Labour’s radical employment rights strategy is risky – but, if successful, it could fundamentally change Britain and its economy
“I believe in management’s right to manage – and I also believe in the trade unions’ right to stop them.” This combative adage has always been attributed in my experience to Hugh Scanlon, who went from being one of the last of the overmighty trade union barons in the turbulent Britain of the 1970s to spending his later years as an actual baron of the realm before his death in 2004.
The words certainly represent Scanlon’s generally irreconcilable view of industrial relations under capitalism, as I can confirm from an expensive lunch I once had with this deeply interesting man in the 1980s. Many on the Marxist left of Scanlon’s era would have agreed with his words, the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill among them. And there are some union activists who still subscribe to them today.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government is emphatically not in the business of encouraging this approach. Quite the contrary. The watchword of the industrial relations section of Labour’s election manifesto this year was not conflict but its very opposite: partnership. The emphasis on partnership is central to the agreement that Labour and the unions crafted before the election, in its “new deal for working people”.
Look inside the new deal document and you will find a menu of strengthened employment rights on issues such as zero-hours contracts, parental leave and unfair...
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