TUC on strike ballots

Commenting on the Prime Minister's statement on the Marr Programme today (Sunday) that the next Conservative manifesto will include a commitment to impose a turn-out threshold on industrial action ballots in “essential services”, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said:

“Workers in Britain already face the toughest barriers to taking action to defend their living standards of any almost any advanced democracy. This has helped turn our country into one of the most unequal where billionaires co-exist with food banks.

“The Prime Minister now wants to make industrial action even more difficult. This shows his readiness to take the side of employers and big business against ordinary working people as his party’s backwoodsmen call the shots.

“With workers facing the biggest and longest cut in their living standards since Victorian times and growing insecurity at work, we need policies to boost incomes, create decent jobs and give people a real say at work, not this return to Thatcherite nostrums.”