Successful campaigning by the STUC shows how issues affecting both workers’ rights and constitutional arrangements can be nudged towards change. Earlier this month, Scottish trade unions persuaded the UK-wide Trades Union Congress that employment law should be devolved to Holyrood: the laws affecting Scottish employment rights should be under the control of Scottish parliamentarians.
As well as calling for the TUC General Council to campaign for the devolution of employment law to Scotland, the motion moved from Unite the Union reaffirmed the importance of repealing all Tory anti-trade union laws, including the Strikes Bill and the Trade Union Act (2016).
Scottish Trades Union Congress General Secretary Roz Foyer ‘deeply welcomed’ the TUC’s backing: ‘It’s clear, especially to any incoming UK Labour Government, that the voices of workers across the country now support the Scottish Parliament having full autonomy over labour and employment rights.
She identified ‘a guaranteed minimum floor of workers’ rights across the UK’ as ‘a prudent first step to achieve this. We would expect both UK and Scottish Labour politicians to entrench and build on these rights within both parliaments, ensuring the Scottish Parliament is empowered whilst giving every worker in every workplace a guaranteed standard of rights from day one of any future UK Labour Government.
STUC ‘deplores’ Labour’s lack of consultation with trade unionists on constitutional reform proposals
The STUC also considered the report of the Labour Party Commission on the Future of the United Kingdom, welcoming its call for ‘the replacement of the House of Lords by an elected Assembly of the Nations and Regions, for its proposal that constitutional status be given to the Sewell Convention (which provided the Scottish Parliament, among other things, control over our country’s economic and industrial policies) and additionally that the Scottish Parliament be accorded greater borrowing powers’.
The STUC also noted ‘the explicit constitutional requirement to rebalance the UK’s economy so that prosperity and investment can be spread more equally between different parts of the United Kingdom’. But it ‘viewed with great concern the document’s failure to make any explicit reference to the role of the public sector in securing this equality and its apparent assumption that this will be achieved in liaison with the private sector – despite all the evidence demonstrating that it has been the financialised ownership across the private sector that has been responsible for the lack of investment, de-industrialisation and uneven development’.
A lack of proper process helped explain this weakness in Labour’s proposals: the commission had failed to ’undertake consultation with the trade union movement or the STUC’. Trade union leaders, however, are committed to promoting their views on these crucial issues, and will ‘make representations to the Labour Party to ensure that STUC policies on the role of the public sector and of renationalisation of basic services and utilities be incorporated and made explicit in any policy statements along with the active role of trade unions in all aspects of the management of economic assets’. There was also a call for ‘a more general discussion’ on achieving ‘constitutional changes in face of the immediate and deepening economic and social crisis – without prejudice to the longer-term issue of whether or not independence would benefit working people’.
Published 25 September 2023.