Not in the Bill, but providing the context to it, is the government’s plan to introduce from summer 2013 hearing and issuing fees in the Tribunal ranging from £400 in unlawful deduction of wages cases, £1200 in unfair dismissal and £1600 in discrimination claims. Workers will pay the fees; employers will pay nothing. These fees represent roughly 25% of a claimant’s likely award, in theory they could be claimed back on winning the claim, save that Tribunal awards are poorly enforced and only around 40% of employers pay Tribunal awards in full.
Fees are also a threat to unions. Around 2% of employees are dismissed in any year. If you take a union like the RMT with around 75,000 members, that’s 1,500 people. If each was to bring an unfair dismissal claim, with the union’s backing, that would require the union to pay £1.8 million a year, merely to get the same limited access to Tribunals that workers have now. This is equivalent to around 25% of the union’s entire national budget. No union could cover the “hit” that fees will represent without to some extent cutting back on the number of cases they fund.
The introduction of fees is bitterly unpopular with lawyers and judges. A serious union campaign against fees would have a real chance of success, but the details of fees has been in the public domain for 4 months now and there are far too few signs of one starting any time soon.
Finally, while a successful strike may stop a dismissal, barely one in 500 successful unfair dismissal claims ends in an order reinstating a claimant. Even while we campaign against the Coalition’s attacks, there is an argument for socialists to win as to what are the most effective means in fighting for workplace justice.
yeah, i meant to say in coventry.
