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UNI Global Union's General Secretary Philip Jennings has written in The New Statesman about the danger of  the UK Conservative Government's anti-trade union proposals. Jennings is attending the TUC Congress where the TUC General Secretary Francis O'Grady has slammed the anti-trade union bill.

Read Jennings' full article below:  

UK government crackdown on trade union rights tears another strip off Magna Carta

The Conservative government crackdown on trade union rights goes against the spirit of the Magna Carta which is celebrating its 800th anniversary this year. Freedom and justice enshrined in that document are under attack by Cameron’s anti-trade union laws because they aim to take away a worker’s right to legally protest. According to the recent ITUC global index on the world’s worst countries for workers, the UK is now down in the third division with countries such as Russia and Albania. The Tory government’s trade union proposals are in danger of sinking the UK’s human rights reputation still further while tearing another strip off the Magna Carta. Cameron is out of step and out of time – the proposals not only go against the 800 year old Magna Carta, they go against the decent work aims of the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

The proposals are putting legal manacles on the right to strike. Even when the legal limits have been satisfied employers will be allowed to use agency workers as strike breakers. The Conservative Government has failed to do its homework, bringing in temporary workers as strike breakers is inconsistent with international conventions. The international body representing the interests of agency work businesses, CIETT, has always been clear that agency employees should not be used to replace striking workers – a position confirmed by CIETT in a Memorandum of Understanding with UNI Global Union.

These measures are an attack on the British trade union movement and will widen the income divide in the UK to catastrophic levels - at a time where inequality is being recognised as a killer of growth by organisations as diverse as the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and the central banks. The IMF has admitted that the fall in unionisation in advanced economies and its impact on workers’ negotiation power is a key contributor to the rise of economic inequality. We know only too well what happens when workers are not allowed to protest or withdraw their labour. When workers at the Rana Plaza garment factory complex in Bangladesh were forced to work in a building known to be unsafe the results were deadly.

The Government is bringing its over the top anti-union activities to social media as well as the streets with proposals for intrusive control of trade union protests. For example, the government  will require trade union members to provide their employers’ with two weeks’ notice of what they plan to post on Facebook or Twitter during a period of industrial action; and unions will be penalised if a member uses a loudspeaker at a protest without first having informed the authorities. The waste of police time that will have to go into implementing these plans is hardly something you would expect given the UK’s proud tradition of liberty.

UNI Global Union and its 20 million members stand with the TUC in demanding that the government’s trade union bill is ripped up, rather than shredding the principles of justice represented by the Magna Carta.

Philip Jennings, UNI Global Union General Secretary