TGWU loses ban appeal
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• The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by the Transport and General Workers Union against a ruling that the union had unreasonably refused to allow lorry driver Kenneth Tucker to transfer his membership to the Liverpool Commercial Transport branch.
The dispute started when Geoff Barker managing director of R Barker & Sons (Transport) hired Tucker, who belonged to the Union's Skelmersdale branch. This contravened a union membership agreement that Barker would only employ Liverpool branch members: when the firm wanted to recruit a driver it told the Liverpool branch and it was sent one from the branch's list of unemployed drivers.
When that procedure was not followed, Tucker's application to transfer to the Liverpool branch was refused and the company was blacked by the union.
Tucker complained to an industrial tribunal after Barker was forced to sack him. The tribunal felt the union's conduct was "deplorable" and it ordered that he be admitted to the Liverpool branch without delay (CM 15 June 1985). An appeal against that decision was dismissed by the Employment Appeals Tribunal in October 1986, and the union appealed to the High Court.
Timothy Horlock conceded on behalf of the TGWU that a person had the right not to have an application for union membership unreasonably re fused, but he argued that Tucker's application had been for membership of a branch. He also suggested that Barker had repudiated the agreement by employing Tucker before he had applied to transfer his membership to the branch.
The Master of the Rolls, Sir John Donaldson, did not agree. He said that the Liverpool branch had been found by the tribunal to have been accepted as being the "union" specified in the agreement. In his view, it was wholly unrealistic to suggest that Barker had repudiated the agreement. The company had thought that there would be no trouble and merely jumped the gun.
In dismissing the appeal, Donaldson criticised the length of time that the case had taken to come before the court.