative power to suppress wages on an individual basis. Unions are, therefore, essential for the improvement of the incomes of wage earners and one reason why we have growing inequality in the UK is the loss of union representation.
Third, unions are economically efficient. They reduce employer negotiating time. They reduce the number of disputes by resolving vast numbers of them by their interventions. And they reduce the inefficiency that results from the uncertainty of individual negotiations and resulting grievances.
I'm not suggesting a panacea: I am saying that the practice of unions works for employees, but also for employers.
This though is not enough for the Conservatives. As Warren Buffett once noted "There is class war, and it is my class waging it", and that is exactly what is happening in this manifesto. A 50% voter rate is higher than that in the vast majority of elections for public office in the UK. Even MPs have been elected by lower proportions of the electorate turning out. And there is a clear threat to ensure unions cannot organise or collect subs in the last paragraph.
This is class warfare and it will harm the UK by reducing wages, increasing inequality, denying representation to people who need it and reducing efficiency in the workplace.
No logic can support this policy. Dogma based on class hatred can.
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Well said! If anyone whose lived through the past five years of TORY/lib dem government doubted this in any way (and this with the claimed (?) countervailing force of the Lib Dems) then many of the “commitments” in this manifesto blow that right out of the water. Furthermore, as with the proposed 21st century version of right to buy (more correctly called the right of the Tory party to steal and redistribute assets to attempt to buy votes), they are back to the 19th century practice of actively promoting suspicion, hatred and infighting between and within the working and middle classes such that the upper, or so called “governing” class to go about their business of getting rich with the minimum of regulation and democratic oversight.
As has been noted on your blog on numerous occasions over the past few years, those of us old enough to have lived through the Thatcher years thought that brand of Tory was bad. But this lot make most of Thatcher’s people (with the exception of people like Tebitt) look like they were centre left politicians. Be afraid, very afraid, if we end up with another Tory led coalition.
I will be very afraid
Ivan, what is so deeply shocking is that the systematic victimisation of some of the poorest and vulnerable people in our society (bedroom tax, benefit sanctions, verbal defamation) has not really dented the Tory vote-it is this callousing of the public sensibility as part of a conscious policy that is profoundly disturbing-this is the first time in my life (I’m 55) that I feel I can talk about the ‘stench of Fascism’ without the sense that Godwin’s Law has been brought into play.
Actually, I’m not so sure you are right about Thatcher -when one looks back at news clips of that period it sounds just as bad as today with Thatcher herself bordering on the psychotic. The ‘sickness’ was FULLY present then:
“Margaret Thatcher and her chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe were behind a politically toxic plan in 1982 to dismantle the welfare state, newly released Downing Street documents show. She later attempted to distance herself from the plans after what was described as a “riot” in her cabinet.
“The proposals considered by her cabinet included compulsory charges for schooling and a massive scaling back of other public services. “This would of course mean the end of the National Health Service,” declared a confidential cabinet memorandum by the Central Policy Review Staff in September 1982, released by the National Archives on Friday under the 30-year rule.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/dec/28/margaret-thatcher-role-plan-to-dismantle-welfare-state-revealed
Thanks for reminding me of this, Simon. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time, which was the “image” of the Tories I was referring to. But it’s pretty clear that the spawn of Thatcher who now populate the Tory party set out to finish the job that her and Howe didn’t manage, and will continue with that project if they form another government after the election.
It is totally disengenuous to equate a vote to strike, which alters the workers normal status quo, with a vote to elect an MP, which is usually a race to be first past the post.
A vote to strike or not which has a total poll of less than 50% by implication makes it clear the majority are happy with the status quo, which is to continue as before.
The unions are shabby on democracy and you have just reinforced it.
There are no more democratic organisations than unions
Large companies should take note too
You are just wrong
Much as one might agree with much of your criticisms of this proposal, this response does not address the specific issue – to compare a simple majority of yes/no whether to strike or not with any form of election (other than a two-horse race) is “just wrong”. There – it’s so simple isn’t it, just to say one is wrong rather than present an argument explaining why?
Strikes in the public sector, which are usually for what are monopoly activities, cause immense disruption on the rest of society, and represent a a very different activity to strikes in the private sector where competition of employment and of what is produced makes such actions a reasonable form of negotiation. Whilst the target of such strikes may seem to the government and current policies, the real target are the customers and the paymasters, the public!
I also question whether unions are democratic; having attended a number of major public sector union conferences, I have seen how policies and actions can be dominated by a vocal and forceful activist few, often in support of wage increases that can only be funded by the government, and therefore by the rest of the population as taxpayers, effectively demanding a greater share of the country’s GDP. I was continually amazed to see how much time an organisation that is socialist in nature spent on demanding ever higher earnings for their own members, at the expense of . . . the rest of society, and memebers of other unions.
So those who work for the state, and who have been denied pay rises for many years, should now be denied the right to ask for a pay rise
Shall we name this for what it is? Stalinism, I suggest
Hugh
These days, the Government rules governing strike action are far too rigorous to deliver the democratic deficit you describe.
