http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... is-johnson

Or you could stop treating people like dicks.

Personally I think the law should be changed so that if a union member doesn't return a strike ballot paper, it count's as a no to strike action.
At the moment you could have a 40% return with 60% voting to strike. That means only 24% of union members want to strike, but the strike goes ahead anyway. Militant members are more likely to return their ballot papers than non militant ones.

While I agree - this should also be true for all elections inc local / national and Euro

Not sure how that would work. Somebody has to be elected. But if the turnout was lower than 50%, no one would be.

have compulsory voting like in Auz

I really don't see why a union should be held to a higher democratic standard than the country it is in.
Why should a union ballot be any different from a referendum? For example, if David Cameron is in a position to make good on his pledge to hold an in/out referendum on the EU would they declare it null and void if the actual turnout was well below 50% (as most elections are in this country)?

Or indeed the London mayoral election...

If people have the opportunity to vote but fail to cast their ballot they are indicating lack of concern either way.
It is explicitly false to interpret another person's non vote as a taking of sides.

It is also inherently self defeating to tell people what they must have an opinion about.
Enforced voting is counterproductive; no matter what the topic, somebody somewhere doesn't care about it.

If the union is organising the ballot appropriately then nobody is being denied a chance to express their choice.
Therefore their non vote is immaterial. Same applies to democracy in general.

Because everyone can vote at an election. Not everyone can vote on strike action. Did the people of London get to vote on the tube strikes? As strikers affect others, a majority of the membership should be in favour of it as they'll be expected to strike if the motion is carried. Either that or you shouldn't be allowed to strike if you couldn't be bothered to vote.

That's actually incorrect. Not everyone affected by government policy has a vote.


Did the people of Manchester vote for crossrail, that uses billions of pounds of central government funds but will not benefit them one jot? The bare face is the way our system works is almost always that some of us vote and the rest of us accept the decision because that's democracy. If we all threw the hump every time some people voted for something that we didn't like that we had to live with, the world would be a very much less fun place to live in.


That's just not the way any of our democratic processes currently work.

Now, I happen to agree that certain voting processes should be compulsory (voting in general elections for example, which I think I've mentioned before) but the fact is that's just not what we do and we can't have one rule for the votes we agree with, and another for the ones we don't. Unless we're Robert Mugabe, anyway.

As a person of London, I don't think I should get a vote on whether employees of an unrelated organisation get a strike.
Strikes are supposed to negatively affect customers, so my opinion that they shouldn't do it as I might be irritated really has no bearing.

If they want to make it harder for tube workers to strike, they should bite the bullet and declare them some kind of special category of ultra important worker. Then pay them accordingly.
Throwing up silly procedural obstacles as a proxy for saying what you mean is dishonest.
Unless they can show that a proportion are denied the actual right to vote for some reason, in which case existing legislation should suffice.