Personally, given the substantial costs to the business of IA and the protection afforded to employees/union who take official IA (including not being liable for the damages they incur), I would like to go a step further and suggest a law that says:
"greater than 50% of all union eligible employees are required to vote in favour of IA for it to be consider official....."
I consider an employee's decision whether to join the union or not is in effect the first step, the second step is to actually vote when called and the third step is to vote "Yes" in favour of IA. Then, for example, if 90% of eligible employees choose to join the union and 80% actually vote and 80% vote in favour of IA the union would have 0.9 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 57.6% and could declare a majority win.
What happened yesterday at BAA with a less than 50% turn-out had UNITE saying "employees voted 3 to 1 in favour" of IA when the truth of the matter is that "only 1 in 4 eligible employees actually voted for IA" which is a very different matter. UNITE would have been able to make the very same statement had only 3 employees voted in favour out of 4 actually voting from a work force of 6,000. Which, I trust, all of us would agree is ludicrous! Likewise,as BASSA was proposing, this would also render ineffective the union balloting a conveniently selected sub-section of its membership only and then declaring the same specious statement.
The ability to cause £1bns of damages (without any liability) by simply doing nothing other than being an apathetic member of a union seems to me like an inordinate amount of power to give someone.
Last edited by Phil Rigg; 13th Aug 2010 at 14:21.