Trade Union Access to Workplaces

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Justin Madders]

I absolutely agree. We have had a number of debates on blacklisting, particularly in construction, but it applies in other areas. Whistleblowers often find that, once they have blown the whistle, they are unable to gain employment. It is a disgraceful activity that needs outlawing.

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend was just coming on to health and safety. Our area has a lot of heavy industry manufacturing. Does he agree that all the evidence demonstrates that where there is an active trade union branch, there is a much better safety culture than where trade unions are not welcome or, in some cases, prevented from organising?

[Justin Madders]

Yes. We have a lot of potentially dangerous industries in our area. The ones I tend to deal with have been around for a long time. They all have long-standing recognition agreements with trade unions, and excellent safety records as a result. It is a learning process, not an adversarial process, particularly in health and safety.

Some companies ought to take a leaf out of those employers’ books and learn how to treat and to deal with employee representatives in a much more reasonable and engaging way. A number of employers behave despicably, adding to employees’ fears about victimisation, which leaves many individuals not wanting their employers to know that they belong to a trade union. How sad is that? How damning is it that some companies are so vindictive to their staff that their employees will not tell them that they belong to a trade union?

Only last week I met a constituent who told me what it was like in his workplace, where unions are not welcome, where arbitrary decisions are made about who is retained and who is let go, and where all the workers are too worried to put their head above the parapet. I hope to discuss my concerns with the company in due course, but does it really need a Member of Parliament to remind an employer of how to treat its staff? If a trade union official was allowed access to the site, they would be able to do that, and in the end everybody would benefit—the workers and the company. At the moment they are locked out, which is simply not good enough. It is shocking that these kinds of things still take place in the 21st century.

What is the point of someone having the right to join a trade union if they cannot exercise that right because an employer refuses to engage? What is the point of their being a trade union member if they cannot be represented? I have lost count of the number of times companies have lied to employees about their right to be accompanied by trade union reps at disciplinary or grievance hearings by saying that, because the company does not recognise a particular trade union, those unions do not have the right to attend the hearings. The Government should clamp down on that.

We have a culture of weak employment rights, greedy corporations and a Government that obstruct trade unions. We need to get away from that and towards a period of renewal and rebuilding of one of the pillars of a decent society: job security. Without job security, people have no security. How can they plan for their future, for a home or for their family if the labour market is so cut-throat, so insecure and so parasitic that they are always just one step away from disaster? The stabilising force of trade unions is a vital component of a decent society.

“Rights” is not a dirty word. Rights are not only about individual dignity and respect in the workplace; they give people a stake in society, when they know that if they do a good job and their employer runs the business well, they will be rewarded. We need an economy —and a country—where everyone has a stake in its prosperity, but to do that we must have a system that values the security and sustainability of a job itself as much as the principle of job creation. Good employers want to work with unions, and in an ideal world all employers would be able to do so without the need for the legislation that we have talked about.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the previous speakers in this important debate. Having worked for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers—USDAW, the shop workers’ union—for 18 years before coming to this place, I have seen an enormous amount of good practice in a trade union. I am sad to say that, since being elected as a Member of Parliament, I have seen the opposite side of the coin. Constituents come to me with employment cases, some of them really serious, and my first question is always whether they are a member of a trade union. I am really sorry to say that the vast majority are not; if they were, they would not end up in these situations with their employers.

Only 14% of workers in the private sector are in trade unions, so it is a very rare breed who have the benefit of trade union protection at work. While working with USDAW and the retail sector over many years, I often heard from skilled and experienced reps; they had been trained and had done training courses on employment rights, and were far better at negotiating under their companies’ grievance and disciplinary procedures than the managers, who were often straight out of business school, or were moved around shops in different areas and so were never able to build up the expertise that the reps had.

Employers are missing a trick by not seeing trade union representatives as an asset to their workplaces and workforces. Having helped to put together presentations for employers on the value of a trade union in the workplace, I know that a trade union can absolutely bring value for money and productivity to a company. A union can also ensure that a company is doing everything by the book, and can certify that at national level; at local level, the presence of a trade union rep can give people confidence in the management in the company—confidence that things are being done right.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) mentioned health and safety. I am honoured to have the laboratory for the Health and Safety Executive in my constituency. It is really useful to be able to talk to people there about how best to implement health and safety at work, particularly given the decline in the resources that the Government give to the Health and Safety Executive. We have seen inspections decline—they are now done on a risk-assessed basis—but where a workplace has trade union representatives who are trained in health and safety, those health and safety reps do risk assessments and take soundings from their work colleagues, who often feel more able to raise problems with their trade union representatives than with their management, particularly if they are concerned about their safety. That is even more the case where there are people in the workplace with a disability or some other form of impairment. It is so important that they feel that they have that support.

