Trade Union Bill

Michael Meacher Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

This is a Bill of naked discrimination against the trade unions, designed to cut the funding of the Labour party severely and, thus, to entrench the Tory party in power, as well as to make it almost impossible to strike in certain industrial sectors. However, it is worth quoting the stated purposes of the Bill, which the Government pretend are their motives. The first is to

“pursue our ambition to become the most prosperous major economy in the world by 2030”.

That is beyond satire. The truth is that after seven years of austerity following the great crash wages are still 6% below pre-crash levels, productivity is flat, the FTSE 100 companies are not investing and household debt is now tipping £2 trillion. The idea that after this Bill we will be overtaking Germany and the United States in the next 15 years is ludicrous.

The Government’s second “reason” for this Bill is to

“ensure hardworking people are not disrupted by little-supported strike action”.

The best answer to that was that given by The Times commentator, Philip Collins, on the day the Bill was presented, on 15 July. He said:

“Strike action, fox hunting, the BBC, Europe, migrant benefits. The Tory ability to identify things that are not problems, then attack them.”

The truth is that the number of days lost to strike action now is less than one tenth of what it was in the 1980s. Of far greater importance to the state of the economy is the chronic underinvestment in skills. This Bill, while obnoxious, is utterly irrelevant to the key problems of this country. The tube workers aside, only teachers and firefighters have caused any real national concern since 2010, and even they normally did so only one day at a time. Even the resistance of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers to plans for keeping the underground open all night are not that unreasonable. Night shifts are unsociable, unhealthy and potentially dangerous as they lead to over-tiredness. But the central point here is not acknowledged in the Bill. The Government seem to believe that whenever a strike occurs, it is always the fault of the workers irrespective of what the employer has done.

It is true that most employers are probably decent and reasonable, but there are a distinct minority of them who are intransigent and who behave thoroughly unreasonably and badly. To penalise and intimidate workers in such cases, when it is the employer who has overwhelmingly caused the breakdown in industrial relations, is wholly unfair and wrong. The last thing that the workers want to do is to go on strike, but when they have genuine, reasonable and pressing demands over such essential issues such as job losses, safety problems and pay, and those demands are swept to one side, as they often are, with little or no negotiation, they have no alternative but to take industrial action. To blame and penalise them and not bad management, as the Tory party and its pals in the media automatically do, is a total charade. The conditions for industrial action are prohibitive. The net effect of all these measures is to make it impossible to strike.