Your comment is completely incorrect. If members of a union don’t vote, for whatever reason, it does not mean they are happy with the status quo, it means they haven’t expressed an opinion one way or another, and should therefore, if democracy means anything, accept the result of the ballot, whatever that result is.
As a sometime union rep, I know that unions try as hard as they can to get their members to vote, not just on strike ballots, but on election of people to official posts withinn those unions. This government however, has done everything it can to restrict the activites of unions within workplaces (eg reduction of facilities time for union activities), one of these activities being to get round and urge people to vote.
So for them to accuse unions of not being democratic enough is a lie, pure and simple. This government, and its supporters such as yourself Hugh, are the people who are shabby on democracy. You and they are not only dishonest, but hypocritical to the nth degree.
Sorry Hugh your comments are almost too ridiculous for words.
How does Germany cope with its unions?
If unions are shabby on democracy then large and multi-national corporations seem to be run by latter day Pharaohs to whom democracy is a completely alien concept!
Apart from the confusion in your statement (“race”? “alters”? “normal status quo?!”), on that basis one could argue, with equal confusion, that a parliamentary or council election with a less than 50% turnout implies that the majority don’t want an MP or councillor at all. In truth, the majority or whatever proportion who may not vote in a given union election are by real implication content at this point to accept the decision of those that do vote – even if they think that it’s an utterly inadequate electoral choice. They didn’t vote “status quo”, and they didn’t vote “no action – I’m as happy as Larry”. And they then act in accordance. You’ve never worked in a unionized workplace, have you?
And for a Tory to bring up the subject of “shabby democracy” in a public place is downright outrageous. Fixed-term parliament, anyone? Going very cheap, ask the Lib-Dems. That’s tantamount to a dictatorship of the monied in my book.
It is a valid position. Indeed, as parliament affects each and every person the barrier must be higher for it than a mere union.
Hugh, I’m not sure I follow your reasoning but thinking about the 40% rule, the last government that got a mandate like that was Baldwin’s Tories in 1931 which was the only time it’s ever happened since 1918 and in that time governments that didn’t have the kind of mandate they now want for strikes have got involved in wars or armed conflict in Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Afghanistan (twice), Ireland (at least twice), Somaliland, Iraq (four times), Palestine, the Second World War, India, Greece, Indochina, Malaya, Korea, Egypt, Kenya, Oman (twice), Cyprus, Indonesia and Malaysia, Yemen, the Falklands, Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Libya and now Syria.
So I’m pretty sure that if governments can do that without 40 % of the eligible voters voting for them, a group of cleaners on zero hours contracts and minimum wage should able to organise a strike if they have a majority of votes in favour!
As ever, there will always be someone prepared to defend the indefensible. We can elect government with 30% of the vote, but unions have to have up to 50%.
Did that mean that, in the last election, the majority of the electorate were happy with Labour then?
The unions are compelled by law to be democratic.
So last general election we can, according to you, safely assume that the 40% or so who did not vote were satisfied with the previous labour administration?
It is a pity that labour were so up their own backsides that they did not discuss coalition with the libdems….still, since they have already stated they will not do so with the snp either, we can look forward to another 5-years of the books not only failing to balance, but the poor paying the rich again, as it always will be with a con-servative government.
As well as class hatred and warfare, it’s hypocrisy on the grandest of scales when this sort of tripe could not conceivably pass the proposed tests applicable to unions if applied to the coming election.
With reference to a blog of months ago, if this isn’t an issue that should force any thinking voter to hold their noses and use their vote to make sure these phenominally self-entitled and arrogant people get nowhere near government, I don’t know what is.
This is a joke – surely?
The Tories talk as if we are still in the 1970’s!!!
John Healy has desribed parts of their manifesto as almost like a tribute to Thatcher and I think he is right. It’s so backward looking its not true.
There is a clear relationship between the weakening of unions and the depression and long term flat-lining of wages.
German union involvement has always been on a higher level with the management of industry (so-called ‘Mitbesstimung’) has that harmed their industry and exports- I think not.
Only here and in the US do we allow ourselves to be suckered by myths surrounding the value of unions.
Its bankers, speculators and the financial sector that the government need to regulate. And if less than 50% of people vote in each and every constituency in the coming general election the result will not be valid. This is to ensure that a government can only have legal standing if such a percentage is attained.
How many MPs are elected to their seat with over 50% of the votes of those who voted, let alone 50% of those eligible to vote? Surely if it is good enough for an MP to be elected for 5 years then the same should apply to union voting. If the Tories want to change the rules for unions, what about company boards?
If they want to make unions more democratic then they should remove the voting system for MPs which allows a person to be elected with most of the voters voting against them. Why not try a preferential system whereby you list your candidates in numerical order, with the person elected requiring to obtain 50% of votes plus one to get elected. Works in other Westminister democracies, why not try it for the mother of parliaments. And while they are about it, how about an upper house that is elected by the voters?
Hank and Richard,
I’ve only just managed to find this excellent piece from the admirable “Another Angry Voice” Facebook site, which sets out the true iniquity of the Tory proposals. Worth a read.
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/tory-trade-union-turnout-boris.html