We have some basic rights at work, but in the UK they are particularly basic, and we often see that even those are not provided. We have a system of employment tribunals whereby individuals have to put their head above the parapet, as has been mentioned; they have to show that they are able to make a complaint in order to access an employment tribunal. That does not help the rest of the workforce, who are probably suffering in exactly the same conditions, particularly where the issue has to do with the minimum wage, holiday pay, sick pay, parental leave or flexible working. Those are basic rights at work that we expect to be in place, but too often they are not, and individual employees have to put themselves forward in order to be able to access a particular right. Many feel that it is not worth it; many feel that it is better to move on to a different place of work. That does not help the other people there.

To access the protection from unfair dismissal, a person now has to have been in a workplace for two years. We have an increasingly mobile workforce, so a growing number of people are not able to access the right to claim unfair dismissal, and do not feel that they can access any of the other rights that enable them to take a case to their employer or to a tribunal, especially where they cannot get the support of a trade union representative in that. That is why, as I have said, it is so important that trade union representatives are able to come in and support individual members in a workplace. Even where the union is not the recognised trade union, the trade union reps need to be able to support their members, who are paying for the privilege of membership. If they are paying for that service, it is not right that their employer should be able to deny it to them.

[Alison McGovern]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does she agree, at this moment, when we are trying to deal with cultures of bullying or sexual harassment, that it is very important that when people take complaints forward, they have somebody with them to give them confidence and comfort in what can be a stressful and sometimes distressing situation?

[Ruth George]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. People often spend the majority of their waking lives at work, and the relationships in the workplace are some of the most important to them. If they are subject to bullying or harassment, that affects their whole life and their confidence in taking the issue forward, so having a trade union representative, or a trade union office that they know they can phone for expert support and advice—having someone on their side—is so important, particularly when they are taking forward a case against a manager or another colleague with whom they work closely. That creates very difficult situations for individuals.

It is not just individuals who benefit from trade union membership. The state also benefits from higher productivity and from better pay and conditions, which reduce the reliance on in-work benefits that comes from low pay and low hours at work. Universal credit is being rolled out, and the only thing that employers have been told by the Department for Work and Pensions is that they no longer have to give people set hours of work. With tax credits, people used to need to have a contract to work 16, 24 or 30 hours a week, for access at different points. Employers knew that and were prepared to give those contracts to ensure that people could afford to live on the contract of work. Under universal credit, yes, people can access mini jobs, with fewer hours of work, but that will encourage employers to provide more flexibility within contracts; I am afraid that the Department for Work and Pensions is actively encouraging them in that. They may not be zero-hours contracts—those are bad enough—but they are short-hour contracts, sometimes for as little as four or eight hours a week. People simply cannot afford to live on them, but employers are happy to give those sorts of contracts and to ask people to flex up when they are busy. It gives employers maximum flexibility, but it does not mean that people who are in work can get by.

That is why we are seeing such a huge increase in in-work poverty. Up to 8 million workers—more than one quarter of the workforce—are now in poverty. That is a crying shame for any decent economy, any decent society. If someone goes out to work, they should be able to support themselves; if there are two of them, they should be able to support a family. There are rising house prices, housing costs and rents, but there have been reduced real wages for almost a decade, and people simply cannot afford to live on the wages that they get.

The issue is not just pay but pension provision. Employers with trade unions provide far better pension entitlements than employers who do not recognise a trade union. Again, the state benefits, because it does not then have to provide a top-up where pensioners are falling into poverty. Trade unions that I saw in the workplace helped to keep better pension schemes going for their members. We have seen innovative schemes, such as the Communication Workers Union and Royal Mail scheme, that will help far more workers continue to have a decent standard of living when they retire, and will save the state from having to step in where people fall into poverty because they have an inadequate pension scheme.

Trade unions can bring benefits across the whole range of rights at work, pay and conditions, and pensions. That is why it is inexcusable that no Conservative Back-Bench MPs have bothered to turn up to this debate to, at the very least, discuss the value of trade unions in the workplace and have a robust discussion about their merits and what they can bring to working people who particularly need that support.

We certainly need trade unions in the workplace at a time when employers are possibly facing a lack of labour. Workers from the European Union are returning to their own countries, or countries of origin, and many workplaces are desperate to recruit. They are seeing a recruitment shortage, and they need to ensure that they can provide the best standards and conditions of employment. Trade unions will help them to do that. They help them to stamp out cultures of bullying, which unfortunately can exist in the workplace. They ensure that there is always a trusted third party. They ensure that people have a friend at work whom they can turn to—and everybody needs one of those at times. I really hope that the Minister will reflect on those points and respond to them.