A class war government

Oliver New looks at the government’s plan to make strikes even harder to organise

No surprise: the Tories have just announced they plan to change the law on strike ballots for public sector workers. Over the years they have made strikes harder and harder – in fact they will never be happy until they have finally made strikes illegal. The Daily Mail says the Tory plans would effectively ban strikes in the public sector.

The hypocrisy is just off the scale. At a time when working people are facing ever more job insecurity, they are increasing casualisation, privatising public services including the NHS, and overseeing the massive spread of zero hours contracts. The government has already prevented many people from going to Employment Tribunals by tightening the rules and introducing charges beyond the reach of the low paid.

They are openly attacking the poor, while for their rich who can’t quite manage to evade all their taxes, they cut the tax rate.

Now it seems they want to count everyone who doesn’t vote in a ballot as a vote against, something they would never apply to parliamentary elections in a thousand years. They of course don’t have to worry about the media saying they are two-faced as the media is run by bosses.

Anyone reading the Tory press wouldn’t ever realise trade unions are the biggest democratic organisations in Britain, which hold regular elections. The fat cat super rich bosses get to be called ‘industry leaders’ while the elected union leaders, carrying out decisions of their elected executives, are called ‘union bosses’.

Strikes are incredibly hard to organise legally as it is. For example, unions have to count every member in every grade in every workplace and notify the employers, even before they ballot. Specialist anti-union solicitors working hand in hand with employers trawl through every dot and comma in order to go to the courts. (Your Honour, the union states it is balloting the eight Customer Service Agents in the Avenue Road site, but in reality the Avenue Road site is now divided into two units and furthermore, there are only five Customer Service Agents and two Leading Customer Service Agents. This is clearly wrong and we ask you to grant an injunction to suspend this strike.) Funnily enough, the ex-public school judges don’t easily see the point of view of the unions from underneath those wigs.

Meanwhile the Labour Party pockets the subscriptions of trade union members, but never goes out to bat for unions and their members. They are clearly far too afraid of the media and the bosses to stand up for the people who are paying and voting for them. Nor will they repeal the anti-union laws, as they have shown in the past. It’s a class war – and Labour is pretending to be neutral.