Employment Rights Bill

Katrina Murray Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)]

My membership of Unison, and of the national executive of Unison prior to my election, is well documented. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

What people on this side of the House probably do not know is that I am also an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the professional body for the people profession, and I have spent over 20 years as a manager and an employer. I have therefore spent most of my career working with people, managing people and employing people. I have ensured that staffing levels are maintained on the hours that people are contracted and available to work, and I have managed their flexibility without having to resort to bank or agency staff every week. However, as a trade union rep, I have prepared for and worked on consultative ballots, statutory industrial action ballots and—oh yeah—political fund ballots. I have done the hard yards: I have walked the wards at 3 o’clock in the morning to speak to the night shift, and I have gone out to remote workplaces to engage with people. But I have also met management to agree on what essential levels of service are.

I pay tribute to all of those who have worked on this Bill to get it to the place where it is today, and I welcome its coming back to the House. I believe in fair work; a relationship between the employer and the worker that is based on equality; a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work; and the right of an individual to withdraw their labour should workers collectively vote to do so. We discussed yesterday what a healthy employment relationship looks like, and it is about more than just pay. It is about how people are treated at work, and it is about ensuring that work pays and that people have not only a job but guaranteed hours, if that is what they want. If someone wants to work full time, they should not have to work two or maybe three contracts with the same employer to make up those hours, or to work the same excess hours every week for months and months—until they want to take an annual leave day, when they lose their entitlement to that.

Today’s amendments focus on two main aspects of the Bill: the rights of trade unions to organise in a way that we recognise in the 21st century, and how this vital piece of legislation is enforced. As we have been reminded, the world of work has changed fundamentally in the last 20 years, and so has the world of trade unions. I listened very carefully, and with great respect, to the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), who spoke of the combative and adversarial nature of trade unions, but that is not the world that I recognise.

[Daisy Cooper]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for addressing some of my concerns, and I look forward to hearing what she says. Just to be clear, I was talking about what can be a combative working environment for employees and employers, and I said there was a missed opportunity to create more collaborative environments. I was not necessarily accusing the trade unions, but working environments can be combative.

[Katrina Murray]

Thank you very much for your intervention. I have 20 years’ experience of working in a partnership arrangement, and staff-side trade unions have been the agreed and recognised bodies for staff in the NHS. It is natural to sit down together and say, “These are our issues. How do we resolve them?” It is a lot more financially advantageous if we do not end up in a situation that is adversarial.

Electronic balloting has long been common practice, but not for statutory trade union ballots. This is not just about public votes on “Strictly Come Dancing” or “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!” I noticed that the Conservative leadership election in 2024 made great use of electronic balloting. It is absolutely time for trade union ballots to be brought into line with society, so I welcome the measures in the Bill to widen the methods of voting in industrial action ballots.

While I am on the subject of balloting, let me also say that I support the extension of the period of time before a re-ballot takes place to extend the mandate for strike action. The ultimate aim of any form of industrial action is for disputes to be resolved by all of the parties involved, ideally before any action is taken, before labour is withdrawn, before individuals lose their money and before the public are affected. The role of the Government should be to ensure that intransigent parties get round the table and talk in order to resolve any issues. Conservative Members have reminded us that when faced with that opportunity, they did exactly the opposite. They introduced the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023, a piece of legislation that is so useless that it has stopped precisely zero strikes. It was used precisely zero times and is rightly being repealed as part of this legislation.

What Conservative Members do not recognise is that trade unions and trade union members do not take action lightly. I do wonder what the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith), was thinking, because he has obviously never talked to trade union members. People know their rights, they want to belong to things and they want to be involved. People collectively make such decisions, and they individually make decisions about their subscriptions—and by golly they know, because they have told me. These provisions have not been brought in with businesses kicking and screaming. Most businesses that work well with people know exactly what is going on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Law]

I thought I was asking a question of the Scottish Labour MPs, only to be asked another question. The hon. Lady will be well aware that the Scottish Government have worked collectively with both unions and other bodies to ensure that the living wage in Scotland is higher than in any other part of the UK. I remind her that it was Scottish Labour in November 2023 that voted with the SNP for employment rights to be evolved through the Scottish Parliament.

Throughout its existence, when powers are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, decisions are taken in the interests of the people of Scotland and outcomes improve: publicly owned rail and water, higher per-head education and health spend, free prescriptions, free tuition, a more humane welfare system and a progressive taxation system. Fair work practices are being delivered already by the SNP Scottish Government, such as supporting collective bargaining, achieving real living wage employer status and closing the gender pay gap faster than anywhere in the rest of the UK.

[Katrina Murray]

Does the hon. Member agree that it is an absolute failure of collective bargaining for the Scottish Government to have walked away from the commitments they made in a deal with health service unions two years ago on the reduction of the working week? They are failing to go through with reducing the working week by half an hour as of 1 April 2025.

[Chris Law]

I listened to the hon. Member with interest, but I suggest that she has that debate in the Scottish Parliament. After all, we are talking about the devolution of powers here in the UK Parliament.

A framework for collective bargaining in the adult care sector has been developed by the Scottish care unions—Unison, the GMB and Unite—along with the Scottish Government and care providers, with a Scottish social care joint council proposed. The Scottish care unions have intimated that the constitution, composition, remit and function of the Scottish social care joint council is preferable and should assume the role of the Adult Social Care Negotiating Body for England. Scotland already has a 10-year history of joint commitments to fair work, whereas England is only embarking on that journey. Furthermore, there is a need to extend sectoral bargaining to all sectors of the economy, not just adult social care.

Measures such as creating a single status of worker for all but the genuinely self-employed, strengthening protections for those with unfair contracts and increasing the minimum wage to at least the national living wage, and then in line with inflation, are all missing from the Bill. The SNP Scottish Government would support those measures if employment law were devolved, and they would be delivered if this Government respected the votes of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Labour manifesto.

Just as the Bill should be the first stop rather than the terminus, devolution is a process, not an event. Not only has devolution moved at a glacial pace, but we live in the world’s most asymmetrical political union, where each nation has differing devolved powers. Why is it that employment law is devolved in Northern Ireland but not in Scotland? I want to see employment rights strengthened continually rather than in a cycle of piecemeal progress when Labour is in power, only to be reversed when the Tories next get their turn. The gains for workers’ rights in the Bill must therefore be protected. That is why the SNP remains committed to advocating for, at a minimum, the urgent devolution of employment powers. That is the best way, short of independence, of protecting workers’ rights in Scotland.