BA’s vindictive attacks on striking cabin crew have rightly been condemned by 95 leading industrial relations academics as an attempt to break their union and further erode worker rights.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/25/ba-strike-letter-academics-walsh
In yesterday’s Morning Star, Keith Ewing, President of the Institute of Employment Rights, looked at the potential legal implications of the dispute in an article ‘BA's assault on human rights’:
“The right to strike is recognised as a human right in international treaty after international treaty, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Council of Europe's Social Charter of 1961. It is even recognised in the EU Treaty of Lisbon. Not only that. The right to strike has recently been said by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg to be protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. And the European Court has suggested that in determining the scope of the right to strike it is necessary to ensure that national law complies with the right to strike as protected by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).”
Professor Ewing points out that recent ECHR decisions may provide a way for the BA strikers to take a claim under the convention on human rights and concludes that “one of the emerging lessons from the BA dispute is that trade unions now need to think very, very seriously about committing time, energy and resources to a litigation strategy to get these rights back.”
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/88454
