Exiting the EU and Workers’ Rights

Justin Madders Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

I rise to speak as a Member with more than 15 years’ experience as an employment lawyer before I entered this place and as someone who was motivated to seek election here in part because I do not believe our current system of workplace protection is adequate.

As we saw in the EU referendum, telling someone on a zero-hours contract or in agency work that there is a risk to their job from Brexit just did not cut it; a culture has been created in this country that views employment as a flexible, disposable concept. People do not know from one week to the next how many hours they will work or whether they will work at all, yet some still wonder why millions of people voted to reject the status quo. So although I welcome the assurances given on workers’ rights so far, I believe we need to go much further to obtain a workplace settlement that puts fairness at its heart. As I will explain, I am still concerned, despite the assurances given, about whether employment rights will be retained, given the track record of many in the Cabinet on this matter.

Employment workplace protection in this country at its current level is woefully inadequate. A person can work somewhere for two years of their life but still find themselves cast aside without any reason and without recompense, even if they have done nothing wrong—that was introduced by the coalition Government. How can people feel confident enough to plan for their future if we have a system that sacrifices that future at the altar of flexibility? We need a country where people have the security of knowing that if they do a good job and if their employer runs the business well, they are going to be rewarded properly and are likely to stay in work. What we have instead is a hire-and-fire culture where workers are seen as disposable commodities and where loyalty counts for nothing.

I would like to see many improvements in the current law—a reduction in the qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims, the strengthening of unfair dismissal laws and the abolition of employment tribunal fees, which we are still waiting for the Government’s review of—but in the context of Brexit the immediate concern has to be to retain what we currently have.

As I said, I welcome the assurances given, but they do not go far enough. We are all familiar with the term “gold-plating”, and in 2011 the Government announced they were ending the gold-plating of EU legislation and would not go beyond the minimum requirements of the EU legislation when implementing it in this country. I consider the term “gold-plating” to be misleading and insulting when talking about basic rights at work, as it conjures up images of opulence and extravagance that simply do not reflect the reality of most people’s experience in the workplace.

One example of where employment legislation is considered to have gone beyond the original EU rules is what is covered by the definition of “pay” in the agency worker regulations, but probably the most widely discussed relates to the working time regulations. The most obvious example of supposed “gold-plating” is the requirement for 28 days’ paid leave in UK law, whereas only 20 days’ paid leave is granted in the directive. It is not just the removal of the gold-plating that concerns me, as many other facets of the regulations could be altered domestically which would fundamentally change and weaken those rights. Could the maximum working week be increased? Could the number of hours worked before entitlement to a rest break accrues change? Could the way weekly rest breaks are calculated alter? Could these be changed across industries to suit? Could we see a return to the prevention of the accrual of holiday pay during sick leave? On collective redundancies, we have already gone down from 90 to 45 days in respect of the consultation, but the Government could go even lower. At the moment, businesses are required to consult trade unions where they are recognised, but what is to stop this Government taking the opportunity to undermine trade unions yet again by altering the rules so that employee representatives could be consulted instead?

There are similar provisions in the TUPE regulations, where there is also another good example of supposed gold-plating, with the application of the service provision changes. That applies to thousands of transfers every year, so I hope there will be no attempt to restrict TUPE’s reach. Another area where there is an opportunity for those who want to see an erosion of rights is in relation to post-transfer changes to terms and conditions of employment, a fiendishly complicated area of law, much of it subject to European Court of Justice judgments. I fear there will be a temptation for those who want to rid us of supposed red tape to say that it would be much simpler just to say there are no specific post-transfer restrictions on changes to terms and conditions.

So the Government can claim to be protecting employment rights derived from the EU, but they could, if they chose to, nibble away at those rights in the way I have outlined. I believe the temptation will be too great for many Government Members—I refer not to removing rights altogether but to significantly weakening them. Why do I say that? One has only to look at what members of the Cabinet have said in the past to get a flavour of where they are coming from. Although we have heard plenty about them tonight, these comments are so concerning that it is worth repeating a few again. Let us start at the top, because the Prime Minister, in an interview with HR magazine in March 2010, when she was shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said:

“Issues we are particularly concerned about are the Working Time Directive…and the Agency Workers Directive.”

In 2012, the Foreign Secretary said that the UK should scrap the social chapter. Last year, he said that the Government should “weigh in” on all that “social chapter stuff”. He claimed that the weight of employment regulation was “back-breaking”. When the Secretary of State for Defence was Minister for Business and Enterprise, he said that the Government must

“turn the screws tighter on burdensome red tape”,

and “de-regulate further and faster.”

The Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade, the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), has also had quite a lot to say on the subject:

“To restore competitiveness we must begin by deregulating the labour market. Political objections must be overridden…It is too difficult to hire and fire, and too expensive to take on new employees…It is intellectually unsustainable to believe that workplace rights should remain untouchable”.

I could not disagree more with that. It is not just what the Government have said, but what they have done. The last coalition Government introduced legislation that enabled employees to be bought out of their statutory employment rights. They also introduced employment tribunal fees that have proved to be a massive barrier to people seeking to enforce their rights, as well as doubling the qualifying period before people can claim unfair dismissal.

If there has been a sudden and belated conversion to the importance of employment rights, I would welcome it and encourage Government Members to join me in arguing for increased workplace protection. If they agree that these rights are important, they will also know that not only are they about individual dignity and respect in the workplace, but they have social and economic value and are an essential component of a healthy, stable and progressive country.

Employment rights ensure that people can participate in the labour market without facing unfair discrimination. They give vulnerable workers more job security and stability of income. They help to encourage a committed workforce and the retention of skilled workers. They are not something that we spend enough time talking about in this place, but most of our constituents will be affected by them. While we need more workplace protection not less, I and everyone else on Labour’s Benches will be keeping a close eye on this Government in case they attempt to water down the rights that we currently have.