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Originally Posted by LondonRoad
This is what makes the High court decision so undemocratic. There is a fair bit of time passes between informing the employer of the ballot process, the ballot, the result and then the industrial action.
In that time there will always be some people who receives a ballot paper who are not entitled to vote. The decision yesterday was about a few hundred people who no matter how the voted wouldn't have affected the overall outcome.
In the future, if there is a much closer ballot, does the employer only have to find one or two people who shouldn't have voted to run to the High Court to force the union to start the process again. Bad precedent  |
Hang on, hang on ... I think it's about time we tempered all this feverish commentary with a little learned opinion. Here's a few wide words from an industrial relations lawyer, offered to the BBC before the outcome of the legal challenge was announced:
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Marc Meryon, industrial relations partner at the law firm Bircham Dyson Bell, said BA's case rested on whether Unite took enough care in ruling ex-employees out of the ballot. "The outcome of the case will depend on how many people they have balloted who have left, and how long ago they left," he said.
"If the union has been balloting people who left the company six or nine months ago… then the company will be saying that it was reasonable to expect the union to have got it right and excluded them [from the ballot].
"But if they are complaining about people who left within the last month or two then it's much more difficult to show that the union was at fault."
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8414306.stm
As is often the way in these sorts of cases, there's the critical word
reasonable. What you're suggesting as the future nightmare scenario simply is not reasonable. No judge is going to halt a strike just because an employer can find a small handful of people who shouldn't have been balloted. For BA to have won this, there must have been a substantial number of people who were not entitled to vote, and there must have been some good evidence that Unite didn't bother to take reasonable steps to avoid balloting them.
---------- Post added at 13:29 ---------- Previous post was at 13:27 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by papa smurf
and all it cost was democracy what a bargain .
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What's so democratic about a trade union that's prepared to flout the law in order to get its way? The laws on how strikes are called are there to prevent unions abusing their power and were put there by a democratically-elected parliament.