Queen’s Speech

Lord Monks Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the Minister on his maiden speech. He brings, among many other things, a much-needed lustre to a group much mocked and reviled in recent years in this House and more widely: I refer of course to supporters of Manchester United. Congratulations, too, to the noble Lord, Lord King, on his debut.

I had hoped that the Conservatives had exhausted their supply of bile against British trade unions and that the ludicrous dollop of red tape in the recent lobbying Act was the final scrape of that particular barrel. Clearly, though, there is plenty of bile left, as the original step-by-step approach of the 1980s is reappearing. A new Bill is proposed that aims to hobble trade union action still further. We are threatened with more curbs on balloting, with thresholds that no other organisations have to satisfy, as has been mentioned by my noble friend Lady Donaghy. Labour agencies would be allowed to bust strikes, which is something that those agencies do not even want because they do not want a reputation like that. We are threatened with changes in facility time for representatives along with contracting in to political contributions rather than contracting out, an old threat that has been revived as an attack on unions’ campaigning ability, whether or not they are anything to do with the Labour Party. This agenda is tribal hostility, no more, no less.

Noble Lords will be thinking, as I am a former general secretary of the TUC, “He would say this, wouldn’t he?”. After all, who today is afraid of the union wolf? It may still be bad but it is not very big—not as big as it used to be. However, join me for a moment in reflecting on the following truths. There are 6.4 million people in trade unions. I see that just this week the Royal College of Midwives joined the TUC: that is the kind of people that trade union members are today. Collective bargaining covers 30% of the workforce. Union membership is not just confined to the public sector, as I often hear; it remains the norm in most UK companies with more than 500 employees. Last time I looked, 41 of the FTSE top 50 were unionised companies; I could list them but your Lordships know all the household names that I would refer to. Thousands of agreements are made every year. Strikes are infrequent and relations are generally constructive.

So why are the Government so set on clouting unions again? Why is that a priority at this time? There are many features of the British labour market that work far less well than collective bargaining and the trade union role. The Minister and others in today’s debate have rightly put productivity at the heart of the country’s problems and of the Government’s programme, and I welcome that. We lag alarmingly behind comparable countries and it is not easy to turn things round. One thing that it is unwise to do, though, is pick a fight with one of the component parts of improving productivity, the trade unions. That was a gap in what the Minister said earlier—the need to involve and engage people, not just train them, though that is very important. Bringing people with you, getting their morale up and making them feel respected and worth something is very important if we are to make it to the premier league of productivity. Unions are an important part of that, not just something that is marginal or that can be given a kick now and again with no consequences.

It is not just productivity where the union role is important. Take inequality, which has alarmed even the IMF, the World Economic Forum and the CBI in recent months and years. When union membership was higher and collective bargaining covered 70% of the workforce, directors and other top executives knew that they could not help themselves to an annual, possibly double-digit pay increase, often regardless of performance, without facing the possibility of a wave of militancy of people claiming comparability. In the past 30 years, though, too many have adopted a self-service culture, feeling free to help themselves to a large chunk of the company income. To a large extent, that is now recognised across the political spectrum.

In the 1920s, a period of union weakness, Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister, worried about boardroom greed and rising inequality. His solution was to build up institutions for collective bargaining through the then new Ministry of Labour. Baldwin also acted to bring in contracting in to the political levy, so he stops well short of being one of my political heroes. But what he did on collective bargaining is certainly relevant to today, and I hope that the more fair-minded and long-sighted Members on the Benches opposite and more widely will recognise that that is important.

We need influential and constructive trade unions to sort out decent living wages. It cannot all be done by law and it will not all be done by voluntarism. We need proper information and consultation arrangements. We need decent contracts with people that respect them, rather than just putting them on humiliating zero-hours casual bargain-basement contracts of the kind that are too prevalent today. A genuine one-nation Government would recognise that the need to boost productivity and promote long-termism in business cultures is interfered with by any tribal instincts of some in the Conservative Party to give unions a kicking.

This Bill deserves tough scrutiny in the House. I hope that we see a bit more of the spirit of Baldwin and rather less of the venom of the 1980s. Is that just too much to ask?