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UK government makes it easier to go on strike

Published 06/08/2024, 16:03
© Reuters.  UK government makes it easier to go on strike

Proactive Investors - Trade unions celebrated Downing Street's plans to overturn some of the previous government's restrictions on industrial action, which demanded that a minimum level of service needed to be provided during strikes.

The government said it felt the minimum service level laws "unduly restrict the right to strike and undermine good industrial relations".

Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and business secretary Jonathan Reynolds have written to government departments and the Scottish and Welsh first ministers asking them to encourage employers to avoid imposing minimum service levels on their workforce until the act is repealed.

With the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act of 2023 seen as unworkable, the new Labour government said, it will be repealed through the proposed Employment Rights Bill, which is planned to be introduced in Parliament within the first 100 days of government and also contains other barriers to workers collectively organising themselves through trade unions.

"We believe this will help to usher in a new era of partnership that sees trade unions, employers and government working constructively together in co-operation and through negotiation," Reynolds' Department for Business & Trade said in a statement.

"This is an important part of our plan for growth and to raise living standards for everyone, everywhere. We will do this by boosting productivity, boosting incomes and levelling the playing field so that employers who do right by their workers are no longer undercut in a race to the bottom."

TUC general secretary, Paul Nowak, told the Guardian newspaper that the minimum service law was "spiteful" and that "strikes are resolved around the table – not through legislating away dissent".

Under the previous government, long strikes over pay were held by junior doctors and teachers in the public sector, as well as rail and postal workers in former state monopoly sectors, among others. New chancellor Rachel Reeves last month said she would accept the independent pay commission's recommendations for pay deals for public workers.

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