Mr Prior waits for answers
Peter Paterson
Mr Jim Prior's latest thoughts on the reform of trade union rights and powers emerged last week to cause scarcely a tremor on the Richter scale of union protest. Mr Len Murray paused for a moment from his study of the unemployment statistics to describe Mr Prior's Green Paper as a 're-floating of stale ideas', while Mr David Basnett, emerging no doubt from yet another conference with Mr Michael Foot on the destinies of the Labour Party, merely observed that Certain difficulties would be created for the Police.
In fact, this is the first occasion since Tory arnd Labour governments, with the establitrnent of the Donovan Royal Corn misslcm, began twO decades ago to try to from the power that a set of proposals had such the Department of Employment has _t_ect such an uncontroversial reception. One uGurvieus reason for this is that Mr Prior's een Paper does not really contain any 4,13/°Posals at all. It is a re-rehearsal of many -cirl:itIngPe ideas for reform which have been cL around for years. It comes to no i;enclusinns, Simply setting out the arguint.nIs for and against, and asking anyone by `r,ested to send their observations to him tne end of June. In other words, this is a characteristic Prior manoeuvre, part of his 'softly softly' approach to the subject, and one that has effectively ameliorated the blood-lust of the Conservative right by making the subject as boring and as intractable as possible. Most important of all. it pushes trade union reform .even further down the list of Mrs Thatcher's achievable priorities:. the proposals, when they arrive, will be fodder for the next election manifesto rather than for the legislative programme of this administration.
The Prior stategy has not only sedated the critics in his own party. The unions perhaps confused by the politics of it all allowed his 1980 Employment Act to go through with hardly a protest, although it removed some of the rights which Mr Foot gave them in 1974 and imposed irksome new restrictions on picketing, the closed" shop and secondary industrial action. Now, preoccupied by the slump, which has hit the union bureaucracies just as hard as it has industry, and by the continuing fratricide in the Labour Party, the unions have little time for worry over Mr Prior's academic speculations. Their fortunes are at a low ebb: unemployment has reduced their sub scription income and weakened the will of their remaining members to fight for wage claims even in line with inflation. Interunion strife has broken out on a scale not seen since the Shipwrights and the Boilermakers (now merged into one union) Were cutting each other's throats in the shipyards in the Fifties. Is this the time to get excited over the abstractions and refinements of labour law?
The answer, probably, is Yes. Mr Prior may appear simply as an earnest seeker after truth, but the questions posed in the Green Paper will not go away, and, given the preoccupation of politicians with the uses and abuses of union power, they will establish the framework within which another government Labour. Conservative or Social Democrat/Liberal coalition will seek to operate.
Some of the questions, clearly, go far wider than trade union issues: for example, a system of positive rights, rather than the .existing range of immunities covering industrial action, has to be seen in the context of a new Bill of Rights. No Prime Minister could allow such a massive constitutional change to creep in via the Department of Employment.
But the Green Paper's questions. by their nature, do seem to imply that Mr Prior himself is not satisfied with the changes he established with the Employment Act. He worries about secondary action should it be outlawed completely. or be confined even more strictly than in his Act'? Should the police be empowered to collect the names of pickets to facilitate civil legal proceedings by employers (a question already overtaken by the controversy over whethera policeman would be entitled to . arrest anyone who refuses to give his name)?
For those who have followed the w.hole course of events, from the publication of the Inns of Court Conservative Association's pamphlet A Giant's Strength. through the ineffectual hand-wringing of the Donovan Commission's report and the 'big bang' theory behind Mrs Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife, one intriguing aspect of Mr Prior's questionnaire lies in the resuscitation of various bits of Edward Heath's 1971 Industrial Relations Act. A large section, for example, is devoted to whether collective agreements should be enforceable in law.
The 1971 Act contained the presumption that all such agreements would be regarded as legally binding unless the parties specifically maintained that they were not. So, for a while, unions insisted that agreements should contain a declaration that they were not bindinghardly what the Act intended. Mr Prior outlines a different approach, It is that legal immunities would be suspended if an agreement is breached, or if agreed procedures for settling disputes are not exhausted before industrial action is taken. This would enable the employer to 'seek an injunction and damages under such circumstances.
That sounds satisfactory, but a contrary case is stated immediately on the grounds that, 'given the history and practice of industrial relations in Britain, the task of convincing negotiators of the value of legal enforceability is primarily an educational one. . .' You could argue, of course, that there is nothing more educational than being taken to court and having to pay large damages, but that does not seem to he what Mr Prior has in mind.
The Green Paper also revives the 1971 idea that industrial behaviour can be divided into action which is 'fair' and action which is 'unfair', with penalties attached to the latter. And there are other echoes of Mr Heath's efforts to outlaw overtly 'political' strikes, and his belief that a right to belong to a trade union must be balanced by a right not to belong, although on this occasion the theory attaches to strikes and lockouts.
But surprisingly, in spite of the continuing preoccupation with the closed shop 'The Government's view of the closed shop is clear; it is opposed to the principles underlying it' no attempt has been made to revive one of the more intelligent aspects of the 1971 Act, Borrowing from American experience, the Act devised quite a neat compromise on the closed shop by substituting the so-called 'agency shop', which Offered a great deal more protection (against Grunwick-type employers and other marauding unions) to the union trying to establish and maintain bargaining rights, as well as to the individual threatened by compulsory union membership and coldshouldered as a 'free-rider'.
In 1971 the trade unions were much more of a force for a government to contend with than they are today, and the Act was most successfully destroyed by boycott. But, given the change in circumstances, the unions might be prepared to accept something like the 'agency shop' rather than face a series of expensive challenges to the closed shop.
One other notion paraded by Mr Prior is the old idea that workers in certain essential industries, such as the public utilities, should be forbidden by law from striking. There was once such a law, but it did not work and Mr Heath abolished it. As we now seem to be on the brink of a strike in the water industry which could do more damage to the nation's wellbeing in a fortnight than the whole of the 'winter of discontent' we might as well test one of Mr Prior's ideas. Should the government have the power to declare a strike in the water industry illegal and to ban it? Consider the implications carefully perhaps while you are standing in a queue for the standpipe send your views to Mr Prior, eto The Department of Employment, Caxton House, Tothill Street, London SW1 9NF. Your letter should arrive by 30 June provided that is, the postmen do not go on strike in the meantime.
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