Impact of the Trade Union Act 1984 on the BMA.

Abstract

When the Conservative administration entered office in June 1979 it was widely believed that the tide of industrial relations legislation would recede. Such an assumption could not have been more mistaken: since 1979 the government has enacted three important and extensive pieces of legislation in this area? the Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982 and the Trade Union Act 1984.13 All these are intended to alter radically the be? haviour of trade unions and their members. For the most part professional bodies such as the BMA have been able to observe these changes in employment law from a safe distance; the new legislation on the legality of strikes and picketing was not seen to have any direct bearing on an organisa? tion whose members were unlikely to take part in (or even contemplate) such activities. The main thrust of the legislation was seen to be aimed at the industrial unions, not professional bodies. This pattern was broken by the Trade Union Act 1984, in particular by that part of it that establishes new rules for the election of executive bodies of trade unions. When the govern? ment published its green paper Democracy in Trade Unions in January 1983 the BMA initially assumed that its highly demo? cratic procedures more than satisfied the principles of trade union enunciated in the discussion paper: voting invariably takes place in conditions of secrecy; members eligible to vote have the opportunity to do so under a system which provides the best opportunity of a reasonable turn out; votes are counted fairly; and those who take decisions at the highest levels are properly representative of, and accountable to, the membership as a whole.4 Indeed, was not the BMA, in the words of the celebrated historians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, one of the most highly developed and efficient of British professional organisations with a complicated constitution, which included all the devices of advanced democracy ? Thus we could continue to believe that the government's proposed legislation was not directed at the medical profession's representative organisation. When the Trade Union Bill was published, however, it was based on more specific and rigorous principles than those first enunciated. The Bill laid down three main provisions for that every trade union would have to satisfy: that members of a trade union should be able to elect their executive committee by secret ballot; that there should be consultation with members in a secret ballot before industrial action is taken; and that members should vote at least once every 10 years on whether their union should maintain a political fund. Only the first of these proposals was likely to affect the BMA to any extent. In this area the government's proposals were more specific in that the new legislation would require elections to the governing bodies of trade unions?that is, their principal executive committees?to be conducted in accordance with the following basic principles :