Employment Rights Bill

John Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 21st October 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

We have heard some electrifying and remarkable maiden speeches today. I rise to speak as a former member of a trade union. I do not miss the subs going out of my pay packet; it did little for me. This is no mere Bill, but a time machine that could take the whole country back decades. The unions are gonna party like it’s 1979. For your benefit, Madam Deputy Speaker—you were not there—1979 was the winter of discontent when the unions bit back, the rubbish piled high in the streets and a Labour PM was soon out with the bins.

With this hastily assembled Employment Rights Bill, Labour is feeding the union alligator that may yet eat it, too. That is because the Bill lacks balance, assuming that all employers are robber barons intent on exploiting workers. The Prime Minister has talked of growing the economy and cutting red tape, yet now we see the reality: proposals that will frighten firms away from taking on new staff and burden them with still more rules and regulations.

My constituent Rory, a forward-thinking dairy farmer, has written to me about Labour’s pledge

“to make Britain the best place to start and grow a business.”

Like me, he sees fine sentiments, but the Bill risks the opposite effect. There is even an expensive new layer of bureaucracy: the fair work agency, whose costs will be borne by business and passed on to the public. The people’s tape is deepest red.

The Bill makes it easier for militant unions to infiltrate workplaces, and it strips out sensible curbs on their power. Strikes will hit the public harder without Conservative safeguards such as those that guarantee minimum service levels. An impact assessment of the Trade Union Act 2016 indicated that it would cut strikes by about 35%.

[Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[John Cooper]

No, I have waited 40 years for this. Much of the 2016 Act will be tossed into picket line braziers, and as ever it is the public who will suffer. The plan to make union funding of Labour opt-out, not opt-in, is another back-to-the-future move. It is naked opportunism from the Labour party.

The Bill will be hardest on small and medium-sized businesses, the backbone of the economy. We must not forget that they are run by people who are themselves workers and strivers. Napoleon disparagingly called us a nation of shopkeepers. With legislation as skewed as this, Labour risks shutting the shops and turning us into a nation of strikers and their union rep handmaidens. This skimpy Bill is so heavily skewed that it resembles the blade in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”, leaving employers strapped in red tape between the ever-present pit of insolvency and the slice, slice, slice of costly, pro-union, anti-growth legislation.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Lorraine Beavers to make her maiden speech.

Employment Rights Bill

John Cooper Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Antonia Bance]

I do acknowledge that, every single of which will go into the pocket of a working person in improved rights and higher wages, alongside £13 billion of increased productivity, reduced stress, better employee wellbeing and reduced conflict in the workplace.

On the amendments, I will start with access to workplaces, which are the key to getting more workers into unions. I strongly welcome provisions to give unions the right to access workplaces for meeting, representing, organising, recruiting and collective bargaining. I am glad the Government amended the rules to ensure they cover digital as well as physical access, and I am glad to see the Central Arbitration Committee oversight and penalties when employers do not comply, as is sometimes the case.

Once a union has established membership in a workplace, it will want to seek recognition. Most employers do not have to be forced to recognise a union—it is just what they do as a responsible employer—but where employers refuse, statutory recognition can be triggered. Until now that process has been absolutely mad and totally dysfunctional, and the cards are stacked against the working people and their union at every turn.

The worst example of this in recent years is at BHX4 in Coventry where a company dedicated to keeping unions out of its warehouses brought its US-style industrial relations to the UK, and took on its own workers who wanted no more and no less than for management to have to sit down and negotiate with their union, the GMB. Amazon is a £27 billion company in the UK yet its sales are growing three times higher than its frontline workers’ wages and it has had 1,400 ambulance call-outs in just five years. BHX4 in Coventry is not a safe workplace, with fulfilment centre workers getting injured, being asked to pick up too much, to load from the back of vehicles on their own, and to lift heavy weights above their heads. Those workers at that Amazon plant were forced to take 37 days of industrial action over poverty pay. At the Select Committee, the company’s badly briefed, evasive executives could not bring themselves to acknowledge that.

Recognising the GMB is a modest request, something 1,000 companies would have accepted without question, but not Amazon. At the Select Committee, the GMB organiser, Amanda Gearing, told us that Amazon flooded the bargaining unit; there were 1,400 workers when the GMB first sought statutory recognition but, strangely, just 27 days after that application went in the number went up to 2,749. Amanda told us how Amazon delayed the access agreement— 52 days to agree access to the workplace, a chance for the company to swamp the workers with anti-union propaganda. All the screens in the warehouse and the app used for work allocation were anti-union, threatening to close the site if workers unionised. When the access scheme was finally agreed, the GMB got a tiny number of screens and one 45-minute session with each worker, while Amazon had five one-hour sessions and screens everywhere. It induced GMB members to leave the union and in every way impeded access.

I pay tribute to the GMB leaders at Amazon in Coventry: Ceferina Floresca, Garfield Hylton, Paramanathan Pradeep and Mohammednur Mohammed—heroes, all of them. Standing up to huge intimidation and under huge pressure, they ran a brilliant campaign, but the deck was stacked against them, and they lost the ballot by a heartbreaking 29 votes. The GMB’s general secretary, my friend Gary Smith, is clear: if the legislation we are debating today had been in place, the GMB members at Amazon would have won their fight.

