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 The Trade Union Bill committee met yesterday (22nd October) to discuss the bill’s proposals on union ballots, or specifically its lack of proposals to improve them.
The TUC marked this by handing in our petition signed by you and more than 20,000 supporters, calling for unions to be allowed to use secure online and workplace balloting in addition to the postal voting they are currently restricted to.
In a press release issued today, the TUC said:
“It’s important, as the current proposals in the trade union bill are totally wrong-headed. The government’s rationale for the new regulations is that they would like to see higher turnout in union strike votes. However, they are planning to address this merely by ruling invalid any vote that doesn’t meet arbitrary new thresholds. It’s new bureaucracy that nobody needs.
The 1992 TULRCA act limited unions to conducting strike ballots only by post, rather than casting votes in the workplace. Turnouts dropped as a result. Postal balloting is slow, expensive, and depresses turnouts. People lose their papers in the junk mail, forget to post it until the deadline has passed, or even get returns lost in the post.”
The TUC takes the stance that action is required by working people, and says:
“There are two ways we could get the turnouts back up. Secure online balloting would let people return a vote by computer or mobile. Government opposition to this has focused on it being insecure, but it’s only less secure when it’s compared to proper ballot box voting, which isn’t the choice on offer here.
 Postal voting is an imperfect system too and shares the same vulnerabilities as secure online. Hundreds of successful and secure online ballots have already been run by organisations of all types – including the Conservative Party themselves, who seem to have forgotten that they elected their London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith online only this month.”
The Tory government may claim that they have security concerns, but that is a false assertion; given they won’t offer option, such as putting an independently controlled ballot box and secret vote into the workplace, so people can vote at work.
That would be comparable to the general election system that they hold up as the gold standard for security and transparency.
The TUC says that it knows that secure online and workplace balloting will work in improving turnouts. The government simply don’t need to bring in more red tape if they want to see more people voting in union strike ballots.
Next month the MPs will vote on this controversial Trade
Union Bill, which threatens the basic right to strike for UK workers.
Shortly before the vote, on the afternoon of Monday 2 November, hundreds of people from all over the country will gather in London to meet their MPs. This is a big opportunity to make sure your MP hears directly from people worried by the government’s plans to undermine the right to strike and to restrict pickets and protests. Following a nearby rally in Central Hall, you’ll go with others to see your local MP in the House of Commons.
Source: TUC
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