Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, many of those who have spoken have referred to historical matters. I am going to take us back to the economic crisis of 2007-08, because it was then that we had austerity policies introduced by George Osborne as our Chancellor.

[A noble Lord]

It was Alistair Darling.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

What has that got to do with it?

The mantra that was sold to the public was that we were all in this together; that we would all have to deal with austerity in order to get our finances right. Well the burden was not shared by all. The burden was borne largely by public services and by those who work in public service. It was, in my view, a deliberate and conscious policy to shrink the state, and we are paying the consequences of that now. Many of the people who have been on strike, and who continue to vote for strikes, have suffered the consequences.

There is a recent history of wage suppression, particularly in the public sector, with people seeing a drop in their income of up to 25% over the last 13 years. We have seen the casual erosion of employment rights; an increase in precarious work such as zero-hours contracts; and the burn-out of so many workers, as has been mentioned, because of staff shortages—largely a consequence of our hard-line Brexit position and the Government’s inadequacy to plan for a future workforce.

The health sector in particular has suffered. I know this directly because I come from a family where my daughter and her husband are both in the health service, as was my husband for many years. They see what is happening to doctors, nurses and all the ancillary workers, the people driving ambulances and the paramedics inside them. Let us not forget, as we are sitting in this Chamber, that the queues of ambulances were not caused by strikes; they are due to the chaos caused by a reduction of the National Health Service’s resources over many years. It is hypocrisy that the necessary work that was being done during the pandemic by transport workers, health workers and carers was seen as celebratory. We clapped and said it was wonderful, and I imagined that that would be the moment we would decide that we had to pay the public sector properly when we came out of the pandemic. Instead, of course, we are ending up making other kinds of choices.

I am afraid that the Conservative Party is going to be seen again as the nasty party. It is going to be seen again as the party that protects the interests of the well-to-do. Here are the people who have been holding things together, and they are asking only to be given what they justly deserve.

I remind everyone that the right to strike is so important because it is respected that it is locked into our understanding of power and who has it. At the end of the day, the only power available to an employee who is being treated unjustly, being inadequately rewarded and working in unacceptable conditions is the power to withdraw their labour. But there is no positive right to strike in English common law. This right is written into the constitutions of many other nations, but, at the moment in the UK, a strike is a fundamental breach of contract. There is limited protection from dismissal for the worker and protection from civil liability for the union in statutory law: the trade union and labour relations Act, which has of course been referred to, puts many hurdles in the way of getting to the point of being able to go on strike, and the unions comply with this.

I remind everyone that, as long ago as 1947, we signed up to the ILO convention on protecting the rights of workers and their right to strike. There is also some protection of the right to strike in Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but I am afraid that, as a lawyer, I have very little confidence about the future of all of this, given that we are already hearing talk from Conservative politicians about getting rid of the European Convention on Human Rights, and we have had displays of ready breaches of international law. So I am afraid I do not have much confidence in the ways in which the right to strike is being protected.

This is yet another layer of obligation, on top of what my noble friends Lord Monks and Lady Bryan described as the whole business of holding the ballot, having to reach certain thresholds, giving 14 days’ notice of any strike action, and so on, in order to make sure that you will not be sacked and there will not be civil liability for the union. This additional layer of obligation—minimum service levels—is being added. Having listened to this debate, it has become clear to me that people think that minimum service levels are about it being as if there is no strike at all—almost as if you will have the same service as on any other day, bad as that might be, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said.

The Bill adds another layer of obligation and does precisely what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said: it is yet another seizure of power by the Executive and away from Parliament, which happens all too often now. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, also spoke of the bizarre nature of the proposal: an employer creating one of these work notices is the very person against whom the strike is being introduced, because they are not behaving well. So is there a risk that those work notices coming from employers might go to the leaders of strikes? Who gets to choose, and how will this be done? They say, “in consultation with workers”, but there is a big gulf between consulting and negotiating. Negotiation with the unions is how this should be, and has been, done: UNISON has already made agreements with every trust in the country in relation to minimum services for health.

Most bizarre of all is that the Bill imposes a duty on the union to co-operate with the employer to defeat the strike. I emphasise that—just think of how ridiculous it is. People are using their last resort to get some justice in terms of reward for their work, and every single one of them—be they teachers, nurses or junior doctors, of whom my daughter is one—does their job because they love it and care about the quality of service that they provide. They know that it is now not being provided to the standard that they were made to believe it would be, and this is breaking their hearts.

My daughter tells me that many of the young people who studied medicine with her are now making the choice to go to New Zealand or Australia to work, because the conditions are so much better there. They are burned out after what they have been through, and there is an absence or shortage of staff. Get to the real point of this: negotiation is the best way for there to be good industrial relations. The Bill is unnecessary, and I hope to goodness that the Government see sense.