Trade Union Bill
Debate between Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe and Lord Elton
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I did not speak in the dress rehearsal on 19 November, when my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock moved a Motion about the trade unions. I was here for most of the debate and read all of it. It was generally positive and constructive and we did not get the digging in to extreme positions that we have occasionally heard during today’s debate. In particular, I read the Minister’s contribution. She said that the Government recognise,
“that trade unions have a valuable role to play in developing our workforce and in ensuring that the vulnerable are able to participate in work”.
She stressed,
“the importance of trade unions and why I believe it is right that the legislative framework needs reform … to modernise the relationship between trade unions and their members and to redress the balance between the rights of trade unions and the rights of the general public”.—[Official Report, 19/11/15; col. 314.]
She pointed out, as she has done today, that the Government pledged in their manifesto to undertake these reforms and bring the Bill forward and this is what you have done.
I read the manifesto to check what you had written and what you have brought forward. Page 18 carries about 2,000 words that cover this. There is no mention, however, of the proposal to change check-off. If the Government are supportive generally of trade unions and their aims and do not want to undermine them, I would like the Minister to explain why they did not have that in the manifesto and why it has now suddenly appeared. If she has been listening carefully to the contributions today, she will know that this is one of the changes that will seriously undermine not just what might happen with money between the unions and the Labour Party but the ability of some unions to perform.
That is not because there is a mismatch between the interests of the members and the unions. Previously I have seen check-off withdrawn in the Civil Service from the Prison Officers’ Association. Many years ago that was undertaken and what happened? It weakened the union because in due course the number of members went down, not because the members were opposed to the union or were not prepared to put themselves out; it was simply an issue of them not being willing to do anything more than say, “Yes, I will agree to check-off but I am not going to start fiddling around with my bank account and the rest of it or start going into other areas”. It was as straightforward as that.
So if you are not truly about undermining the unions, you need to explain why you are going to go ahead with this quite dangerous piece of change. I rather support the view of the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, that these are the kinds of issues where a test is brought to bear on whether the Government are serious about making matters better or whether they are being quite malicious and determined to knock one side down. I hope you are not, but on the face of things it looks very much like that.
Having embarked on this little exercise, I took the trouble of going through the rest of your manifesto—the whole 81 pages—and, given that we keep hearing the Chancellor speaking about your party being the one that represents working people, I was looking to see on how many occasions you said anything about life at work. With this Bill we are talking about a much diminished trade union organisation compared to what it was some years ago. We now have barely 6 million or 7 million trade union members, yet we now happily have 30 million people at work who, for one reason or another, are not members of a trade union. I went through what you were offering the whole of the population who were able to vote, not just those who were trade unionists or non-trade unionists, and it was quite interesting to pick up some little statements where you said you were going to back people at work. You are going to work to reduce inequality—
Lord Elton (Con)
I do not want to restrict the flow of the noble Lord’s very eloquent speech, but we have not heard whether the “you” he keeps using is singular or plural. If he could revert to using the third person, as required in the Companion, that would make it much easier.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
I am grateful for being put right and I will endeavour to do my best on that score. I cannot guarantee it, however. You have nicely thrown me off my line as well. Thank you very much for that.
After looking at the relatively modest references in the manifesto to working conditions for 30 million people, what I really wanted to look for in the legislation, when it came, was the whole point about what is going wrong with industrial relations that needs rescuing—I pick up the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Morris, particularly—to see whether we can find some way of having a piece of legislation that was not simply negative but would perhaps look to the positive as well.
On 19 November, the Minister reminded us:
“This is a free country. Everybody has the right to belong to a trade union. Equally, there is no compulsion in the workplace to do so. Closed shops are a thing of the past”.—[Official Report, 19/11/15; col. 312.]
Of course they are. However, what she or some of her friends may not realise is that we now have millions of people at work who do not know what we are talking about when we talk about the closed shop. It is in the past. But if one looks at the evidence that has come from a whole range of organisations about the nature of conditions at work, what many people know is that when they go to work, where they spend much of their lives, they have very little control over it; as technology develops, they have less and less so, and there is often a diminishing respect between employer and employees. If she cares to look at the work that has been done by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, she will see that one in three employees experienced a form of interpersonal conflict at work in the preceding year; and that a lack of respect is the most common way in which conflicts affect behaviour at work, with 61% saying that they have difficulties with those issues.
Yes, those 24 million people are free to join trade unions if they wish, although there have to be 50 or more workers employed and the majority of them voting for it for a trade union to be admitted to represent them. Since over 90% of those employees are in small to medium enterprises with fewer than 50 employees, it is not surprising that there is an ever-growing body of employees with no representative rights at work. Going back to your manifesto, will you tell the 24 million to 25 million UK employees who are not in unions how you will fight for them, how you will fight for equal opportunity, and how you will see greater gender equality at work and the other aspects that are mentioned in the manifesto?
In the main, most of these issues cannot be resolved by legislation at the centre. They have to be worked at. Those of us who have worked in workplaces know that the solutions are to be found down at the workplace level. But now, as I say, an increasing number of people are effectively voiceless. Although unemployment has been falling, there is a rising number of low-skilled jobs, zero-hours contracts and low pay, with stagnant productivity across the country and ill-equipped and poorly trained staff. Are the trade unions responsible for that? I would say no, and I do not believe the Minister herself would agree with that.
What we therefore need is something to go in this legislation which is positive, which works for the other people who are there. I know that the unions did not particularly want to see changes in the legislation that was introduced in 2005 on consultation. Perhaps the Minister might go back and have a look at that and see whether we cannot find something that would be positive and of benefit and would get us away from the continual divisions that we find on industrial relations and produce the consensus that is needed to make things better.