Value for money?

On Saturday I attended the event on employment rights and the impact of the European Court of Justice cases organised by IER (Institute of Employment Rights) and SERTUC (South East Region TUC). It was a well attended conference and there was a wide range of unions represented (including someone from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions) and a number of pensioner groups and former trade unionists.

The first speaker, Professor Keith Ewing, an expert on employment law, posed the question to the conference on why the vast amounts of funding being paid into the Labour Party by the trade union movement was not leading to any improvement in the situation concerning employment and labour law in the UK. He suggested that instead of subsidising Labour, the primary aim of the trade union movement should be to pay for legal challenges in the courts concerning employment law and that money remaining should go to the Labour Party. His point is a very valid one, as John Hendy QC, also an expert on labour law, compared trade union rights in the UK to those of Russia and Turkey and unlike anywhere else in the EU. He outlined one recent industrial dispute where a strike involving workers at Metrobus was ruled illegal because the ballot was held on a Friday and the information sent back to the trade union officials at 5pm, which is when they had left work. The ballot result was sent over the national union HQ on the Monday morning and then registered in accordance with the employment law and returned to the local union officials, and the employer was given the result on the Tuesday morning. This resulted in no material loss to the employer, yet the courts ruled that the union had acted contrary to the employment laws of the UK.

It was quite clear from the conference that British trade unions are working under a handicap which does not apply to workers and unions in the rest of the EU. Indeed there was strong evidence from the discussions that the main drive against workers rights is coming from the British government and not the EU and that within the EU, it is the UK which is pushing for faster and deeper implementation of laws detrimental to trade union rights. Another speaker was John Monks from the ETUC (European TUC) who argued that he was glad that a French commissioner had been appointed as Commissioner with responsibility for financial dealings as he would be much more prepared to use regulatory controls than a UK one. John Monks also called on the TUC and the UK unions to support a European workers action day in March, to ensure that workers across the EU were not called upon to pay the price for the greed and rapaciousness of bankers and the financial institutions.

The conundrum of how to work with a British Labour government which has done nothing to weaken Thatcher's anti-union laws and attempted to privatise the Royal Mail, was addressed by Billy Hayes, the General Secretary of the CWU (Communication Workers Union). Hayes argued that it was only by working with allies within the Labour Party that the privatisation of Royal Mail had been prevented and quoted Tariq Ali saying: "The only difference between the Tories and Labour is 5%. But it is within that 5% that we must operate." Hayes also went on to compare the situation with postal services in other EU states and gave the example that the UK system is so open to privatisation that the Irish Post Office (An Post) can bid for contracts in Northern Ireland by paying a fee of £1,000 whereas the Royal Mail cannot bid for the postal services in any other EU state, including the Irish Republic. Hayes also pointed to France, where Sarkozy had just given considerable subsidies to the nationalised postal service, stating that the privatisiation of the French postal service would not be in the French national interest. For Hayes it was clear who was responsible - the Labour government. Yet his union is one of their biggest sponsors! Many in the audience pointed out that it is only electoral calculations which have prevented Mandelson from privatising the Royal Mail this time and that if New Labour are returned they will try again, as indeed will the Tories.

Keith Ewing had pointed out that it was only necessary for the UK government to register services as being protected by national pay and conditions clauses and it would have the impact of making all employment in those services 'protected' . This would not mean protectionism but that all EU workers working in that field in the UK or working for subcontractors based in another EU state, would have to be paid under the same terms and conditions as workers in the UK. This had already been done by many other EU states. Again, it was a failure of political will on the part of the Labour government which meant that this had not been done. So in the "race to the bottom" and the removal of workers rights and terms and conditions, it is not the EU which is primarily responsible, but the Labour government of the UK which wants its economic space to be the most deregulated in Europe as before it boasted that its financial services were also.

There is a grim lesson here for the British trade unions, which so far has only been learnt by the RMT, PCS, and one or two others. You are paying your oppressors. Even Billy Hayes had to admit that the conditions of neither of the two Warwick Agreements with the trade unions have been met - one of those conditions in Wawick 1 was a commitment to a state run Royal Mail - this government has tried to end that. The Green Party is committed to trade union rights and national control of public services and would implement many of the rights which UK workers are losing rapidly under the excuse that it is the EU which is implementing this. Time for trade unionists to wake up before the general election and to smell the coffee.