SouthCoastShankly wrote:I do agree that the north of England got the rough end of Thatcherism. But when you consider what the Conservatives were trying to achieve - "forcing Labour to give up socialism by moving the country permanently away from excessive respect for the power of the state towards a preference for the free market"
It is shocking that this Labour Govt. has not restored any of the union powers workers once had.
Its not shocking - its common sense, that is why virtually no national economies have powerful trade unions anymore.
In the UK, trade unions accumulated some extraordinary legal privileges over the course of the twentieth century. For example, they could not be sued for damages caused by their industrial action. Perhaps the worst feature of this was the fact that employers who were not involved in any dispute were often caught up in 'secondary picketing' as public-sector union activists attempted to spread disruption more widely in order to force governments to concede to their demands.
The Thatcher reforms were progressive and remorseless. Six successive Acts of Parliament between 1980 and 1993 reflected four key principles:
(1) Reforming the closed shop.
Trade unions forced people to join a union and meant that anyone who disobeyed union orders and was driven out of membership then had to be dismissed by the employer. The Act made it illegal to dismiss an employee for not being a union member.
(2) Secret ballots.
Unions were required to hold a ballot before they launched industrial action such as strikes. Previously, strike decisions had often been taken in open meetings where the closed-shop dismissal threat could be used on dissenters, which dragged on late at night, leaving only the activists present at the final vote. The government felt that secret postal ballots would provide outcomes that were more representative of real shop-floor opinion.
(3) Secondary picketing banned.
The 1984 Act also banned unions from extending their disputes to anyone besides their members' employers.
(4) Legal immunities curbed.
If unions failed to observe these rules on strike ballots or secondary picketing, they lost immunity from lawsuits for damages caused by industrial action.
I defy anyone to argue that these measures were not common sense