The right to strike




UK law has never included a positive legal right to strike or to take other forms of industrial action. Instead, workers are protected by immunities from a civil claim in the courts such as breach of contract, but only if they take specific forms of industrial action and follow a tightly prescribed series of rules. 




Industrial action laws cover not just strikes but also lockouts, go-slows, working to rule and refusing to cross picket lines. Overtime bans, even where overtime is voluntary, have also been treated as industrial action, since the aim is to pressure the employer to do, or not to do, something (Ticehurst v British Telecommunications plc [19920 IRLR 219). (For a contrary view on whether withholding voluntary tasks can amount to industrial action, see the recent High Court judgment in the case of Ministry of Justice v The Prison Officers' Association [2017] EWHC 1839. In this case, the court suggested that if tasks are truly voluntary, a coordinated withdrawal from those tasks cannot amount to industrial action, since there is no contractual obligation to perform them).


As well as being highly restrictive, UK strike laws are out of date. They were designed for a world of direct, continuous, full-time employment and have failed to keep pace with the different and more fragmented ways in which work is now organised, including outsourcing and the widespread use of false self-employment (see Chapter 2). In particular, it is not unusual for groups to work alongside each other doing the same or similar work but employed by different employers and therefore unable to support each other through industrial action. Secondary or “solidarity” action (industrial action in support of the workers of another employer) is banned in the UK (see page 170). 




Some categories of worker are forbidden by law to strike in the UK. These include members of the armed services, prison officers (in England and Wales), police officers and civil servants working for the National Crime Agency. In 2015, prison officers in Scotland regained the right to strike. By contrast in 2017 in England, the High Court took the unprecedented step of granting the Ministry of Justice a permanent injunction preventing prison officers from striking (Ministry of Justice v POA [2017] EWHC 1839).