‘Red Len’ backs down over 50% strike ballot rules
UNION baron ‘ Red’ Len McCluskey offered a surprise concession on new anti-strike laws yesterday – as he accepted the need for 50 per cent turnouts before workers walk out.
Despite running a hostile campaign against the law for months, Mr McCluskey said he would do a deal on turnouts in return for digital and workplace ballots.
David Cameron welcomed the U-turn but indicated he was opposed to electronic balloting. The Unite boss said he would accept the Government’s insistence that a strike can go ahead only if 50 per cent of those eligible voted. But in return he said voting should be allowed in workplaces and online.
In a letter to Mr Cameron, he said he was ‘comfortable about accepting the thresholds and the time limit on the validity of bal- lots’. As well as imposing a 50 per cent turnout rule, the Trade Union Bill will also end so-called ‘rolling ballots’ whereby strikes are called months and months after the vote, and impose a time limit of four months.
Mr Cameron told The Andrew Marr Show: ‘The trade unions are accepting these thresholds are right, that you shouldn’t have damaging strikes that close schools or shut hospitals or stop underground systems working, you shouldn’t have those things
without a proper turnout of voters.’ But he added: ‘The Speaker of the House of Commons did put together a commission to look at electronic voting and the conclusion was that it wasn’t safe from fraud. So I think there are problems with that approach.
‘Is it really too much to ask someone who is going to go on strike, who is going to disrupt people’s children’s school, to fill in a ballot paper?’
The PM suggested controversial parts of the Bill – such as a requirement for people on pickets to wear armbands – could be reviewed.
‘All these measures in the legislation can be discussed as they go through Parliament,’ he said.
Last week Mr McCluskey compared forcing people to wear armbands to Nazi rules forcing trade unions to wear armbands with red triangles ‘in the concentration camps of Dachau’.
He told the BBC the Bill was ‘deeply, deeply divisive’, adding: ‘There are occasions, and our history is littered with them, where bad laws are introduced even by elected governments. People have not only a right to oppose them but a duty to stand up and defy them.’
‘There comes a time when you have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your membership and if this law pushes our members outside of the law, what we in Unite will do is we won’t abandon our members. If that pushes us outside the law, then it will be the Prime Minister’s responsibility for the outcomes of that.’
Unite officials said they wanted ‘secure’ workplace ballots monitored by the Electoral Reform Society. They pointed out the Tory Party’s ballot for its London mayoral candidate – won last week by Zac Goldsmith – was conducted online.
‘Comfortable with
the thresholds’