In the long-running case of The Pharmacists' Defence Association Union v Boots, the PDAU sought compulsory recognition for its pharmacists under the statutory rules. However, before the PDAU applied to the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) for recognition, the employer entered into a "sweetheart" recognition agreement for the pharmacists' bargaining unit with the Boots Pharmacists Association (BPA), a non-independent union.
Under the statutory rules, PDAU's application was inadmissible because there was already one union "recognised to conduct collective bargaining". The idea behind this provision is to stop one trade union from displacing another recognised union, but it applied even though the agreement with BPA was limited to some fairly peripheral issues and didn’t cover collective bargaining for the basic issues of pay, hours and holidays.
After going through various different stages, the case ended up in the Court of Appeal – to decide if the rules were incompatible with Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to form and join a trade union) because it made the exercise of trade union rights ineffective.
The Court of Appeal has confirmed that there is no breach of Article 11 because the statutory procedures contain specific rules allowing workers to apply for derecognition of a non-independent union. In practice, this would not be an easy option – one of the pharmacists would have to be willing to take it on and would have to show the CAC that at least 10% of the bargaining unit were in favour of derecognition and that a majority would be likely to be in favour, before the CAC could even accept the application and take it to a vote.
