To be updated:

I can tell you this, people: the unions plan to stick tight to Red Ed, no matter how Ed and his supporters try to cut them.

I went to a House of Commons lobby for John McDonnell’s Lawful Industrial Action Bill, where two points were repeatedly observed: 1) the bill has its second reading this Friday and 2) union members expect Labour MPs to turn up to vote it on. We were there to knock on MPs’ doors and make that point directly. We like to think that Red Ed was thrilled that we were there.

We also like to think he’d back the bill. He wouldn’t need big balls to do it – the Lawful Industrial Action Bill is wet and watered-down enough to appeal to, well, any flinching Murdoch bitch. “It’s so bloody moderate it’s undermined my revolutionary credentials,” McDonnell rightly observed. It’s so bloody moderate that the TUC conference gave it full backing in September. Red Ed could hardly be burned.

The point of the bill is to end the undemocratic employer practice of challenging strike ballots on the ‘strength’ of minor balloting errors.

Employers successfully overturn ballot results where unions make small mistakes with member information – where a tiny number of addresses or job titles are incorrect, and that sort of thing. A proposed strike action with a 90% Yes vote goes no further if an employer finds holes in the union’s paperwork.

Things are even less democratic when employers are responsible for the holes. In Johnston Press vs the NUJ this year, for example, the NUJ was forced to abandon a journalists’ strike when the employer claimed to ’employ no journalists,’ even though Johnston Press’ website stated that it employed 1900 journalists and the affected journalists wanted to strike as such.

As Bob Crow observed, it’s not beneath employers to change people’s job titles quickly to scupper a ballot. The onus is on the union to make sure its member records match the employer’s. That can be hard to do if member job information changes and nobody is immediately informed. Extreme pedantry is a feature of some employer challenges: only last year, EDF won an injunction against the RMT because a strike notice defined the potential strikers as engineers and technicians, rather listing exact job titles.

Here’s Crow on life in that labyrinth:

The Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act already says that accidental errors made by unions ‘on a scale unlikely to affect the result of a ballot’ should be disregarded.

The problem is that employers are making hay with definitions of ‘accidental.’

McDonnell’s bill would amend the act. He wants ‘small accidental failures in ballots and strike notices’ to be disregarded and burdens of proof moved to employers – they would need to show that member records and strike notices were substantially (rather than slightly) inaccurate.

McDonnell hopes to bring UK strike legislation in line with the rest of electoral law “where an election’s outcome can’t be challenged if it was conducted substantially in accordance with the law.” (Imagine the theatrics if Boris was chucked out on account of a few misspelt names on the electoral roll).

McDonnell rightly puts the boot into Labour for not tweaking this law – and for not overturning Thatcher’s appalling anti-union laws full stop – while it had the chance. Labour’s failure then leaves thousands now even more vulnerable to the coalition’s war on jobs. Doesn’t matter how many Yes votes a strike ballot gets if an employer and a few hanging judges dropkick each of them out of frame:

For those who remain of the romantic view that employers live only to negotiate with staff, particularly in a recession, here is Matt Wrack of the Fire Bridgades Union describing an all-too-common modern-day evil – where employers use the legendary HR1 process to sack an entire workforce and tell people they’ll only get their jobs back if they sign new contracts on lesser salaries and conditions.

I’ve met so many people who never dreamed that would happen to them.

And here’s Crow reminding Labour why it is called Labour. I don’t care whether or not the RMT is affiliated to the party, or if it true that Uncle Bob is most of the way out to lunch. For once, he was right on the ball:

The bill will be read this Friday.