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Prof Keith Ewing: attacks on collective bargaining are a global issue

Issue date
Solidarity with US unions

We are one campaign

4 April 2011

As part of the TUC's support for the US trade union movement's campaign to defend collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, the TUC held a solidarity rally on Monday 4 April.

Professor Keith Ewing, Professor of Public Law, King's College London, and Vice President of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights spoke about the erosion of collective bargaining rights in the US, the UK and the EU generally. This is an edited text.

Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated while in Memphis on this day in 1968. He was there to support striking sanitation workers, fighting for the right to have their union recognised by their employer; fighting for the right to collective bargaining.

Today is also a day of international solidarity with the public service workers of Wisconsin, whose right to bargain collectively has been stripped away by legislation sponsored by State governor Scott Walker, a man who has led the great state of Wisconsin to pariah status.

But as we stand in solidarity with brothers and sisters in Wisconsin, we do so in the knowledge that theirs is not a struggle confined to a single US state. Nor - as the neo-liberal strategy of Governor Walker stretches to other states - is it a uniquely US problem. It is a global problem, demanding a global response.

European workers too are seeing the erosion of hard won collective bargaining rights, also as a result of the greed of the bankers, who having emerged unscathed are now using the courts to avoid unwanted publicity. In one prominent case a so-called super-injunction was granted, so that - according to The Times using the cover of parliamentary privilege - the individual cannot be described even anonymously as a banker.

In this country the erosion of bargaining rights is taking place by stealth, public sector employers stealing benefits previously secured. Although collective bargaining machinery still exists in local government, friends in public service unions tell me that it is a long time since they had a collective agreement on pay or on other terms and conditions of employment.

In contrast, what is happening is that public sector unions are finding themselves on the sharp end of what are called 'section 188 notices', the new virus afflicting the British workplace. By this device - which is being used across the public and private sectors - employers are issuing notices of mass dismissal (of thousands at a time), and offering to re-employ workers on inferior terms.

These new terms are imposed without the agreement of the trade union or the workers, who have no choice but to accept. Sometimes it involves a repudiation of a collective agreement, which the union is powerless to defend. Collective agreements in this country are not legally binding, and the only sanction open to workers and their unions - industrial action - is so fraught with legal dangers as often to be beyond use.

All this is being done under cover of an EU Directive that was designed to protect workers facing redundancy by requiring the employer to give as much advance notice as possible and to consult with the union to find alternatives to redundancy, to reduce numbers to be made redundant, and to ameliorate the consequences. What is being done is a total abuse, with protective legislation being used as a licence by employers to undermine collective agreements and terms and conditions of employment.

But it is not only in the United Kingdom where the bankers and their chums in Whitehall are calling the shots. In Greece, workers and trade unions have been told by the European Commission that their labour laws are to be made more flexible, which means that their collective agreements must become more decentralised, which means in turn that fewer people are to be protected by collective agreements.

Yet whether it be Wisconsin, the United Kingdom or Greece, this marks a global assault on the human rights of workers everywhere. Claims about violations of human rights are not to be made lightly, for fear if devaluing a fragile currency. But workers' rights are human rights, and the right to bargain collectively is recognised by international law as an essential aspect of the right to freedom of association.

At international level the right to bargain collectively is expressly recognised by the two core Conventions of the ILO, the UN agency of which 183 countries are members, all bound by a constitutional principle to promote freedom of association. Conventions fleshing out that principle impose duties on member states, duties which include a duty to promote collective bargaining.

That principle is embedded not only in international standards, but in regional treaties as well. Express reference to the duty of the State to promote collective bargaining is to be found in the Council of Europe's Social Charter of 1961, the conjoined twin of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well (bizarrely as it now transpires) in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights of 2000.

Even the courts are jumping on board for fear of being left behind, as in the recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Demir v Turkey (2008). A chamber of 17 judges unanimously recognised the right to bargain collectively as a fundamental human right, upholding a complaint from a Turkish local government union whose collective agreement had been annulled by the Turkish courts.

On the day before he died on 4 April 1968, Dr King addressed the sanitation workers of Memphis and famously said that

You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.

Dr King's vision of the dignity and worth of labour can only be realised by the very architecture that governments throughout the world now seem determined to destroy. In this country, our forebears saw clearly the importance of trade unions, and the role of collective bargaining as a means of raising wages, equalising incomes, stimulating demand, creating jobs, and reducing unemployment.

But as Dr King realised, the case for collective bargaining is not simply an economic one. It is about social justice. It is about repudiating the idea that labour is a commodity, competing in a Darwinian 'labour market' (a phrase that should be banned by progressive people everywhere). Above all it is about ensuring that everyone - that is everyone - is treated with equal respect, and paid a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.

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