The European Court of Human Rights may have a mandate to intervene against the Conservatives’ anti-strike proposals
The Tories’ Trade Union Bill is an extraordinary attack on the human rights of working people. Only Labour can stop it, but some in the party will fear a confrontation over workers’ rights. It’s vital we don’t let that fear get the better of us.
The Trade Union Bill will make strikes for public sector workers impossible unless 40 per cent of workers eligible to vote favour industrial action and the voter turnout reaches 50 per cent.
In addition, in the unlikely event of a strike, the plans would make it easier for employers to hire agency staff, making industrial action ineffective and making collective rights redundant.
It’s ironic that a Tory government that won only 37 per cent of the vote wishes to implement such a law.
If democracy in the United Kingdom was held to the same standards, no government would be elected. The Conservatives won the most recent election with 37 per cent of the vote and in 2010 won 36.1 per cent and managed to form government.
Yet the same percentages would not provide a mandate for public sector strikes. This intrinsically flaws the proposal.
As well as its hypocrisy, the proposed law will severely undermine human rights, specifically freedom of association. By limiting public sector strikes, the government will be preventing the universal right to freedom of association, a right closely linked to freedom of expression.
This will compromise the right of a group to take collective action to pursue the interests of its members.
The state is obligated to protect the right to strike and collective bargaining in order to allow for the protection of workers. The right to strike and collective bargaining maintain safe working conditions, fair wages and healthy working hours. These are things that benefit us all.
Labour should always be a broad church, but we should also continue in our tradition of fighting to preserve the protection of workers when they are at their most vulnerable.
Workers’ rights are human rights and this is just another proposal for legislation that is consistent with the Conservative’s anti-human rights agenda. In fact, it is very much linked to the Tories’ attack on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act.
The ECHR protects the rights of workers under freedom of association. In a case a few years ago involving the Turkish government’s ban on public sector strikes, the European Court of Human Rights used the ECHR to declare the law incompatible with Turkey’s human rights obligations.
The European Court of Human Rights may therefore have a mandate to intervene against the Conservatives’ anti-strike proposals. Aware of this, the Conservatives have developed what looks like a deliberate and calculated plan to assault workers’ rights and undermine the ECHR at the same time.
The Labour Party must not be afraid to challenge the Tories’ or appear to be seen too left-wing on the issue of human rights. Regardless of the election defeat or a future policy supporting aspiration, Labour must maintain its position to protect the fundamental human rights of workers in the United Kingdom.
Steven Male is a Campaigns Volunteer with the Labour Campaign for Human Rights
75 Responses to “Trade Union Bill: another calculated attack on workers’ rights”
gunnerbear
“As for flotsam, jetsam and the unemployable, why don`t you leave Bankers, city spivs and the Tory cabinet alone!” Top Notch! 🙂
gunnerbear
Then you’d turn it into an echo chamber like LL or ConHome.
gunnerbear
“If Gordon Brown made one big mistake, it was trusting the city and the banks at their word to regulate themselves. He admits that. The whole world now knows the big financial institutions cannot be trusted at their word.” Then Gordon was a total f**kwit, unfit to be CotE or PM if he believed the words coming from the City. We regulate Doctors, Nurses, water quality, rail workers, steel workers etc. because we know regulation is necessary to keep individuals and companies in line………yet Gordo the Ungreat – not satisfied with smashing the pensions framework – sat back and let his chums in the City to their worst.
stevep
Utter rubbish.
the Tories created the template for poor city and banking behaviour in the UK, Labour inherited it. Did I not make that clear? The Banks and the city were deregulated by the Thatcher regime and became powerful self-serving institutions, difficult to control.
Large swathes of the globe were also in the same boat.
Any cursory examination of the facts (loads on the web, Wikepedia etc,) will show much of what you are trying to pass off as given, is in fact, at best, risible. At worst, untrue.
stevep
No, just a forum where we can discuss progressive left-of -centre politics, like it says on the tin.
It wastes time and space arguing with Tory trolls out to disrupt and divide the debate, but if it has to be done, I`m not one to shirk my duty.