Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, here we go again. The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, has taken us through some of the industrial relations history, going back many centuries in some cases. It shows that it is a rite of passage for successive Conservative Governments, since Mrs Thatcher and Lord Tebbit, to legislate against trade unions and to minimise their scope for action. We are the old enemy, as has just been very graphically described in that last contribution. It reflects a nostalgia to replay the epic battles of the 1980s, only this time it is nurses and NHS staff, fresh from being applauded in the pandemic, who are now on the front line. It is not coal miners or printers; the world has changed since Lord Tebbit’s high-water years. As can be seen regularly from the polls, these workers who have been taking action are getting a lot of public support at the present time. That must be taken into account.

This is all against the background that we have seen in recent decades of rising inequality, the poor getting poorer and many workers working on a more insecure basis. If you are talking about balance, the other side of this House has got the balance wrong. The right way is to give workers more scope.

By the way, where is the employment Bill we were promised, which was going to give workers in the gig economy greater rights and greater freedom? That is buried somewhere, while staff have been diverted to the exercise that we are debating today.

At the moment, there are mixed messages all over the place from the Government: one minute Ministers are cooing that they want to talk to unions, while the next minute this crude club of a Bill is being swung at the unions, despite the fact that we already have some of the toughest trade union laws in the democratic world.

The Government must face up to the fact that, with inflation running at 10%, with pay in the private sector rising at around 6%, and with the public sector lagging well behind at half that, they have a very big problem in respect of their own employees. In a democracy, you cannot dam the wave of discontent, and this is a legitimate discontent that we are talking about at the moment; you have to find settlements and a way through.

Others will comment on the constitutional outrage of this skeleton Bill, with its absence of any detail about what minimum standards are needed to run, say, a railway or a hospital. The extensive claiming of Henry VIII powers would make even the old king and Thomas Cromwell blush. In his intervention in the debate in the other place, the Member for North East Somerset—Mr Rees-Mogg, no less—put it very well when he invited explicitly your Lordships’ House, our House, not to accept the Bill in its present form. He regarded it as unconstitutional, and he is right on this Bill. Of course, no one can accuse him of consistency, because he is the author of the retained EU law Bill, which will be in a Committee of this House on Thursday, which is also a skeleton Bill, giving wide powers to Ministers to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.

I am not against minimum standards, particularly as far as public services are concerned, but they will work only if they command respect and are fair. In particular, they need to be agreed. Agreements exist in some key sectors already; we heard about the ambulance service, and nuclear decommissioning is another one. In other sectors, nobody has ever thought that they were necessary. If they are going to be necessary, you would assume that the Government would be thinking about how they could get support for such measures, not issuing diktats. In fact, when you look at those countries overseas that have these arrangements, you see they are part of far more union-friendly labour codes than our restrictive regime in the UK. To take just one part of the Bill—the withdrawal of unfair dismissal protection from workers who refuse to work when called in during a strike—no other democratic country has a measure of that kind.

I ask your Lordships to look at the Bill from the point of view of a union. A dispute has arisen and there is a grievance. Before it does anything about it, the union has to hold a secret postal ballot, it has to surmount the thresholds on turnout and majorities, and it has to give due notice to the employer—all of which have been introduced, as we heard in the history lesson given by the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs. If the union can leap those hurdles, the strike can commence. But once this Bill’s provisions have been enacted, individual members can be called into work, in effect to break the strike. That is what they will be asked to do, and if they refuse they can be fairly dismissed. That is a recipe for a whole lot of extra trouble, at a time when the emphasis should be on finding a solution to the original dispute. The result will be an additional dispute, and a very bitter one at that. In the 2019 Queen’s Speech, the Government stated that no individual worker would be targeted. What happened to that promise? It seems to have disappeared.

It used to be the case that Governments tried to be exemplary employers, setting an example to the private sector; Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill and others always made that clear. But now the public sector is in crisis, with pay falling drastically behind many other sectors, chronic staff shortages and too many services not performing acceptably—on a normal day, TransPennine, for example, would struggle to meet any decent minimum service. The Government need an initiative to tackle these real problems, instead of messing around with this tiresome Bill.

