Another post about unions straight away?! I’m sorry, but this one was important.

Striking against the government

So, unions are currently mobilising at the TUC to strike against the government. Now I know that being allowed to strike is a human right, and I am not asking to change the law here to change that. But I do want to draw a distinction between striking against a private company and the government, because I think they are fundamentally different.

When you strike against a company because, for example, you want higher wages or to stop someone being sacked, you are trying to change the behaviour of the company. The company is controlled by the shareholders, so you are trying to change the minds of the shareholders in light of a dispute with someone else in the operational side of the company; a director. This is perfectly reasonable if you are being treated unfairly, and it is your human right to try and change the shareholders mind, going so far as to refuse to work for them anymore by striking, and ultimately resigning.

Your dispute may be with your manager, in which case the unions assistance in providing legal representation or other support is an excellent example of cooperation and organisation, and should lead to an improvement in the organisation, by a change of manager behaviour or their resignation. This is symmetrical with the private sector and at least one reason why public sector unions should exist.

But translate the rest of this to the public sector. If your objection is to redundancies ordered by elected officials the situation is different. The country elects representatives and from these the government is drawn; they have the authority of the people (for a limited time). You may not have voted for them, and you may disagree with what they are doing, but they rightly have the power to run the country as they see fit, changing their mind according to circumstances, because they won.

If you try and defy them; that is to get them to change their behaviour by some means not available to everyone, then you aren’t a democrat, and are ignoring the will of the people.

Newspapers are just talking; everyone can publish literature or set up a website. Protesters are just talking louder; everyone has the right to march on Parliament. Strikers are trying to change government policy by coercion, and wasting everyone’s money or reducing the quality of peoples’ services in the process: this is not OK!

To describe such action as a struggle against oppression is to misrepresent your argument, at least in the UK. Cutting public sector jobs (of which there are currently a lot, you must concede) is one way of governing. It is perfectly legal, and rational according to a mainstream nonviolent political theory, i.e. small-state toryism. It is not oppression. You might not like it, you might say it will hurt the economy, you might object to the government sacking people, but ultimately it is not oppression; your objection is political.

To take your argument further, saying that the Left should always have a veto over the right via public sector trade union strikes is undemocratic, and I object to everything that is undemocratic. It also leads me on to the next part of my argument:

The politicisation of Trade Unionism

BA’s employees struck while Labour were still in power. This might indicate that trade unions care about real issues, and will always represent the interests of their members consistently depending on who is in power; but it also might not. New Labour was much to the right of many of the unions, especially the leaders, and as such there was always a chance of a politically-motivated strike.

But it was not until the Tory prime minister was safely in Downing Street that their conference announced coordinated strike action between 3 huge public sector unions over “the coalition’s cuts”. Never mind that they were Labour’s cuts too, as said Alistair Darling.

This is (not Labour but) the Left’s trump card; this is why they are never out of power. They always have the power to stop the trains and tube or massively decrease NHS coverage for a few days at a time. One of the BBC’s unions is even going to strike during the Tory Conference.

Seriously, this is too much. These people might be elected by trade union members, although if they’re like every other political club that will be ‘whoever turned up,’ but they weren’t elected by me. They are clearly acting for political reasons instead of representing the real interests of their members.

In conclusion, if public sector trade unions want to be allowed strike, they need to let me, and all the less left wing people who vote Tory or UKIP, have a vote somewhere along the line as well.

Otherwise they are as bad as an army who depose the leader if they don’t like the election result; something that is the opposite of democracy.