My Lords, this group of Labour amendments, particularly Amendment 38, seeks to inject a further term of flexibility into the period of time before which a mandate might ultimately expire. Currently there is no ultimate time limit but, as has already been said, any reasonable trade union would wish to ensure that it still had the full support of its members before setting a date for strike action to take place. The problem with deadlines is that they up the ante. The pressure on both employers and trade unions is to achieve a resolution, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, indicated.
Amendment 35 seeks to substitute a 12-month mandate for the four months suggested by the Government. It is very difficult to know whether 12 months would be any more suitable because every trade union dispute is different. To me, 12 months feels too long—but what is the right period of time? Labour Amendment 38 addresses this in what seems a very reasonable way: the period of the mandate can be renewed every three months where the employer and the union have a mutual agreement to that effect. Again, this injects an
important element of flexibility and would stop the race towards meeting the four-month deadline, which could result in a nuclear option being exercised by the trade union—or, indeed, the employer.
It seems somewhat ironic that this Government purport to want to devolve power and decision-making but here they are being prescriptive in a way that is very likely to exacerbate the breakdown in employer/trade union relations rather than enable the business of negotiation to proceed in a smooth way. Neither employers nor trade unions will benefit from the setting of an arbitrary four-month mandate. We want more “talk, talk” not “walk, walk”, particularly because, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and several other noble Lords have mentioned, the customer is going to be disadvantaged.
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