Lobby the Tuc-april 5! Tebbit's Bill Means to Your

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Tebbit: 'a comprehensive attack on the most fundamental trade rights' DESPITE the blather of TUC leaders, occasional local conferences and a handful of smart TUC leaflets, little is being done to rouse the labour movement to action against the new Tory anti-union laws.

Yet Norman Tebbit's laughably misnamed "Employment Bill" is a comprehensive attack on the most fundamental trade union rights.

Included in its provisions are:

*Restrictions on the right to strike.

*Punitive fines against unions that step out of line.

*New attacks on the closed shop.

*Moves to prevent councils restricting contracts to union labour-only firms.

*Scope for the selective sacking of strikers.

At the centre of Tebbit's proposals is the curtailment of the legal immunities which alone have given British workers the illusion of the "right to strike"

In fact it is almost impossible to strike without committing civil wrongs (or torts') against the employers concerned and their customers and suppliers.

This has until now been regulated by the pros ision of immunity from civil action for trade unionists who take industrial action 'in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute"!

The definition of a "trade dispute" has been accepted as a dispute "connected" with one or more of the following:

'terms and conditions of employment; physical conditions of work; engagement or non-engagement; sacking; suspensions; work duties; distribution of work; discipline; trade union membership and facilities for trade union officials; negotiation and consultation machinery; and procedural rights"

(Labour Research pamphlet, p.3)

Curb Now Tebbit has set out to curb these limited rights. His Bill tightens up the definition of an immune action to one which 'should relate wholly or mainly" to a trade dispute rather than being merely "connected" with it.

This shift of wording is designed to make it easier for judges to rule an action unlawful. Such a ruling would enable a court to order those organising an Harry Sloan looks at the Bill action to end it - and to threaten them with fines or imprisonment for contempt of court if they refuse.

Indeed the new proposals would offer employers the possibility of imposing a de facto "cooling off period" by enabling them to begin court proceedings and seek an interim court order to prevent industrial action until the final verdict is reached - possibly weeks later.

Tebbit's attack on immunities also now excludes disputes which are defined as "between workers and workers" • This is likely to be interpreted as rendering demarcation and grading disputes unlawful as well as strikes against the use of non-union labour.

In a further move to restrict workers' scope for class action, the new Bill would strip away any immunity for action "relating solely to matters occurring outside Great Britain"

This would immediately make it unlawful to take any form of solidarity action with any section of workers overseas. Blacking action against repressive and dictatorial regimes like the Turkish or Chilean juntas or the South African apartheid state would be unlawful: so too would strikes, blacking or other action in solidarity with workers in foreign-owned subsidiaries of British firms, or workers employed by multinationals also operating in Britain.

Indeed since Northern Ireland is excluded from 'Great Britain" , the Bill would bar any solidarity with the struggles of Irish workers.

But it is not only on an international level that Tebbit's Bill aims to crush workers' solidarity: a further provision restricts the definition of a 'trade dispute" to those "between an employer and his own employees"

Restricted

Prior's 1980 Employment Act severely restricted the right to take "secondary" industrial action, and to picket other than the strikers' own place of work.

Now Tebbit appears set to force through legislation making all solidarity action unlawful - even the action routinely expected of trade unionists in supply firms and customers.

The idea at the centre of this Tory proposal is to restrict industrial action to the particular section of workers in dispute - thus providing a major obstacle to unionisation, and to pay and conditions struggles in a whole range of industries where only blacking action can give workers sufficient strength to win.

Hand in hand with the stripping away of immunities runs Tebbit's proposals to spell out the ways in which unions become liable for damages in the courts and the minimum amounts of money involved.

The Bill lays down that unions will become liable to be sued for all actions which are not deemed by a judge to be 'in contemplation and furtherance of a trade dispute" las redefined above).

