The right to strike in the UK


Under UK law, there never has been a positive legal right to strike, or to take other forms of industrial action. Instead, workers are protected by “immunities” if they take specific forms of industrial action that would otherwise be unlawful, as long as they follow a tightly prescribed series of rules. Once fully implemented, the TUA16 will make it even harder for workers to secure and then hold onto protection from the immunities. 


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) are normally treated as industrial action, since the aim is to put pressure on the employer to do, or not to do, something.


As well as being highly restrictive, UK strike laws are outmoded. Like most statutory employment rights, they were designed for an employment model of direct continuous full-time employment and have failed to keep pace with the increasing fragmentation of the workforce, including outsourcing, restructuring and the growth of false self-employment. In particular, it is not unusual for groups of workers, including agency workers, to work alongside each other, often doing the same or similar work, but being employed by different organisations and therefore unable to support each other through industrial action. Secondary or solidarity action (i.e. industrial action in support of the workers of another employer) is banned in the UK. The ban has many important implications including making it much harder to organise industrial action in the context of a TUPE transfer (see Chapter 12). 


The UK’s industrial action laws are also out of date because the government has consistently fought against unions’ attempts to harness new technological opportunities to increase workplace participation through the use of electronic balloting for industrial action, although on this issue, an important concession was won following House of Lords’ opposition during the passage of the TUA16 — see below: Balloting.


Some categories of worker are forbidden by law to strike in the UK. These include members of the armed services, prison officers, police officers and civil servants working for the National Crime Agency.