The Right to Strike under UK Law: Not Much More than a Slogan?: Metrobus v Unite The Union * [2009] EWCA Civ 829

Abstract

Under UK law, the statutory provisions which permit the organisation of industrial action and participation in such action are framed in terms of immunities from the tortious and criminal liability that would otherwise attach. For that reason, the existence of a right to strike in this country has sometimes been disputed. In some quarters, the view has persisted that the wording of the legislation reflects the fact that industrial action is an interference with the employer's ‘natural’ right to manage. As Lord Denning famously stated in 1979, ‘Parliament granted immunities to the leaders of trade unions, it did not give them any rights. It did not give them the right to break the law or to do wrong by inducing people to break contracts. It only gave them immunity if they did.’1 Arguing against this view, others have suggested that the negative protection afforded by the statutory immunities ought to be regarded as equivalent to the positive protection of the right to strike found in other jurisdictions; that the choice to frame the law in terms of statutory immunities, rather than rights, was down simply to a technique of drafting.2