Prior's anti-union law: ATTACK ON WORKING CONDTIONS

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Part three of a series by Jack Burnett 1) a letter to her employers to return to work. 2) if her employers write for receipt and finally saves indicating her intention confirmation of her return she While the main thrust of Prior's anti-union Employment Bill is to weaken the labour movement in future battles with capital, he has also taken a little time off to deliver a few blows against the present condiin the House of Lords, the Earl of Gowrie explained the rationale for these attacks when he criticised Parliament for having in the past passed legislation that had:

"accustomed the electorate to a greater degree of mental and physical comfort than our national situation allows"

A state of affairs that the present government are energetically reversing!

Reverse

Here the attack is to reverse the most paltry and inadequate of gains made in recent years.

Only four years ago there was no statutory protection of pregnant women's jobs. Before 1976, maternity rights depended on individual agreements, and how seriously the well-organised sections of the labour movement thought of women's rights is well expressed in the national agreement in engineering that covers 400,000 women workers and had absolutely nothing to say on maternity leave or pay.

The Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act of 1978 conceded that a woman with two years continuous employment in the same job has a right to return within 29 weeks of the birth of her baby to:

"the job in which she was employed under the original contract of employment and on terms and conditions not less favourable than those which would have been applicable to her if she had not been so absent"

Like all parliamentary legislation even when passed under popular pressure the form is granted while the content of such social reform is limited.

Exclude The restrictions like the two year qualifying period will effectively exclude many women from "enjoying" this legislation, for many women of child bearing age will have entered employment quite recently and therefore won't qualify and many others will have gone from one employer to another and consequentiy debarred themsleves from the Act's provisions.

But while the neutral civil servants of social democratic governments frame legislation in such a way as to exclude many of thosé it is intended to benefit, the Tories come along to clobber the remainder that managed to jump through the restrictive hoops.

Prior's law will now demand of women who meet all the above requirements that they will still forfeit their rights unless they rigidly comply with a whole new set of bureaucratic obstructions.

On top of the normal notifications she would give her vritten three weeks before she employers, are now added:

Prior letter three weeks before her date of return. Failure to fulfil any one of these stipulations could lead to the woman losing her legal right to return to work.

The employer has no obligation to inform her of any of these conditions.

And having met them all, she still has no right to her own Job. Instead her employer is free to give her "suitable" alternative employment which Prior's law states must not be "substantially" less favourable than what she was doing before.

The word substantial and the word suitable can cover a great deal of ground and there's little doubt that Prior intends employers to exploit it to the full.

For those working for small capitalists Prior's attack is complete.

Not wanting the small busi nessman to be as frustrated over his tedious new regulations as he intends to make the employee, Prior has simplified his obligations enormously. He doesn't have any!

Divert

To quote Prior's Minister of State for Employment (sic!) the inimitable Earl of Gowrie, a preoccupation with legislation "diverts management's attention from the central task of running a business".

And to assist them with this central task Prior's law states that employers of six workers or less do not have to re-instate a woman who wants to return to her job after having had a baby if it "is not reasonably practicable to do so"

The "'apartheid'-like approach that Prior has introPHOTO: John Sturrock, Report duced whereby a woman worker has either limited maternity rights or none at all, depending entirely on the accidental fact of the size of the workforce, is also extended by Prior into clause 7 of his law which deals with unfair dismissal.

One of the first things this government did-without waiting for a new Employment Billwas extend the qualifying period of protection from unfair dismissal from 26 to 52 weeks.

The new Employment Act doubles yet again in less than a year the period of no protection against unfair dismissal.

For an employer with less than 20 workers, two years employment has to be worked must comply within 14 days of before any legal protection against dismissal is given the 3) she must write a third worker.

And for those workers who do wish to bring a claim for unfair dismissal and are legally entitled to, the dice have been further loaded by Prior against them.

Firstly the 'onus' that formally at least was on an employer to prove he had believed reasonably in dismissing a worker is reversed.

Now an employee is assumed guilty and has to prove instead that the employer acted unreasonably.

Clause 8 of the Act which deals with the "compensation" paid in proven cases of unfair dismissal abolishes the minimum award of two weeks' pay-which is overwhelmingly the normal pittance paid out in such cases.

This clause would also allow a tribunal to further reduce its award in a case of proven unfair dismissal if the management could bring forward evidence of the employee's "misconduct"even if totally unrelated to the actual case for dismissal made by the employer!

And again refusal of an unfairly dismissed person to accept what an employer is pleased to call reasonable reinstatement' could lead to further reductions in the Tribunal's award.

A subsequent article will deal in greater detail with the role of industrial tribunals.

Here it is necessary just to observe that the Thatcher government's assault on postwar state incorporation of the unions is not without its positive side for the working class.

Tribunals in short undermine shop floor organisation and provide a legal screen behind which union bureaucrats can hide their treachery.

Pitiful

The pitiful hand outs they grant a tew workers is a small price indeed for the bosses to pay for the corrosive effect they have of working class consicousness.

The blind hatred that a shop keeper's daughter feels towards the working class obscures for Thatcher what a powerful instrument of the capitalist class she is busily dismantling and discrediting.

In this contradictory sense it can be said that Prior's assault on Tribunals will be regarded as the most progressive piece of legislation that this government ever enacted!

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tions of the working class. James Prior's right hand man