Tag Archives: trade unions

Last night my watching of the first Eurovision semi-final was rather interrupted with a Twitter storm created by Liberal Reform, or at least someone with access to its Twitter account. Liberal Reform is a group within the party which exists, according to its website, to

promote personal liberty and a fair society supported by free, open and competitive markets as the foundation of the party’s policy.

So what had they said that wound people up so much?

We need to have a rethink about how we regulate trade unions in the UK.

Far too often, rail union barons are able to cause economic damage

as they retweeted a post talking about the rail strikes this week.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, unions did seem pretty scary to me. My experience was watching mass meetings at car plants where they all voted to go on strike. Even then, I questioned how comfortable you would feel about disagreeing. But I was also mad keen on history, and learning about how important unions were in giving people better chances of making it out of their workplaces alive and in challenging abuse by employers put them in a much better light. There’s not a lot that the Thatcher government did that I like, but their legislation insisting on strike ballots was a good thing. Some of the other Conservative reforms since, including the bill passed last year, have gone way too far and I am glad that we didn’t vote for them.

Every day union reps fight for workers who are being treated unfairly. An effective union rep is one of the workplace’s most valuable assets.

Way back in the mists of time, I was also heavily attracted to the SDP’s policy on industrial democracy, giving people more say in their workplace and I also liked co-ownership models.

I think it is so important that we do all we can to improve workers’ rights, to make workplaces safer, more inclusive and work more enjoyable and fairly rewarded. Unions have a huge role to play in that. We should always be suspicious of and curious of any power imbalances, but it is clear that they often lie with employers.

In terms of the current ongoing strikes in healthcare and rail, I think that we should broadly be supporting the workers, whose requests are pretty reasonable. When you think how people’s earnings have shrunk because of inflation over the past few years, it is not surprising how many are struggling. Added to that, labour market shortages caused, among other things, by Brexit and people being too sick to work thanks to the state of the NHS, have made workplaces so much more stressful.

Our current policy on unions was passed in our Towards a Fairer Society paper in York last Spring. This snippet gives a much more collaborative flavour: