from Bob Gregory
"The Worker and the Law" (Penguin Books 7/6) is an invaluable and longawaited guide to the position of the law as it affects trade unionists. Important chapters deal with issues such as Contracts of Employment, Collective Bargaining, Compensation and Members' rights when in dispute with their union. The most significant section, however, is the chapter dealing with the _—_ to strike, and the appendix which discusses the Trades Disputes Bill1,1965.
No reader should imagine that the law will be made clear for him as a result of reading this book, He will probably leave it feeling both angry and bewildered, But this is no fault of the author, Professor K.\. Wedderburn, whose exposition is clear and useful. The fault, rather, lies with the law. If the law is, as commonly supposed, an ass, then the ass is on the side of the employer,
During 1964, the whole issue of the right to strike was affected by the judgements in two cases: Stratford v. Lindley, and Rookes v. Barnard. Statutes placed in being at the end of the last century and in the first year of this were reinterpreted by the law Lords in an anti-union fashion, Professor Wedderburn quotes Professor Kahn-Freund as saying: "One is under the impression that the regressive tendencies of the courts, which in the 19th and early 20th centuries had to be repeatedly counteracted by Parliament, are on the point of being revived."
Labour's election promise to the unions was to rectify this mess. Many commentators called for a new law which would have rationalised the whole position and cleared up the anomalies of the 1906 Trades Disputes Act which gave rise to the re-interpretation. The T.U.C. more modestly requested an amendment to the 1906 Act which would have restored the ground lost since Rookes v. Barnard, but which would have left certain other anomalies still to be resolved, It is amazing, therefore, that the Government's Trades Dispute Bill, 1965, will probably confuse the issues still further and falls considerably short of the T.U.C.'s proposals. It may involve the unions in new test cases to establish the meaning of the new Bill and leaves on one side important areas of legislation in which the trade unions need to be protected from litigation. The real goods, it seems, will only be delivered after the findings of the Royal Commission have been made. Meanwhile, the mess remains and Professor Wedderburn's comment is that the new Bill "is the narrowest measure that could honour the pledge to provide..,protection for union membership and officials," Determined courts, he says, will not find it difficult to evade the terms of the Bill. Towards Socialism continued/
The New Left has now achieved a mature and truimphant demolition of the theoretical supports of Labourism. The myths have been destroyed: they can hardly continue to claim factual or analytical respectability. Conversely, the so-often limping, frustrated and bewildered left is being equipped not with a crutch, but a springboard. If the concepts, the strategies, the armoury, which this volume contains can be absorbed, disseminated and refined in fruitful and constructive discussion, and . translated into coherent programmes, the near-future may startle the young, and rejuvenate many older socialists, who at this moment are so dismayed at the collapse of the halfhopes of Wilsonism, and the weakness of the parliamentary left. No one who is seeking that possibility can afford to neglect this book.