As a young Labour lawyer, I was a part-time Tutor and Examiner to the National Council of Labour Colleges, in trade-union law and industrial law.  As a result, I have always differentiated clearly between rights (a) which attach to the individual worker, and those (b) which attach to the trade union as a collective organisation.   

In Labour political debate, these two ideas are often confused, rolled-up easily together.  After all, given the individual’s “right to join a trade union”, it is easy to argue that such a union should have the necessary collective rights to render it effective.  The conflation is entirely understandable.

It is nevertheless wrong.  Many of the great battles of English labour history have been fought over union rights (e.g. “recognition”, legal immunity, workplace organisation, collection of union dues, political contributions) - not worker’s rights at all.  And the failure to differentiate between individual and collective rights may obscure important features of the employment relationship.  Quite apart from the fact that only one-quarter of the workforce now belong to any union at all, leaving three-quarters to rely on their legal rights as individuals.   

Let me give a current example.  RMT, the rail union for the London Underground, recently argued successfully (before an Employment Appeals Tribunal) that a union representative was entitled to accompany a worker at an internal disciplinary hearing, albeit an early, relatively informal proceeding. That is because Labour’s early industrial relations legislation gave the every worker the individual right to be accompanied either by a union representative or another employee from the same undertaking. 

But Labour’s original proposals planned to give every worker the right to be accompanied by any other person of his/her choice – friend, relative, or other advisers included.  The unions lobbied to cut down that wider freedom, presumably because it put them in a stronger position.  Outsiders were cut out of the picture, leaving fellow-employees as the only alternative to union representation – i.e. precisely the category least likely to help, by taking up the unpopular the barefoot advocate role.  The unions were left effectively with a  representative monopoly, which they asserted in the London Underground case.  What started off as a valuable individual right, ended up by being a trade union monopoly, effectively a collective right, in all but name. 

That was wrong.  The Government should have stuck to its original guns. If  a manager is in dispute with the company, nobody would dream to contest his or her right to mobilise assistance (whether from a solicitor, or accountant, or personnel consultant, or personal friend).  Why should not all workers be accorded the same right?  Why should there be one rule for the managers, and another for “the workers”?  Labour got that one right, in its original draft Bill.  Why did the Government allow this key process to be hi-jacked by the Unions?

The winds from the Continent are, I am glad to say, strengthening worker’s rights - rather than union rights.  Part-time and agency workers in the UK are benefiting mightily from EU initiatives, and long may that process continue.  I am sure that our systems are moving in the right direction, foreshadowing a major systemic re-balancing of the employment relationship, a new work settlement right across Europe.   

The trade unions have a pivotal part to play, nationally and internationally, in negotiating and enforcing that new settlement.  They should do so, in my view, without reliance on new collective rights – they should operate competitively, demonstrating their value to workers, persuading workers to join as members,  proving their representative effectiveness, and thus expanding as natural institutions of the labour market place.

What do you think?  Drop me a line