Enemies of the workers

Labour asks for support from the unions but stabs them in the back.
Special report: New Labour in power
The British government is celebrating a victory in Europe, according to a report I read last Monday from the European editor of the Press Association, Geoff Meade. Britain has fought and argued that the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Human Rights should not be made legally binding on member states.

Originally the charter sought to guarantee the legal right of workers to organise in trade unions; the right to negotiate with employers; the right to withdraw their labour when deemed by them to be right to do so. It also included the legal right of employees to be consulted by employers on all matters affecting their interests as employees.

It's well known that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were bitterly against such legal provision. They argued that the protection of workers as workers was a matter of social policy while the protection of workers, as individuals, outside their employment, could be considered a question of human rights.

This convoluted and somewhat abstruse reasoning that absurdly compartmentalised human rights for workers was but a cover for their real concern. Such European laws would supersede Thatcher's Law that made British trade unions the least free in the developed world. As a consequence of the Blair government's strenuous efforts, it looks as if our unions will remain the least free.

The latest draft of the charter will go for endorsement to the Euro-summit in Nice next month and as it stands will not be legally binding. The European TUC including the British TUC will be lobbying in force, insisting that workers' rights are human rights and should enjoy the full authority of the law in free societies.

The European TUC supported the charter as envisaged at the EU council that met in Cologne in June 1999, which concluded that the "protection of fundamental rights is a founding principle of the (European) Union and an indispensable prerequisite for her legitimacy".

The European trade unions made their opinions clear. "A real 'protection of fundamental rights' implies the legally binding incorporation of these rights in the treaties." The British Government opposed such proposals.

It is incredible, but none the less true, that this British Labour government is now seen as the arch enemy of trade unionism in Europe. How can it be that a political party - the British Labour party, founded and funded by trade unions - should now, in government, bite the hand that fed and still feeds it?

In this respect the writing was on the wall before the 1997 general election. In April 1997, Larry Whitty, then general secretary of the Labour party, spoke at a meeting of Labour party members in Brussels. These included Labour MEPs, their staff, Labour party members who happened to be employees of the EU and others who were employed in the private sector and domiciled at that time in Brussels.

In his speech Larry said: "One of [his] worries is the number of IOUs being pocketed by the CBI and pledged by Tony Blair." Now whatever electoral promises he has broken there is no doubt that Blair honoured these pledges.

Shortly after the general election, as Britain's new prime minister, Blair assured businessmen that however he might tinker with employ ment laws and trade union rights in the UK, they could be certain that at the end of the exercise Britain's trade unions would still be the least free in Europe.

This became part of the sales pitch for encouraging inward investment in the United Kingdom. Come to Britain, under New Labour, and get yourself a shackled and tamed workforce.

Yet New Labour now has the gall to ask British trade unions to give an additional eight million quid to its war chest for the next election. It stabs them in the back; it stabs them in the front, while taking their money. That's mugging by another name. For the unions to give this lot a penny would be an act of masochism and not trade unionism. To give them eight million would be lunacy.

 Jimmy Reid, now a writer and broadcaster, led shop stewards in the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders dispute.