Last week’s Court of Appeal judgment in Metrobus v UNITE must make frustrating reading for the union’s officials: it upholds King J’s grant of an injunction preventing bus drivers from striking in Croydon, Crawley and Orpington last autumn on the basis, firstly that UNITE had not promptly informed Metrobus of the result of its strike ballot, and secondly that its strike notice did not give Metrobus sufficient information to work out how many drivers at each depot would be called out.
Three arguments had persuaded King J to grant the injunction. First, although the strike ballot had closed at noon on 1st September, a mix-up between UNITE and Electoral Reform Services involving a missing fax was at least in part the cause of the union’s only telling Metrobus the outcome almost 48 hours later. That was too long. Second, the union’s correspondence did not properly explain how it arrived at its figures for how many drivers would be called out from which depots – although the Court of Appeal judges all disagreed about how the relevant legislation applied, the majority ruled that insufficient explanation was given. I expect unions are already drawing up guidance for officials about how to comply with this I think quite demanding requirement. The only point on which the majority in the Court of Appeal disagreed with King J was the importance of a statistical typing error – a UNITE secretary, Sandra Evans, had at one point typed 766 instead of 776. The Court of Appeal, surely rightly, thought this error far too trivial to justify an injunction.
The other interesting point about the case is that the Court of Appeal saw all the relevant legislation as compatible with the article 11 Convention right to join a trade union.
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