9. Industrial action

The law relating to industrial action covers not just strikes but lockouts, go slows, working to rule, and refusing to cross picket lines, regardless of whether or not industrial action is in breach of an agreed procedure. Overtime bans (even where overtime is voluntary) are normally treated as industrial action since the aim of a ban is to put pressure on the employer to do, or not to do, something.

Under UK law there is no positive legal right to strike. Instead, workers are protected by immunities if they take specific forms of industrial action that would otherwise be unlawful. How these immunities operate is explained below.

Some employees are forbidden by law to strike. These include members of the armed services, prison officers and police officers. The newest addition to this list is civil servants working for the National Crime Agency, who are prevented from striking by section 13 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013.

The UK has some of the most restrictive strike laws in the developed world. The UK strike laws are also outmoded. Laws that were built for an employment model based on direct continuous full-time employment have not kept up with changes in work organisation, restructurings, outsourcing or business transfers and increased fragmentation of the workforce.

Some forms of industrial action are absolutely banned. The most important is secondary or solidarity action, that is to say, industrial action in support of the workers of another employer. This has very important implications. In particular, the ban means that workers who work alongside each other but who have different employers cannot take action in support of each other’s strike, even if they are doing the same job. In practice the ban makes it exceptionally difficult to support workers who transfer to a new employer under TUPE, or to engage in multi-employer collective bargaining (see Chapter 12).