Conservative Government
From 1979, the UK's Conservative government took a strongly sceptical policy to all forms of employment law and regulation. It opted out of the Social Chapter. This approached mirrored the policy trend of the 1980s, where ten major Acts reduced the power of trade unions. Reforms to the internal structure of unions mandated that representatives be elected and a ballot is taken before a strike, that no worker could strike in sympathetic secondary action with workers with a different employer, and that employers could not run a closed shop system of requiring all workers to join the recognised union. The wage councils were dismantled, and a public campaign against the merits of unions paralleled the decline of membership and collective agreement coverage to under 40 per cent.
Read more about this topic: History Of Labour Law In The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the words conservative government, conservative and/or government:
“A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewed and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)