Government abandons unworkable plan to make unions give 14 days notice for a tweet

12 Oct 2015, by John Wood in Politics

News just breaking (via the FT) that the government may have just dropped proposals under consultation as part of the trade union bill, requiring unions to give employers and the police two weeks’ notice of any social media plans around strikes and pickets.

The idea had been that unions would need to submit a campaign plan, detailing how Twitter and Facebook would be used, what websites would be created, and what content would be published on them.

We’ve been drawing attention to the wrong-headedness of this since the original proposals were drawn up. Unions are by their nature voluntarist organisations. The people who end up on picket lines (or tweeting about them) are directly affected workers protesting a fundamental issue in their working life, not on-message union staffers who all read the memo about what they should say.

As the proposals stood, any tweets that broke the outline of the campaign plan could have seen the unions found in breach of picketing guidelines. They’d be liable for a fine of up to £20,000, and could give employers scope to get the picket declared unlawful and stopped.

It was a nice potted illustration of how the overall trade union bill seeks to suppress protest and skew the balance of power between employers and employees. The proposals didn’t suggest that management would also have to give the union two weeks notice of how they would be responding to a strike – they would keep full flexibility of communications, something denied to the workers.

And we weren’t the only ones who noticed. At second reading Conservative MP David Davis threatened to oppose the bill at third reading if these provisions weren’t removed:

“This proposal strikes me as both impractical—how on earth would it be done?—and asking for judicial trouble. There will be judicial review if this line is pursued. It has been argued that the measure is there to stop bullying. Well, fine—then pass a law to stop bullying and intimidation, but make it affect everybody, not just trade unions. We already have quite a lot of laws to prevent intimidation.”

Presumably the government don’t want the embarrassment of having to stand their arguments up in the committee sessions for the trade union bill, which start tomorrow.

If the news of a U-turn is true, it’s good that they have seen sense on this, but we’re far from satisfied about what’s left. The picketing campaign plans still have ludicrous amounts of impractical details designed to trip unions up offline, even if the online clauses are improved.

Unions will still have to tell employers where pickets or protests will occur; how many will be there; whether they’ll have a megaphone; and so on. They’ll still have to give activists’ names to the police and employers, and appoint picket supervisors, who need to wear armbands and carry letters of authorisation at all times, which must be shown to anyone who asks.

The overall effect will be to make protests and pickets unworkable or easier to challenge, and to scare workers out of getting involved for fear of doing the wrong thing and landing the union a huge fine, or being reported to their employer and being punished for it.

There’s nothing good in the trade union bill, and we’ll be opposing all of it in our evidence to the bill committee this Thursday. There’s a lot else to dislike, from letting employers use agency temps to undermine striking workers, to unfair ballot hurdles that don’t apply to other types of vote. And so far it’s ruling out potential good things like allowing unions to use secure online and workplace balloting to increase turnouts and accountability.

As Frances O’Grady said:

“This is welcome news if true. Forcing unions to tell employers and police two weeks in advance what they plan to post on Facebook and Twitter is a huge threat to civil liberties. However, one concession doesn’t change the fact that this is the biggest attack on unions in over 30 years. We will continue to oppose the whole Trade Union Bill each and every inch of the way.”

If you agree with us, please join our campaign to get it stopped.

(You can do it online right now – no need to give us 14 days notice!)

Government abandons unworkable plans to make unions give 14 days notice for a tweet http://t.co/6dkmERDKfU #TUbill pic.twitter.com/FprKbuDMr2 — TradesUnionCongress (@The_TUC) October 12, 2015