In particular unions are made liable for damages if they carry out secondary picketing, 'indiscriminate" secondary action, or industrial action "to compel union membership"

This covers a whole spate of industrial disputes in which the central issue is government policy (spending cuts, wage controls, Taken together with a House of Lords ruling (May 1981) that a third party in a dispute can sue the organiser of a strike for damages, the new law opens up the prospect of union funds being seized wholesale even as a result of a single dispute.

In an effort to use these proposals to enlist the union leaders as a strikebreaking task-force, the Tebbit Bill emphasises that the unions themselves would be liable for damages under conditions where the national executive had officially supported an action or where an official acted in accordance with the union's rules or under instruction.

Plainly Tebbit hopes that this will make it even harder than at present to win official backing for strikes - and that the blackmailing proposals in the Bill will send union executives and full-timers scurrying to mass meetings in order to strong-arm their members back to work. tion There is evidence in the last three years that this could indeed prove to be the case.

Once again the objective of the Tory plan is to isolate the sections involved in action, cutting them off from the support even of their own union, while encouraging employers to herd in scabs to do their work and to sack the militants involved.

The Bill goes on to spell out the kind of penalties involved for breaking its provisions. Damages are calculated on a sliding scale up to a maximum of £250,000 for unions of over 100,000 members -but the fines that could be levied for contempt of court are of course unlimited, and legal costs would be astronomical.

Meanwhile there are provisions to make unions liable for compensation payments to blacklegs sacked for refusing to join a union.

These compensation payments are lavish. Tebbit's Bill scraps the maximum Prior his Bill curbed picketing

ompensation for such

'unfair dismissal" cases. ind introduces minimum igures which guarantee a landsome pay off to each ind every blackleg.

A worker on average earnings could pick up at east £20,000 if it was not practicable to reinstate, or at least $24,000 if the employer refused to reinstate.

And the whole of this bill could be landed on the union involved, together with costs, backed up by the threat of further fines for contempt of court.

On the other front, every effort is being made to destroy existing closed shops by the imposition of periodie secret ballots in which 80% of the workforce or 85% of those voting will be required to say 'yes' If this is not achieved, or if the ballots are not held, then any employee sacked for non-membership would be automatically deemed unfairly dismissed and eligible for damages.

While scabs and blacklegs receive added protection and financial featherbedding, union militants face a renewed wave of victimisations under Tebbit's law. It proposes to abolish the existing provisions, which prevent an employer from selectively sacking strikers while continuing to employ worhers who have been on strike but returned to work.

This will give carte blanche to employers throughout the country to throw down ultimatums to strikers announcing that anyone who has not returned by a certain date will be sacked. Edwardes-style confrontation will be made readily and cheaply accessible to every manager -with a vast pool of unemployed lined up by Tory policies as a potential army of strikebreakers.

Additional clauses aim at strengthening the hand of 'lump' labour subcontractors by making it illegal for Labour councils to insist that contracting firms only use union labour.

And by extending on the provisions of Prior's Employment • Act, the Tebbit Bill offers public funds to finance postal ballots on wage offers.

While this still remains voluntary, it is plainly part of a long-term plan to impose such ballots on the Indeed there is no evidence that Tebbit's bill is the final stage in the Tory assault on trade union rights.

Rather the kind of retreat being laid by the TUC before this legislation is the most cast-iron guarantee that the Tories will be back again with further restrictions and penalties in the future.

In place of Heath's Industrial Relations Act with its structure of special courts and its head-on confrontation with the unions, Thatcher is creating a legal framework to use the established courts and judiciary, together with the docile and reactionari union bureaucracy, to shackle the strength of the workers' movement.

Talk in these conditions of action only after the Bill becomes law and after the Bill becomes law and after some trade unionist falls foul of the law is simply talk of surrender and betrayal.

The fight must begin now to prepare mass action to defeat both Tebbit's BIl and the savage Thatcher government.

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-FightingSocialist Organiser, Thursday 1982 Page 4

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