10 December 2018

Labour would reinstate the right to take sympathy action to support workers abroad, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has said.

Speaking at an event in Airdrie, McDonnell pointed to the acts of Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride who refused to work on the engines that were powering Chilean airplanes used to inflict violence on the country's people in the 1970s.

The Shadow Chancellor said the actions of those workers "struck a blow against the brutal Pinochet dictatorship" and was a "fantastic example of the operation of trade union rights".

Promising to repeal Thatcher-era laws that removed the right of workers to take "collective action and acts of solidarity" with their counterparts in other countries, McDonnell reiterated Labour's commitment to those recommendations made in the Institute of Employment Rights' Manifesto for Labour Law - to reinstate sectoral collective bargaining and establish a Ministry of Labour to "give workers a voice in parliament", as well as to provide "decent pay and equal rights for people from day one".

"Our programme of workplace reform will restore the balance between employer and worker, and it will do so by installing basic trade union rights in law again," he said.