The Royal Mail – a completely legal strike.
I was wondering to myself how it can be that the Royal Mail’s staff can go on strike and then after trying to recruit extra workers to cover services during the strike be told by Bill Hayes, leader of the Communication Workers Union that “I think it’s a stupid move, more than anything else. It’s something that’s not going to help resolve the dispute. It’s going to inflame things,” which he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, according to The Guardian . Bill Hayes also threatened to sue any agencies which tried to help find workers during the strike.
It was in Personnel Today that I dug out the story of when, in 2007, 20,000 prison officers walked out over pay – this was illegal as the Prison Officers Union had made a private agreement with the government not to strike. The Ministry of Justice stepped in with an injunction to force the officers back to work or face some time on the other side of prison life themselves. I guess prison officers would not be the most popular people with their fellow inmates and all returned to work!
The Labour party decided that the Conservative party’s Criminal Justice Bill should be shelved and this brought an end to the illegality of essential workers ability to strike. Now there are simply agreements in principle between the essential workers unions and the government over not striking, such as the aforementioned Prison Officers. Personnel Today also refers to Hammonds solicitors which informs that this type of ‘no-strike agreement – is part of a collective agreement between a trade union and an employer – and is a voluntary, private contract, which agrees ‘in principle’ that unions will not stage industrial action’.
So the Royal Mail is (of course) within it’s legal rights to strike if other forms of negotiation have failed as there is no private agreement in place….. but I have heard that the private delivery companies are rubbing their hands together with a flood of new business and ever competitive rates vs Royal Mail. This boost to competitors combined with the current recession does make it seem an ill-timed dispute over pay, conditions and modernization but clearly there is a collective feeling at Royal Mail that the problems need addressing right now.
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December 17th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
[...] an earlier blogpost, back in October I mentioned the Royal Mail Strike and how some strikes were now potentially not illegal as Labour Shelved the Criminal Justice [...]