Trade Union Bill

Lord Stoddart of Swindon Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jordan (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for being unable, through my own fault, to speak at Second Reading. I give general support to this group of amendments, and to Amendment 38 in particular. It is a positive amendment to a Bill that has little positive about it. It is designed to delay and decrease the likelihood of industrial action starting and gives an incentive to both sides to keep talking without disadvantage to either.

The Bill ought to have been about resolving disputes, not about organising them. My noble friend Lord Lea mentioned the junior doctors today on strike. They are not the usual suspects when we think about strikers. We have heard lots of statistics about the overwhelming number of workers who have never been on strike, and, for those who have, how it was, for them, once in a lifetime. There are times when people do things they do not want to do, believing that there is no other way. No workplace is immune to this dilemma; not even this Chamber. How many noble Lords did not want to vote against the Government on benefits cuts? But they did, believing there was no other way to answer a Government who were neither listening nor prepared to do the right thing. Every single day, in countless workplaces, decent men and women encounter petty but sometimes serious injustices. Most times they take it and carry on working. But there are times, as your Lordships know, when you have to take a stand. If laws are needed when the working relationship breaks down, they should help to repair that relationship. This Bill does not.

This amendment is a simple, small step to making a bad situation better. It provides a mutual opportunity for a second chance to resolve a dispute. This is a chance for second thoughts about finding a solution to what is, by then, an entrenched conflict. This is not only what businesses want; it is what customers, the consumers of their products, want. I urge support for this amendment. Let us test the Government’s ability to be sensible.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a retired member of Unite. I joined my first trade union in 1943 as a youth in training on the Post Office telephones, so I have a bit of experience that I can share with the noble Lord, Lord Deben.

I give support to these amendments and, in particular, to the noble Lord, Lord Collins, who spoke about consultation. That is always much better than confrontation. Throughout my life I have been involved in trade union activities. When I worked for the CEGB I was secretary of the local advisory council and a member of the regional and national advisory councils, so I have been around trade unionism for a very long time. I was always impressed at amendments that were put into the gas and electricity Bills at the time—I think they were moved by Mr Mikardo, who was then MP for Reading—which made provision for consultation. Since I took part in that consultation, I know that it works.

The power station in which I worked had previously been owned by the Wessex Electricity Company. It was not used to consultation. When the company was nationalised, and the law said that there should be consultation, it had to embark upon it. I helped it to do so. It was a long, hard job but in the end consultation does work. Certainly, in my time the people I represented never needed to go for strike action or go-slow action, because we had the patience to do so.

That is what the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and these amendments are talking about: patience, consultation and understanding. The noble Lord, Lord Jordan, was general secretary of one of the trade unions to which I used to belong and knows his stuff as far as trade unionism is concerned. I just wanted to say those few words to support the idea that consultation works. This Bill is not consultation, it is confrontation and confrontation never works. It only causes disaster, both to the employers and the workers themselves.

The noble Lord, Lord Deben, had a lot of interruptions —I felt sorry for him, really, but he can take it; he has been around a long time. He was absolutely right to talk about the customer. The customer in this case is wronged by strike action. But he must not imagine that the customer is always against the striker. I can assure him that when we had the miners’ strikes in the 1970s, people were queuing up to accommodate the striking miners in their own homes. Indeed, according to the opinion polls, two-thirds of the public support the junior doctors. The public are not always against strikes, although they often are. But I support the amendments and I think that on the whole this is a very foolish Bill.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull]

My Lords, this group of Labour amendments, particularly Amendment 38, seeks to inject a further term of flexibility into the period of time before which a mandate might ultimately expire. Currently there is no ultimate time limit but, as has already been said, any reasonable trade union would wish to ensure that it still had the full support of its members before setting a date for strike action to take place. The problem with deadlines is that they up the ante. The pressure on both employers and trade unions is to achieve a resolution, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, indicated.

Amendment 35 seeks to substitute a 12-month mandate for the four months suggested by the Government. It is very difficult to know whether 12 months would be any more suitable because every trade union dispute is different. To me, 12 months feels too long—but what is the right period of time? Labour Amendment 38 addresses this in what seems a very reasonable way: the period of the mandate can be renewed every three months where the employer and the union have a mutual agreement to that effect. Again, this injects an important element of flexibility and would stop the race towards meeting the four-month deadline, which could result in a nuclear option being exercised by the trade union—or, indeed, the employer.

It seems somewhat ironic that this Government purport to want to devolve power and decision-making but here they are being prescriptive in a way that is very likely to exacerbate the breakdown in employer/trade union relations rather than enable the business of negotiation to proceed in a smooth way. Neither employers nor trade unions will benefit from the setting of an arbitrary four-month mandate. We want more “talk, talk” not “walk, walk”, particularly because, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and several other noble Lords have mentioned, the customer is going to be disadvantaged.