Trade Union Bill exemption call for Scotland

 Roseanna Cunningham, Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for Fair Work Skills & Training has made an official request to Minister for Skills, Nick Boles that Scotland be excluded from the entire Trade Union Bill.

Ms Cunningham believes that the proposals within the Trade Union Bill could potentially undermine effective engagement of trade unions within Scottish workplaces particularly that of the Scottish public sector.

Ms Cunningham said “that all the measures within the Bill in combination will affect employees’ right to strike, change the relationship between unions and organisations negatively, and lead to greater confusion amongst employees. The letter states that this directly impacts across Scottish business and especially the devolved public services in Scotland and is therefore not a constructive platform upon which the Scottish government can pursue their ambitions for Scottish workers.”

She is also concerned that as the Bill is currently drafted there is considerable scope for abuse in the future and as much of the detail within the Bill is to be set out in regulations, the Scottish government would not have any opportunity to formally influence the regulations.

The conclusion of the letter is a request that Scotland is excluded from the Bill in its entirety and that as one of the UK government’s amendments to this Bill an alternative extent clause is introduced. The belief of the Scottish government is that the extent clause will be the only way they can maintain the integrity of their more progressive approach of working in partnership with unions and in particular, for devolved Scottish public services to remain guided by the Scottish Ministers and the Parliament.

  Comment

Will it ever work? Two governments’ one country! The devolution of power is a rocky road and as the saying goes:

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.