One of the most anachro­nis­tic le­gal dis­putes to be seen go­ing through our courts late­ly seems to have come to an end, with a judg­ment de­liv­ered by the UK’s Privy Coun­cil re­ject­ing an ap­peal by a for­mer RBC Bank em­ploy­ee and the Sanc­tu­ary Work­ers’ Trade Union in their case against the Reg­is­tra­tion, Recog­ni­tion, and Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Board, the RRCB.

It all be­gan when Mi­toon­lal Per­sad tried to take a trade dis­pute to the In­dus­tri­al Court through the union against his dis­missal by his em­ploy­ers, the RBC Bank, but was stopped by the RRCB when it ruled that Mr Per­sad was not ‘in good stand­ing’ (in oth­er words, that it couldn’t con­firm the pay­ment of his mem­ber­ship dues to the union was up to date).

What Mr Per­sad and the union un­suc­cess­ful­ly tried to re­vert was the grounds of the de­ci­sion by the RRCB and their ar­gu­ment that, by stop­ping him from ac­cess­ing the In­dus­tri­al Court, he was be­ing de­nied ac­cess to jus­tice (this was re­ject­ed be­cause Mr Per­sad could have pur­sued his case via oth­er le­gal routes). So far, so odd, but noth­ing shock­ing, and hard­ly a case for ap­peals all the way to the Privy Coun­cil.

What was tru­ly shock­ing was the fact that the RRCB’s rul­ing came about be­cause the union in ques­tion did not have a bank ac­count, po­ten­tial­ly mak­ing it a lot hard­er for mem­bers to pay their dues and for it to run its busi­ness. In fact, it is ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult to even imag­ine how any op­er­a­tion that col­lects mon­ey from mem­bers, sup­pos­ed­ly pays staff and month­ly out­go­ings like rent and util­i­ty bills, and trans­acts with pub­lic bod­ies and busi­ness­es was do­ing all this with­out hold­ing a bank ac­count.

The union’s de­fence was that it had been set up in Feb­ru­ary 2017 and that it was still too small when the dis­pute arose just over a year lat­er. It re­mained with­out a bank ac­count for at least 18 months since its cre­ation, as con­firmed by the union’s pres­i­dent in a let­ter to the RRCB in Au­gust 2018, in which he ar­gued that costs re­lat­ed to hav­ing a bank ac­count could not be jus­ti­fied giv­en the small mem­ber­ship base and un­der­took to open one once they were high­er.

But what this bizarre case re­al­ly brings to the fore once again is the is­sue of how ac­count­able trade unions are and should be to their mem­bers and so­ci­ety as a whole.

The Trade Unions Act does re­quire them to pro­vide some fi­nan­cial in­for­ma­tion on an an­nu­al ba­sis to a reg­is­trar in the Min­istry of Labour (list­ed as ‘gen­er­al state­ment of re­ceipts, funds, ef­fects, and ex­pen­di­ture’), who al­so has the right to de­mand ac­cess to more de­tailed ac­counts if deemed nec­es­sary.

If this has been hap­pen­ing and has been ap­plied to the Sanc­tu­ary Work­ers’ Trade Union’s ac­counts, why was it al­lowed to start and con­tin­ue to op­er­ate for at least over a year with­out a bank ac­count, with the is­sue on­ly com­ing to light by ac­ci­dent, due to a trade dis­pute?

Or, giv­en oth­er dis­turb­ing is­sues of ac­count­abil­i­ty that came to light in an­oth­er re­cent le­gal dis­pute, when it be­came clear that the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion was be­hind with their an­nu­al ac­counts, should we as­sume this is a deep­er is­sue? The prob­lem is that ac­count­abil­i­ty (or the lack of it) seems al­so to be an is­sue with the reg­is­trar it­self, as it is ex­treme­ly hard to know what it is do­ing, even though the law clear­ly states that ‘an­nu­al re­ports with re­spect to the mat­ters trans­act­ed by the reg­is­trar in pur­suance of this act shall be laid be­fore Par­lia­ment’.

The is­sues sur­fac­ing at the PSA alone over the past few years, rang­ing from ir­reg­u­lar mem­ber­ship lists ahead of its elec­tions to the lack of au­dit­ed ac­counts and claims of ir­reg­u­lar de­ci­sion-mak­ing, show the im­por­tance of over­sight and ac­count­abil­i­ty re­gard­ing the trade union move­ment. Not be­cause they are trade unions, but be­cause, like all oth­er sec­tors in so­ci­ety, they ought to be reg­u­lat­ed and their mem­bers pro­tect­ed from even­tu­al il­le­gal or im­prop­er ac­tions.

In fact, giv­en how their in­dus­tri­al ac­tion de­ci­sions can af­fect every­one’s lives, not on­ly just their mem­bers, there is a strong case for more, not less, reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight to en­sure they op­er­ate with­in the law. In essence, it is about time that the Min­istry of Labour’s reg­is­trar of trade unions does its job—or at least demon­strates it is do­ing its job—by hold­ing the trade unions to ac­count, as the law clear­ly states, for the sake of their mem­bers and the wider so­ci­ety.

For all we know, Mi­toon­lal Per­sad may have paid his fees in cash le­git­i­mate­ly and would have ex­pect­ed the union to take up his case to the In­dus­tri­al Court, a rea­son­able ex­pec­ta­tion it failed to ful­fil, ex­pos­ing not on­ly Mr Per­sad but the oth­er mem­bers, be­cause it didn’t have some­thing as ba­sic as a bank ac­count.

As a min­i­mum, we should do this to avoid the em­bar­rass­ment of end­ing up again with a case at the Privy Coun­cil cen­tred on the fact that one of our trade unions was al­lowed to op­er­ate with­out some­thing as ba­sic as a bank ac­count with no alarms ring­ing at any gov­ern­ment de­part­ment or agency, es­pe­cial­ly at the Min­istry of Labour.

And, who knows, the dis­pute can al­so help us ad­dress an­oth­er ab­sur­di­ty (in this case, one en­shrined in law): the fact that Mr Per­sad had to be a trade union mem­ber just to try and have his case heard by the In­dus­tri­al Court.

This vir­tu­al mo­nop­oly our trade unions hold over the In­dus­tri­al Court nev­er made and will nev­er make sense, but this re­stric­tive ap­proach to jus­tice makes even less sense if unions’ op­er­a­tions and ac­counts are al­lowed to re­main opaque and with­out the right lev­el of over­sight re­quired by law and gov­er­nance best prac­tice.