Johnson wants to ban strikes and introduce a scabs charter!

 

Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, Britain already has the strictest anti union laws in the advanced capitalist world. But if Boris Johnson, the Conservative Prime Minister, gets his way, it's going to get a whole lot tougher for British workers to take legal industrial action.

The Tory government are proposing to ban strikes in essential public services including the transport sector, and are planning to introduce a scabs charter that would allow agency workers to be used as blackleg strikebreakers. The use of agency workers as strikebreakers was outlawed in 1973. Regulation 7 of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Business Regulations 2003, currently prohibits employers from using agency workers to cover an employee who is taking part in a strike or industrial action. The Tory government now wants to repeal Regulation 7 because of the series of strikes organised by the RMT union that have brought British railways to a grinding halt.

The strikes on the railways do not involve train drivers who are mainly members of the union ASLEF. Although RMT members are demanding a mere 7% pay rise and a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, says the union is holding the country to ransom. He accuses the unions of having unrealistic expectations on pay and doesn't think they should be chasing pay rises that match inflation which is currently running at a 11% and increasing.

While the Tory government want to make it more difficult for British workers to improve their pay and conditions by taking industrial action, they are proposing to ban controls on the pay of City bosses and banker's bonuses. Last year, banker's bonuses increased by 27.9%. Pay for Chief Executives in FTSE 100 companies bounced back to £3.6m after having fallen to a mere £2.8m in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.

Mick Lynch, the General Secretary of the RMT, believes that the dead hand of government is all over the current rail dispute and is impeding a settlement of it. He's probably right, but I would remind him, that in 2016, the RMT naively urged its members to leave the E.U. because they believed it would end the attack on seafarer's and offshore workers, and on the rights of British worker's.

In Brexit Britain, we've recently seen nearly 800 P&O seafarer's sacked without notice, who were ignominiously escorted off their ships by P&O security staff wearing balaclavas and carrying handcuffs. The majority of these seafarer's were members of the RMT union. Many of these seafarer's were replaced by agency workers who were paid the minimum wage. The RMT said many of the replacement staff were recruited from India and were working for as little as £1.80 an hour.

Most of the anti union laws introduced by the Tories under Maggie Thatcher, were never repealed by a Labour Government, and it is therefore, much easier to sack British worker's than it is in other parts of Europe. Although P&O managed to sack almost a quarter of its British staff, no French P&O employees were affected. So much for taking back control.