Employment Relations Bill

One of the key provisions of the Employment Relations Act 1999 was the establishment of a statutory procedure for the recognition of trade unions by employers for collective bargaining purposes. Following a review of the effectiveness of that legislation, the Government has introduced a new Employment Relations Bill that addresses a number of areas where it believes that recognition procedures could be improved and trade union law modernised.

The Bill contains:

• measures to improve the operation of the statutory recognition procedure, for example, by clarifying issues surrounding the determination of the appropriate bargaining unit and "topics" for collective bargaining, by allowing unions to communicate with workers at an earlier stage in the process, and clarifying and building on the current legislation relating to the supply of information to the Central Arbitration Committee and the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas)
• measures to simplify the law on industrial action ballots and ballot notices
• provisions to increase the protections against the dismissal of employees taking official and lawfully-organised industrial action by exempting "lock-out" days form the 8-week protected period
• measures to implement the European Court of Human Rights judgment in the case of Wilson & Palmer, which ensure that union members have clear rights to use their union's services, and cannot be bribed by employers to relinquish essential union rights
• measures to improve the operation of some individual employment rights such as a clarification of the role of the companion in grievance and disciplinary hearings; and a technical change to flexible working legislation concerning protections from unfair dismissal
• a power to make regulations to introduce information and consultation in the workplace, by implementing the EC Directive on Information and Consultation
• measures to improve the enforcement regime of the national minimum wage (see News item on 22 August 2003)
• measures to give the Certification Officer greater powers to strike out weak or vexatious claims
• measures to improve trade union regulation, and a power to allow the Secretary of State to include non-postal methods of balloting in statutory union elections and ballots

Other matters which the Government intends to include in the Bill in due course are

• measures to widen the ability of unions to expel or exclude racist activists and others whose political behaviour is incompatible with trade union membership, and
• measures to protect strikers against dismissal, by defining more closely the actions which employers and unions should undertake when taking reasonable procedural steps to resolve industrial disputes.

(Sources: www.dti.gov.uk/er/erbill_2003.htm )
...back to 5 December 2003