To prevent repeats of the P&O travesty, unions must get tougher

theguardian.com:

Spare a moment for the real victim of the mass sacking of P&O workers: Natalie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover. When she turned up to address a local protest in support of the now redundant staff, the attendees were, for some reason, unimpressed with her failure to vote against fire-and-rehire rules that had left those workers vulnerable to gangster capitalists such as the owners of P&O Ferries. After they chanted, “Shame on you” she warned fellow MPs of the dangers of “militant unionism”, and said she had been “bullied” and “abused”.

But increasing numbers of Britons have come to realise that the real menace is not militant unionism, but militant capitalism. And that rather than being too extreme, the modern labour movement has been too subdued. Trade union membership is around half of its 1979 peak: just a quarter of the British workforce are members of unions, and in the private sector, it’s a derisory 13%. As Tony Blair boasted in 1997, British law was “the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world”, and Tory anti-union laws have only tightened that vice since. Communities based around secure jobs in mining, factories and docks have given way to a precarious and transient workforce that is harder to organise.

And there’s an even bigger existential menace to trade unions: decades of officially sanctioned hostility to trade unionism has left the very concept alien to many younger people. ​​As one study of young core workers by the Trades Union Congress in the UK found: “The vast majority hadn’t heard the words ‘trade union’ and couldn’t provide a definition.”

But a new generation of trade unionists believe these are challenges to overcome, not excuses for passivity. “The anti-union laws in the UK are