Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Thursday 8th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow my noble friend Lord Davies because I absolutely agree with what he says. I would add, just from my own experience, that, early in my working life, I worked in a retail organisation where there was a staff forum and where I and colleagues were organising to establish a trade union. The difference is this: that staff forum was set up by the employer. It was not set up by workers. That staff forum was funded by the employer; it was not funded by workers. That staff forum was not democratic, whereas the whole point of a trade union is that it is a democratic organisation of working people. I would hope that one of the aims we could share across this House is to see an increase—an expansion—of genuine collective bargaining, because the evidence is very clear that, internationally, we see that the demise of collective bargaining has been associated with growing inequality, worse conditions at work, a poorer share of the wealth that workers help produce and no independent democratic voice.

I would hope that, in this country, we recognise that there are many, many working people who feel they have been denied a genuine voice—an independent voice—at work and in society, and they are rightly fed up about it. If we want to tackle that—if we want to tackle inequality and the sense of powerlessness that many people feel—it is collective bargaining through the route of independent, democratic trade unionism that we all need to see grow.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was not intending to speak in this group and I am torn between both sides. I have some cynicism about the Opposition’s attempt at recognising non-trade unions and staff associations. I entirely understand the point that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, has just made about employer-led staff clubs, which I have been, over the years, invited to join. While they have been very pleasurably good social forums, they are very different from trade unions.

However, I am afraid that there is a danger that we can romanticise what contemporary trade unionism is, based on the very fine history of 150 years of struggle. I do not actually think that trade unions at the moment should take for granted that workers will be loyal to them, because there have been far too many instances of trade unions not being fit for purpose. Indeed, there is often a huge gap between trade union leaders and trade union members. Many members are leaving unions or not joining them, and that is not always because of evil bosses in a kind of caricatured way.

At Second Reading, I made the point—and I am only repeating it here now—that, for example, the Darlington Nursing Union has been set up because the nursing unions have abandoned female members of staff who were nurses and who have been attacked by their HR departments and their employers for their political views in relation to gender and sex. As it happens, we now can appreciate that they were simply reiterating their right to privacy as biological women—something that the Supreme Court has now at least acknowledged is the law—but they have been harassed and bullied and so on, and the trade unions abandoned them.

I made a point about the Free Speech Union. I appreciate that it is not a trade union, and nobody, least of all me, is suggesting that the noble Lord, Lord Young, who is in his place, will become the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, of future negotiations. Despite the fact that that is an unlikely role for the noble Lord, Lord Young, the Free Speech Union has been forced into existence and has represented workers who have been done over by their employers when their trade unions have abandoned them. That is the point I am making.

The UCU is one example of a university union. I was a NATFHE rep for many years in the further education sector and I have watched in horror the way that that union has degenerated and sold out its members. So, for the record, I would prefer that we did not caricature each other in a way that does not represent the contemporary time. The trade unions today are not the trade unions of old. They could do with upping their game. Similarly, I do not think the trade unions are the evil enemy of employers, as is sometimes implied by people sitting closer to me on this side of the House.