Europe is right! Who would expect this sentiment to be cheered to the rafters by the Brexiteer Tory benches? Business secretary Grant Shapps claims his strikes (minimum service levels) bill “will bring us into line with other modern countries such as France, Spain Italy and Germany”, which all have laws enforcing minimum service cover during strikes. “Civilised European nations” do it, he says. So just as the government is uprooting up to 4,000 hated laws that align the UK with EU regulations, they cherrypick this new one to adopt. Except this right to sack striking workers isn’t what happens in these countries.
A sharp riposte came from the European Trade Union Confederation: no, this anti-strike law puts the UK right outside the mainstream, its general secretary, Esther Lynch, has said today. “The UK already has among the most draconian restrictions on the right to strike in Europe. The UK government’s plans would push it even further away from normal, democratic practice across Europe.” No country – none – has a law that allows a striking worker to be sacked.
And here is Tory MP Stephen McPartland, tweeting his indignation: “Shameful, shameful, shameful to target individual workers & order them to walk past their mates on picket line or be sacked. By all means fine the Unions, make them agree to minimum service levels, but don’t sack individual NHS staff, teachers & workers!!!” Ex-health secretary Stephen Dorrell said it was “simply extraordinary to waste parliamentary time by introducing legislation which removes the right of NHS staff to withdraw their labour in a future dispute at a time when ministers and MPs should be focusing on resolving the current dispute”.
The insult to ambulance and NHS staff is the pretence they don’t already make provision for emergency cover: they all do, as they did carefully in yesterday’s strike. As in other critical occupations, voluntary agreements for strike cover are already in place in the nuclear industry, says the union Prospect.
In his deliberate misrepresentation of other countries’ union laws, Shapps even praised the International Labour Organization (ILO), prompting Angela Rayner’s ironic astonishment he’d ever heard of it.
Oozing unction, he claimed: “Even the International Labour Organization – the guardian of workers’ rights around the world – says that minimum service levels (MSLs) are a proportionate way of balancing the right to strike with the need to protect the wider public.”
But he leaves out key ILO provisos: the right to strike is enshrined in its Convention 87, signed by 157 countries, including the UK, and MSLs should never render a strike ineffective. They should be negotiated, not imposed by employers or governments, and disputes over them should be resolved by an independent body. This bill leaves MSLs to be compulsorily fixed by the arbitrary whim of ministers. The ILO says MSLs can only cover “the safety of individuals and their health”, which certainly does not apply to Border Force staff, teachers or rail workers.
Britain’s ever toughening anti-union laws are unique in Europe, says Tim Sharp, the TUC’s senior employment rights officer. Last year’s tightening of the screw quadrupled union fines to £1m for breaking complex strike laws. This is pure politics, as employers have not called for harsher laws.
On the contrary, Neil Carberry, the chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, tweeted: “We want nurses, rail workers etc back at work – sacking them is not an option. So you are always going to need some form of deal.” He represents the agencies that were supposed to benefit from last year’s anti-union act, allowing them to send in scab workers in a strike: they have shown little inclination. Nursing temp agencies refuse to send in nurses on strike days. These kneejerk, back of the envelope, anti-union gestures are done with no consultation with anyone. They act as political gestures, not as functional policy.
The great cultural difference between Britain and those European counties that Shapps now lavishes with praise is an underlying approach to industrial relations by agreement and negotiation: the Tories think warfare with unions wins elections. These countries have collective bargaining covering nearly everyone, whether or not they are union members. Collective agreements, acting as a pay floor across a whole sector, cover 80% of employees in Spain, 82% in Denmark, 98% in France and 100% in Italy.
Compare that with the UK, where only 27% of employees are covered. That’s why Labour will bring in fair pay agreements across all sectors, negotiated jointly between unions and employers, starting with social care. That’s why Labour plans to reform pay review bodies, with a new emphasis on the need to recruit and retain staff.
The great cultural difference is embodied in European works councils, where workers have a right to be included. Of course there are still strikes, but the tone is set for agreement and negotiation. The Tory tone yearns for the grand old days of Margaret Thatcher and her confrontations, though they forget that she picked her battles cannily. She only began her battle with the miners in the spring, when there were huge coal stocks; she would never have taken on nurses at a weak time of critical NHS staff shortage.
Here’s the ultimate insult to public intelligence: Shapps saying piously, “The British people need to know that when they have a heart attack, a stroke or a serious injury, an ambulance will turn up, and that if they need hospital care, they have access to it.” Yes, indeed. What a good idea legally binding minimum service levels would have been in these last 13 years, had they bound this government to maintain a minimum number of beds, nurses and doctors per capita of an ageing population, or indeed all other public services falling into dereliction, contributing to a 9% excess death rate last year. For failing to provide basic levels of public service, voters will almost certainly sack the government.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