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is a fearsome campaigner on the Business and Trade Committee. She talks about intimidation and paints a lovely picture of unions working actively for their workers, but how can we square that with the version of intimidation that the hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) seems to be referring to with the return of flying pickets?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Before the hon. Lady responds, she will no doubt realise that she is close to eight minutes. I know she will want to speak for a little while, but not too much longer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Frith]

I have had conversations with the vast majority of them. They support the general emphasis—[Interruption.] Actually, if the right hon. Gentleman has been listening, he will know that the argument I am making is that on much of the proposed legislation—giving rights on day one, being fair minded, making work pay—they are already doing that. The point I am making—[Interruption.] I have just named several. The most recent conversation I had was with MSL Solution Providers. Its challenges and arguments are around R&D tax credits, an argument I will make in due course. But the Conservatives’ claim of being the voice of small business and entrepreneurship is misguided, misrepresented and, frankly, out of date.

Once we have laid the new employment foundations, we must support them in building their businesses further. In particular, for some that means ensuring that AI enhances and expands prospects and prosperity in the employment market and the wider economy.

Lastly, I am proud to highlight my support for extending bereavement leave to those who experience a miscarriage—a compassionate and essential measure that I proudly support alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen).

The Bill is not just about a legislative process; it is about our values. It is about recognising that a thriving economy and a fair society must go hand in hand with tackling our inequalities. It is about ensuring that whether employer or employee, the foundation on which our employment is built ensures strength for all.

[John Cooper]

I rise as a former member of a trade union, and the harsh lessons I learned then are what concern me about this Bill. As a low-paid journalist on a local paper, I had hoped that the union would go in to bat for me. Instead, it was more interested in Cuban socialism and collective bargaining, more concerned about traducing Mrs Thatcher’s legacy than the tribulations of a junior reporter, more interested in funding the Labour party than supporting me and my newsroom colleagues. That is why I am backing amendments such as amendment 292, which seeks to defuse what has been called a subscription trap, where inertia is used to allow political donations taken from members to tick up year in, year out. Is this the clean money of which the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) spoke?

In the Business and Trade Committee we have heard that good relations are possible between employers and trade unions. Of course they are—not all union reps are agitators, any more than all bosses are grasping exploiters of the workers. But stripping out existing protections, as this Bill does, risks tilting the law too far in favour of the unions, making strikes more frequent and more damaging thanks to, for example, lower notice periods.

We know that the unions are already restive; just ask the Secretary of State for Scotland, unable to attend an event with, ironically, the Scottish Confederation of British Industry in his own office because he would not cross a picket line, and he has had to cancel at least one other event as the pickets strike on. If a Cabinet Minister is already at the unions’ mercy, what chance do the general public have?

We have heard about positive trade union benefits, but it is not all sunlit uplands. One rail union refuses to let bosses use email for rotas, insisting on fax machines— I imagine I am one of the few Members who remembers those. Another left passengers inconvenienced when it ordered members not to use a footbridge as it had a skim of snow on it no thicker than the icing on a cake. They must be licking their lips at clauses that remove previous thresholds for strike action such as the 50% turnout requirement and the 40% support requirement. I think the public will support amendments that would keep existing benchmarks as modest guardrails, not to crack down on unions but to limit the damage that hotheads might inflict.

This skimpy Bill, cobbled together with indecent haste to meet Labour’s “first 100 days” deadline, bears all the hallmarks of a thank you note from Labour to its union backers. If it passes, the unions are going to party like it’s 1979. However, Labour Members pocketing supposedly pristine union donations should have a care, because that 1979 winter of discontent saw the public lose patience with a Labour Prime Minister captured by the unions. History does not repeat precisely, but this does look awfully familiar.

Employment Rights Bill

John Cooper Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

I will finish by drawing the House’s attention to a case that starkly proves the need for this legislation and that has not been public since March this year. Members and those watching our proceedings may have read the book “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a shocking exposé of the workplace culture at Meta, its practices in Myanmar and China, and how it has targeted teenagers in emotional distress to push consumer products on them in their darkest hours. Despite previous public statements that Meta no longer uses NDAs in cases of sexual harassment—which Sarah has repeatedly alleged—she is being pushed to financial ruin through the arbitration system in the UK, as Meta seeks to silence and punish her for speaking out. Meta has served a gagging order on Sarah and is attempting to fine her $50,000 for every breach of that order. She is on the verge of bankruptcy. I am sure that the whole House and the Government will stand with Sarah as we pass this legislation to ensure that whistleblowers and those with the moral courage to speak out are always protected.

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

Sadly, we are not here to relitigate this entire Bill, which is so wide in scope and impact, and yet so skimpy in detail, having been cobbled together for a headline under Labour’s “first 100 days” banner. I refer the House to Lords amendment 61, which without doubt will be dashed aside as Labour seeks to salvage something, anything, as a legacy for its deposed red queen, the former Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), whose Bill this very much remains.

