Thursday, August 06, 2015

Union crackdown

3.8 million public sector workers will lose the right to have their trade union subscriptions automatically deducted from their pay cheques.
  

In a move that will be condemned by trade union leaders as another assault on their rights, the government confirmed that the forthcoming trade union bill will force public sector workers to make their own arrangements to pay union subscriptions. It is another example of the government’s hostile approach to their movement after the publication of the trade union bill earlier this month, which included plans to criminalise picketing and to raise the threshold in a strike ballot by requiring that at least 40% of those asked to vote support the strike in key public services.

 It is claimed that administrative costs will be saved in the public sector as 3.8 million trade union members – 54% of the public sector workforce – are told to make their own arrangements to pay their union subscription, mainly by direct debit. Unions say this will lead to a loss in funds by making subscription payments more complicated.

2 comments:

Bernard Bortnick said...

Whatever dues mean in Great Britain, in the U.S. it is largely a dues racket promoted by the divisive capitalist craft unions. If unions are not unifying the entire working class they are divisive and scab affairs with 'contracts' negotiated by separate trades such that the whole is willy-nilly a scabbing organization. Unity of all wage slaves seems to be the only way capitalism will be overturned and socialism established in which a unified all encompassing Union can launch that "administration of things" Marx and Engels referred.

ajohnstone said...

The IWW once had a policy opposing such methods of due collecting as it separated members from the union's organization. But these days most workers are paid through their bank rather than in cash so I suppose the unions consider they are just keeping abreast of the times and minimizing the onerous bureaucracy that collecting dues by hand would result in.