Striking Back at British Trade Unions

...Britain now faces one of its most serious challenges in years...

...The climax was reached during the winter of '78-'79...

...The TUC has also urged unions to spurn the government's offer to finance secret worker ballots on strikes...

...Otherwise trade unions would not be able to function...

...The promise was not carried out, leading London newspaper wags to label it "The Late Solomon Binding...

...It is, in fact, calling for them to be deprived of privileges accumulated during their long fight to protect workers' interests, which they have been exercising with potent, invulnerable regularity...

...They also have themselves mostly to blame for the weakness of their present political position...

...He adds, however, that this must be limited by whether a union's action is "reasonably capable of furthering the dispute in question...

...Nevertheless, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the central body of the British union movement, is mounting protest demonstrations to show its displeasure with the Tory policies...

...The landslide victory would have been impossible without ballot-box backing from a substantial number of Britain's 12 million union members...

...Moreover, the unions, who make the Labor Party...

...They are not obliged to honor contracts reached through collective bargaining, they cannot be sued and injunctions cannot be brought against them if their actions are "in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute...

...Only the country's tenacious tradition of individual freedom, and the determination of its political leaders to maintain that tradition, sustains the climate of liberty, law and order...

...There must [still] be some legal immunity for industrial action," Prior says...

...British unions do not operate under the same sort of legal limitations as American unions...

...That winter of discontent led directly to the springtime election triumph of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives...

...In Great Britain, the law of the land is ultimately what Parliament says it is...

...Though several prominent union leaders—including Terry Duffy of the Engineering Workers, Joe Gormley of the Mine Workers and Frank Chappie of the Electrical Workers—are known to feel that some sort of union reform would be tolerable, no trade union official can openly welcome moves to hobble his organization and members...

...Though ridiculed as "wet" (British slang for spineless, ineffectual and unctuous) by hardline Tories, Prior refuses to set the stage for a disastrous knockdown-drag-out confrontation between the government and the unions...

...Lest anyone rush to the conclusion that the class war is fizzling out here and labor and management are advancing arm-in-arm toward a bright new tomorrow, it should be quickly noted that the CBI is not suggesting granting unions something they do not already enjoy...

...a viable political force, simply do not trust the Conservatives...

...She has been encouraged, too, by a series of recent votes by union members rejecting their leaders' calls for strike action...

...There are jobs at stake—and not only those of politicians and union nabobs...

...But if Parliament chooses to exempt an individual or group from the constraints of the law—as in the case of the unions—it alone can change that decision...

...The same winter striking maintenance personnel forced hospitals to restrict their services, and a strike by "dustmen" resulted in garbage piling up odoriferously against the railings of London's Leicester Square...

...Apparently they were made queasy by the no-holds-barred strike epidemic, and were drawn to the Conservative election manifesto's vow to restore a "fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement...

...Jubilant Right-wing Conservatives immediately insisted that the comfortable Tory majority gave the government both a mandate and an obligation to carry out its pledge in full measure...

...As inflation raged, productivity sagged and unemployment increased, successive governments looked Norman Gelb reports from London for the Mutual Broadcasting System...

...On television news programs Britons watched the spectacle of truck drivers—free spirits if ever such existed—meekly queueing up before local officials of the striking lorry drivers' union to be told who might drive through which picket blockades, regardless of whether they were union members or whether the companies being damaged had anything to do with the dispute...

...While British management occasionally seems bewildered by the demands of efficient industrial enterprise, the unions must accept some responsibility for a deterioration of the national economy that has left British workers among the lowest paid in the industrial world, at a time when prices here are reaching the same high levels as elsewhere...

...But her Minister of Employment, James Prior, firmly rejects this tough approach...

...Meeting vigorous opposition from apprehensive trade unionists, Wilson withdrew the planned legislation and settled instead for what he called a "solemn and binding" promise from the unions that they would reform themselves...

...Whether it will succeed in meeting that challenge depends as much on the unions' appreciation of their own long-term interests as on recognition by the Conservative government that anti-union diatribes are no less counterproductive than industrial anarchy...

...on helplessly...

...Trampling on Britain's industrial relations traditions, he warns, could have dangerous consequences...

...Even some Labor Party figures described the situation as "industrial anarchy...

...A decade ago, Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson tried to introduce certain restrictions on union legal immunity to help the economy and bring a measure of harmony to industrial relations...

...They reluctantly ruled that Parliament had given unions the right "to inflict untold harm to industrial enterprises unconcerned with [a] particular dispute, to the employees of such enterprises, to members of the public and to the nation itself...

...This gesture was prompted by the not altogether unjustified suspicion that militants often intimidate those who do not wish to strike when decisions of this kind are made by an open show of hands on the shop floor...

...For even when Labor governments were in office, union leaders promoted their short-term interests at the expense of political strategy...

...If we could get agreement between the parties to sensible changes in the law," he says, "that would be the greatest step forward that this country would ever take in industrial relations...

...The CBI wants the unions to be made subject to due process, like everyone else...

...Legislation he is now steering through Parliament would restrict lawful picketing to an employee's own place of work (thus ending the practice of "flying pickets" converging from all over the country to close down a large company, or even an entire industry, during a strike), and would curtail union power to impose a closed shop...

...A popular backlash developed, unmistakably expressed in a long succession of public opinion polls...

...since there is no written constitution, there is no possibility of constitutional review by a high court...

...THE SOFT APPROACH Striking Back at British Trade Unions wnormangbb London britain's major employer organization, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), has proposed that Parliament pass a law giving unions the right to strike...

...They urged Mrs...

...With unemployment rising and productivity falling, the Prime Minister believes she has firm grounds on which to base an appeal for public support against union inviolability...

...Thatcher's warning that if Prior's soft approach fails to produce the desired effect, stronger legislation may have to be introduced...

...British industry continued to be massively disrupted by unions deploying their enormous, unchallengeable powers...

...In overturning an injunction granted by a lower court against strikers who were forcing closure of a company not directly involved with their grievance, the Law Lords, Britain's supreme judicial personages, recently reaffirmed these immunities...

...Nor are they soothed by Mrs...

...Thatcher to ban the closed shop, outlaw secondary picketing, reduce extra Social Security payments for the families of strikers, and make unions legally responsible for observing collective bargaining agreements...