50% plus one makes good sense; outlaw short-term action with tighter contract law
“24 or 48 hour strikes or temporary walkouts bring pressure to bear on employers at relatively little cost to themselves”
Now that the dust has settled after a small minority of public sector workers threw their toys out of the pram, we ought to think about new laws to make sure unions can’t impose their will on us in the future.
There are two actions the government should take.
Firstly, insist that for a strike to be legal, it should have the support of more than 50% of the membership. Secondly, adopt the U.S. law that says if a union breaks its contract, the membership can’t return until a new one has been agreed. This would outlaw the kind of action that allows London’s transport unions to regularly cripple the capital, at very little personal cost.
It’s no use the union bigwigs saying this is inconsistent and unfair because a government that emerges from a general election with less than 50% of the vote would have no mandate to govern. Unions and governments are very different things, are they not? Unions are relatively small organisations that exist for narrow reasons, so if they seek to act in the name of their members with the potential for great disruption to express their selfish interests, demanding support of at least 50% of the members is a perfectly reasonable barrier to erect. When you realise that the unions which caused disruption on November 30 had the support of not more than 30 per cent of their members, if newspaper reports are right, then this is a reform of the system which would be very effective.
Unions in this country are able to break their contracts with impunity by calling 24 or 48 hour strikes or temporary walkouts to bring pressure to bear on their employers at relatively little cost to themselves. In the U.S. this isn’t possible because if a union breaks its contract, it can’t return until a new one is agreed. If Britain did this, it would outlaw this short term activity er at a stroke and render impotent those power hungry socialist maniacs like Mark Serwotka of PCS, Dave Prentice of Unison and Tony Woodley.
Incidentally, I found out during the latest strike activity that the civil service First Division Association had changed its name to FDA. This isn’t surprising because when they called themselves First Division, this group of arrogant pen pushers, box tickers and jobsworths tried to pretend that they were an elite group, and used this football analogy, Since then of course we all know that First Division means League Three in football terms. Hence the FDA, until it is sued by the Federal Drug Administration.
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