Trade Union Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Chris Stephens and Tom Blenkinsop

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward.

The purpose of our amendment is to require consent from public bodies, but I wish to make some remarks about the role of check-off and the principles behind it. Our first concern is the impact on collective bargaining arrangements. An employee can pay bills through salary deductions, including council tax and rent. They can also make charitable donations—for example, in Glasgow employees can make trade union charitable donations to organisations such as Action For Southern Africa or Community HEART. Staff association subscriptions, too, can be taken off as a salary deduction. Under these proposals, however, in a collective bargaining arena where there is a staff association and a trade union or unions, the staff association would be allowed check-off, but the trade unions would not. That shows an extraordinary bias towards staff associations. I asked the Minister for the Cabinet Office about this in the evidence sessions and was advised that a staff association is internal and a trade union is not. What remarkable ignorance of how a workplace operates. Surely both organisations are internal, and employees have made a choice about who is to bargain on their behalf?

In our view, new clause 11 is designed to interfere with and unsettle those collective bargaining arrangements. I ask the Minister what is to stop a trade union reclassifying itself to become a staff association. Is that how they will be able to get round the Bill? We are asked to believe that these proposals are modernisation. In reality, they are a 19th century solution in a 21st-century world. If allowing other deductions is modernisation, then why is check-off to trade unions not modernisation? It is a fanciful and quaint notion.

We are also concerned about the legal risks that public sector employers will face in relation to these arrangements. In a recent court case, Mr Justice Supperstone said:

“I am not impressed by the argument that check off is only or primarily for the benefit of the union as such, rather than for its members in their capacity as employees. It seems to me that there is a real benefit to employees in the administrative convenience of not having to make their own arrangements for payments each month, or having to set up a direct debit or standing order and then change it or replace it from time to time as may be necessary”.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. Obviously, it depends on the workplace. If someone is a private sector construction worker or employed in an industry working shift patterns which are not annualised, pay will fluctuate depending upon production targets and what the market is doing. Inevitably, as a result their union subs will change, because most unions have a redistributive model for their subscriptions.

[Chris Stephens]

That is an excellent point. Trade unions will be denied money on that basis, as in the very example given by the hon. Gentleman. Another concern is that what we are seeing here is a situation where a voluntary agreement between a public sector body and a trade union is effectively to be banned by the state.