unions


of workplaces and a high union membership. The reality in the vast majority of cases is that turnouts in the postal ballots dictated by existing legislation are low, especially at big employers where union members are counted in hundreds of thousands. Ballot papers are often mistaken for junk mail and consigned to the bin. Under the new laws unions will spend more of their time


campaigning to ensure a maximum turnout rather than negotiating a way through a dispute. Even if the strike ballot passes all the tests, the new law will insist that unions give employers two weeks’ notice of industrial action, granting management ample time to bring in strike-breaking agency staff – another tactic which will be allowed under the punitive new legal regime. One can imagine a scenario in which agency staff turn up


at a workplace only to discover they have been hired to break a strike. Even if they were forewarned, temps are invariably poorly paid, on zero hours contracts with minimal rights and as a consequence reluctant to refuse the offer of work.


“ ”


The time limit on industrial action will inevitably mean


There were 114 strikes in 2013 compared with an average of 144 a year in the 2000s


that strikes will be more intense and longer before the mandate lapses and unions have to conduct another expensive ballot. Meanwhile employers might be tempted to sit on their hands until the strike vote becomes null and void. While claiming that the new rules will ‘democratise’


industrial relations, ministers won’t allow unions to mix electronic voting, independently scrutinised workplace ballots with postal balloting. The reason, of course, is that more modern methods would lead to higher turnouts. When the Tories first announced the policy last year, they said the threshold would have prevented more than two- thirds of strikes called during the past four years. And yet figures published by the Office for National Statistics show stoppages are already less common than in the previous two decades. There were 114 strikes in 2013 compared with an average of 144 a year in the 2000s and 266 in the 1990s. It ill-becomes any politician, of whatever party, to draw


attention to turnouts in ballots. In the General Election, the ultra-Thatcherite Business Secretary Sajid Javid, who is


theJournalist | 15


ANDREW AITCHISON


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