UK Govt Plans to Allow Employers to Sue Unions in Public Sector

[Borg Refinery]

Rishi Sunak considered banning thousands of workers from joining a union, according to leaked government emails detailing proposals described as potentially the “biggest attack on workers’ rights and freedoms” for decades. [..]

Union leaders fear the extreme measures – not even known to be under consideration until now – could have also been considered for other sectors, theoretically leading to more than a million workers banned from joining unions.

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said: “These emails reveal that while the government publicly is saying: ‘We want to resolve the dispute’, behind the scenes they were preparing the biggest attacks on fundamental rights and freedoms that we would have seen in this country for generations.” [..]

The first, described as a “police service ban on striking” because officers are banned from industrial action, advocated “BF staff banned from joining a trade union” with striking or “inciting disaffection” to become a criminal offence.

Another model, a “prison service-style ban on striking”, would replicate restrictions on prison officers who are also banned from industrial action with possible concessions such as a new independent pay review body.

The third option – the one chosen last week – was legislation to enforce “minimum service levels” in public sectors such as the NHS, with employers able to sue unions and sack staff if minimum standards are not met. [..]

The emails, however, show that the most extreme model – banning workers from trade union membership – was rejected only because it might “be difficult to justify” because the European Convention on Human Rights guaranteed UK workers the right to join a union.

Because of this, civil servants felt the minimum service levels model was their “preferred option”. [..]

If we weren't under the jurisdiction of the ECHR we would be in deep, deep trouble.

 

[sear]

If we weren't under the jurisdiction of the ECHR we would be in deep, deep trouble.

It's well known the UK opted to separate from the EU.

I don't understand this locus of law enough to understand what connection if any ECHR law has outside the EU.

"the European Convention on Human Rights guaranteed UK workers"

Thus I deduce ECHR applies to UK workers.

It's a bumpy road BR. I imagine there were tensions between labor and management as soon as there was labor and management. It's none too pretty when it gets lopsided. I hope no harm done in this case.

 

[Borg Refinery]

Yes it's confusing; this explains it:

The UK has agreed to be part of the ECHR in a number of international treaties including the Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. If the UK is no longer a member of the ECHR, it could violate international law.24 Jun 2022

The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement contains a number of provisions ‘locking-in’ the UK’s continued commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). As with many other areas, far from closing arguments about the ECHR and human rights after Brexit, the deal shifts them further down the road, writes Frederick Cowell (Birkbeck College).

The ECHR is not an EU institution; the ECHR was created by the Council of Europe in 1950, the EU’s founding text was the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The Council of Europe has 47 members to the EU’s 27 members and countries such as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland are party to the ECHR, but have distinct relationships with the EU. Hence, every law student’s eye-roll when the ECHR and the EU are treated as one and the same. Yet, opposition to the ECHR and the EU in the UK overlap; claims that the ECHR weakens parliamentary sovereignty, were also made in the 2011 debate over the prisoner’s voters ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. As public hostility to immigration increased in the late 2000s a common refrain from focus groups was that asylum seekers and foreign nationals were using human rights to ‘play the system’. The commitment to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA) which brings the ECHR into UK law was first made by the Conservatives in 2006 and was framed part of a wider constitutional reform project which later included a commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Although the demands of the coalition government in the 2010-2015 Parliament ruled much of this out when in 2014 the Conservatives published their proposals for replacing the HRA it was framed in language about sovereignty, with references about protecting ‘our laws’, that in 2016 would become a feature of the Brexit campaign. The proposal that the UK would treat the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights as advisory would, as one analysis suggested, be incompatible with the UK’s obligations under the ECHR pointing towards the UK withdrawing from the ECHR. As the final page of the 2014 proposals made clear the UK’s ‘relationship with the EU will be renegotiated in the next Parliament’ and EU obligations which conflicted with the UK’s new human rights framework would be ‘renegotiated’.

The Brexit process and Britain’s ECHR membership


Yet, when the 2016 referendum came the UK’s relationship with the European Court of Human Rights did not really feature in the debate. After spending much of 2016 delaying the publication of proposals to repeal the HRA the government quietly shelved these plans in December. At the 2017 General Election, the Conservative manifesto said that the party if in government would not ‘repeal or replace the Human Rights Act while the process of Brexit is underway’ but left open the prospect of implementing a change to the UK’s relationship with the European Court of Human Rights after Brexit. [..]

 

[sear]

We're "in the weeds" a bit.
Two separate issues:
- Where we are, &
- how we got here.

I'm a little bit glad we're formalizing human rights, making them explicit.
I'm a little bit sad we have to.