By
Mark Gruenberg
The British Labour Party’s think tank
has drafted a strongly pro-union pro-worker platform it plans to run on in next
United Kingdom election and enact if it gains power.
The Institute for Employment Rights’
Manifesto For Labour Law envisions re-established and strong sectoral
bargaining, protection of whistleblowers, strong job safety and health
regulation and tougher enforcement overall, two top IER officials and a Kings
College law professor told a conference
in Washington, D.C.
There would also be a separate
Ministry of Labour, with Cabinet rank, mandatory access for union organizers to
mass meetings of workers at employment sites, “full employment rights for all
workers from day one,” as IER Director Carolyn Jones said, “and one simple
definition of ‘worker,’ to prevent employer misclassification.”
Jones, IER Chair John Hendy and King
College Professor Keith Ewing were part of a panel at the D.C. conference
discussing lessons the U.S. could learn from unions overseas. Other speakers
were from Canada, Argentina, and the International Labour Organization. The
D.C. conference chair, retired Communications Workers President Larry Cohen,
told the crowd U.S. unions could learn a lot from their overseas counterparts.
The D.C. conference considered ideas
for reversing the decline in private-sector union density in the U.S. since the
1950s, down to its current 6.4 percent. There’s been a parallel, and steep,
decline in British union density since World War II.
It was 86 percent in 1946 and 60
percent as late as 1980, Ewing said. Then, viciously anti-union Tory
(Conservative) Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took power. In 1978 she
repealed the 1909 law. British union density is now 26 percent, Hendy said.
U.S. union density is 10.5 percent.
All three Britons said Thatcher modelled
her anti-union campaign on weakening British labour law to a point where it
closely parallels the GOP-weakened U.S. National Labour Relations Act. Hendy
and Jones told the U.S. crowd they expect the Labour Party and its leader,
Jeremy Corbyn, to adopt the manifesto and take it into the next general
election campaign, whenever that is.
Labour and Corbyn endorsed a skeleton
version of the manifesto in the 2017 campaign. Then, Labour unexpectedly won
dozens of previously Tory seats, reducing Tory Prime Minister Theresa May to
leading a minority government propped up by right-wing Irish nationalists.
The question is whether Labour will
win the next balloting. Hendy was confident they would. Current opinion polls,
Feb. 3-4, say otherwise. They give the Tories 41 percent of likely voters to 34
percent for Labour. Neither May (40 percent) nor Corbyn (19 percent) are
popular with voters as a whole, though Corbyn overwhelmingly won Labour’s
primary before the 2017 election.
Nevertheless, the party gave the
institute the mandate to prepare the manifesto. The manifesto would reverse
“years of betrayal” when former “New Labour” Prime Minister Tony Blair
“tinkered with individual employment rights,” not basic workers’ rights, Jones
said.
The point, Ewing said, would be to get
British labour law away from the U.S. model. “The Canadian system and the
Australian system” like the U.S. and United Kingdom labour laws, “are
enterprise-based systems, but they don’t work (his emphasis).”
The 1909 labour law system Churchill
established, Hendy said, trade boards which mandated sectoral bargaining
between unions and all employers in a sector – say, mining or transportation –
with wages and hours as the main issues. “Thatcher swept all that away.”
The new manifesto envisions creating
45 separate industrial sectors, with the new Minister of Labour appointing both
union and management representatives to the boards overseeing each. The boards
would then negotiate minimum, and mandatory, contract floors. Among their
mandates would be one for “equal pay for equal work and elimination of the pay
gap,” Hendy said.
“Now we have to explain this to
workers, then we have to explain it to employers, then we have to get them on
board – and then we have to win the election,” he concluded.
(IPA Service)
Courtesy:
People’s World
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