The Attack on Workers and Trade Unions – The Neoliberal Shift Explained by Lord John Hendy

In this clip, IER Chairperson Lord John Hendy KC explains the imperative need to reform the UK’s labour laws following the period of neoliberalism that sought to disempower trade unions and atomise the working class.

Successive Thatcher-led tory governments rolled out a tranche of anti-union laws which ultimately dismantled sectoral collective bargaining and worker power in the UK. As Lord Hendy explained in the House of Lords last week “collective agreement coverage of UK workers was in excess of 80% between 1945 and 1980. Significantly, the proportion of workers covered by only an enterprise-level collective agreement was almost insignificant and had grown to only 9% by the late 1970s.”

In present day, the percentage of workers whose terms are negotiated by collective agreement now is likely to be around 25%. On almost every established measure of workplace rights, social provision and employment security, British workers lag behind those in other advanced industrial countries – particularly its main European counterparts. In this clip, Hendy explains how the transfer of power away from trade unions and workers has worsened the living standards for the working class:

The consequences has been that the working class today are in a much worse position today than they were in the 1970s. The value of real wages has been stagnant for at least 15 years now, so people’s standards of living are getting worse generally, than they were before, and that is a reflection of the loss of power of working people at work

In the full episode, Lord John Hendy KC, Professor Keith Ewing and Carolyn Jones discuss critical issues such as sectoral collective bargaining, the establishment of a Ministry of Labour, and alignment with international legal standards.

You can listen to the full episode here

All episodes of the IER Podcast can be found here