Lords amendment 61 would reinstate the requirement for trade union members to opt in to contribute to the political fund. Incredibly, Labour Members, who bristle at commercial subscriptions that rely on consumer inertia, will likely vote down this sensible and proportionate change. The reasons why demonstrate the wider issue with the Bill. The left’s hive mind aside, the Bill is a love letter to the unions—a thank you for all the support.

Labour has been bought with union gold, with donations totalling almost £40 million since the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) took the helm of his party. It means that the Bill is payback for the unions, all the time masquerading as a fillip for the working class. We know how important that working-class concept is for the Labour party from watching the candidates for the vacant deputy leadership engage in a “prolier than thou” contest, with hairshirt-and-gravel shades of Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch thrown in.

In reality, the Bill has little to do with actual working-class people, and the Labour party has no monopoly on them in their ranks. Instead, the Bill does rather more for what is sometimes called the “boutique left”—the trade union apparatchiks and their ilk. The Bill only makes sense if we see it through the skewed prism of every employer being a robber baron and every union organiser a saint. It does nothing for all those who will struggle to find a job in the first place, as its granting of day one rights will give companies—already facing big bills thanks to employer national insurance contribution rises—pause for thought. Other amendments fight a rearguard action with a sensible six-month qualification period. The Bill means that unions are going to party like it is 1979—but they should have a care. In ’79, restive unions triggered strike after strike, sounding the death knell for both their own unfettered power and for the Labour Government.

Lords amendment 62 addresses the threshold for strike action, meaning that 50% of eligible members would have to vote for action. Are the unions not better being sure of the complete backing of their members before lighting the picket-line braziers? Again, the unions should learn the lessons of the past. Next year marks a century since the general strike. Although often talked of in reverential tones by the left, the strike left the unions’ proud red banners in the dirt and the miners it was meant to support back in the underground galleries with worse pay conditions. Why? Because the strike alienated the public. Last week, the chat from the man forced on to the Clapham omnibus when London was crippled by transport strikes was less, “Up the workers!” than, “Right up the workers,” with their £65,000 base salaries and demands for a still shorter working week.

Business cannot afford the Bill unamended, as it will take an estimated £5 billion out at a time of belt tightening. The public cannot afford the Bill unamended, as it will facilitate more frequent and more damaging strikes, and it will make jobs harder to come by. Labour itself cannot afford the Bill unamended. Labour Members may think that, with scandal and crisis all around, they cannot sink any lower in the popularity stakes. Oh, they can, and the Bill is the ticking timebomb that could take them to their nadir faster than they imagine.

[Michael Wheeler (Worsley and Eccles) (Lab)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and to my proud membership of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers and the GMB. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough (Justin Madders), who has just popped out for some well-earned tea, for his hard work steering the Bill through the House. I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my equally hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Kate Dearden), to her place; we both know that she has big shoes to fill.

Today, we finally arrive at the concluding stages of this historic Bill’s long journey through Parliament. It is a moment that has been many years in the making. For well over a decade, working people have been calling for the protections that this landmark piece of legislation will introduce. It is our duty to deliver them, and to deliver them in full. Last year, people voted for change. They are crying out for change, and this Bill delivers real, meaningful and positive change. It is therefore immensely frustrating, although sadly not surprising, to see the old coalition band get back together in the other place, to have one final go at obstructing this Bill through changes, like Lords amendment 1, which will be the focus of my remarks.

One of the defining aims of the Bill is to end exploitative short and zero-hours contracts. The right to a guaranteed-hours contract is at the heart of the new deal for working people because, as I said on Report, the rise of one-sided flexibility has been one of the most damaging labour market developments of the past 14 years. Such contracts leave workers—often the lowest paid—vulnerable to sudden changes in income, with weekly working hours varying unpredictably. It is an unstable, precarious life that many are forced into, and it is long past time that this exploitative practice was brought to an end.

Lords amendment 1, a throwback team effort from the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, seeks to replace the Bill’s right to a guaranteed-hours contract with a far weaker “right to request”. At just five words long, the amendment may seem minor, but it is anything but. As working people know from bitter experience, a right to request often means no right at all. Unfortunately, it is clear from the comments made by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) that either Liberal Democrats do not understand or they are wilfully misrepresenting the amendment.

Lords amendment 1 creates a loophole, enabling unscrupulous employers to use pressure or coercion to deter employees from making requests. It also puts that crucial protection out of reach of those who simply are not aware of their rights in the first place. Far from delivering a new right, it reopens the door to workplace conflict, insecurity and exploitation, something of which I am sure the Liberal Democrats would not be proud. It is completely at odds with the spirit and purpose of the provision, and it must be rejected.

We must deliver greater security, stability and dignity to people in their working lives. The right to a guaranteed-hours contract, and the increased financial security that brings with it, is central to achieving that. It will be transformative for living standards, productivity and the economy. I urge colleagues from across the House not to undermine this essential provision and to reject Lords amendment 1. Working people are counting on all of us to do the right thing by them.