Could the Minister put the Bill to one side? Could he consider launching a consultation with the TUC and relevant unions on minimum standards to see whether agreements could be reached where they do not already exist? Let us face it: to get an agreement could require some uprating in pay. That is what some other countries have done, by the way, in their minimum standards agreements. If not, the Bill will, if enacted, inject poison into already difficult situations.

The impact assessment for the old Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill warned of more frequent disputes, as did my noble friend earlier, and more action short of strikes. Others have warned of mass sickies. This is a time for industrial relations statesmanship, not political preening and posturing. It is time the Government took a different course.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

If you go to the engine division at Rolls-Royce, people are proud of working for Rolls-Royce: not only does it give them a living, but it helps build their country up. Sometimes I get a bit worried because people seem to insinuate that the working people of this country are not patriotic. They are. We saw this when the Queen died. The first thing that happened was that the TUC postponed its congress as a sign of respect. We need to remember, at all times, that the working people of this country are in a contract with the Government and with the people to build a prosperous society, and we should be on their side to achieve that objective. That is the way to have a contented and united country, so I ask the Minister to just put a pause on the Bill. We do not need it at all, but please exclude the aviation services and look at the others and ask, “Will this work?” When the Government get the answer no, they should have the guts to pull it.

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. He followed me as president of BALPA and has done a good job, as I know from all my ex-colleagues in that union. I have long experience of disputes in the transport sector, particularly in railways. In fact, if any noble Lord has a spare half hour and wants to go through the history of flexible rostering and train drivers, I am your man. I may not sell many tickets for that particular gig, I fear, but this is the sector that it is really all about. If the Bill hits the statute book and is used, it is in this sector that the trouble will really start, because it is very strongly unionised, with workers who are no strangers to industrial action. Whether culturally or practically, they have taken it over all their history. It is part of their way of life, and the first person who issues a work notice to them will really be lighting a fire with petrol, because it is incendiary and the cocktail of the dispute will be explosive.

Let us just follow through for a moment what would happen. A work notice is issued. The workers will act collectively, not individually, and refuse it. Individuals might then be selected—this is all provided for under this wonderful Bill—and those individuals will have a choice to make: whether to go along with the work notice or to turn around and say, “We are sticking with the democratically made decision to strike, and with the union”. Then what happens? What is the response likely to be? Will the employer persist and maybe fire some of them? We will get a situation where there are two disputes: the original dispute and the dispute about reinstatement of the workers concerned. This is nowhere near where we should be going as a country, and nowhere near finding a way to improve industrial relations and get people working co-operatively and in a spirit of mutual trust and support.

With two disputes instead of one, the Government need to be very careful and think carefully about employment law. The party opposite has enacted a lot of employment law since the 1980s. Some of it, I have to say, has been well targeted and has hit the mark, and some of it has had counterproductive effects. Even the election of general secretaries of unions has had a counterproductive effect in quite a lot of unions, with the more radical candidate usually winning. A piece of legislation such as this—an obvious candidate to be counterproductive, as well as wasting a lot of time and expense in all this procedure we are going through at the moment—seems to be about a Government taking a step against the unions that is too far. The Government should pause, think again and put it in the waste-paper basket of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to speak briefly to support what all noble Lords have spoken about so far. I am honorary president of the UK Maritime Pilots’ Association, which is exactly the same, with not quite so many members, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has with his airline pilots. We have the same issue of safety. In piloting an aeroplane, you are going rather faster than a ship, and if a ship gets into trouble, it cannot stop, or stop quite as quickly, as we all know. It is a dangerous job, and the pilotage training lasts several years. You start off with small ships and then they get bigger, and the scale of your local knowledge has to be quite dramatic. In most ports, big ships are now not allowed in without a pilot, for very good reason.

The same comments apply to the railways and railway safety. Noble Lords will have seen the accident in Greece last week—a head-on collision caused by some failure of regulation. We do not have that any more. We have an Office of Rail Regulation and various other bodies that make really sure that whatever operation we do is safe. I cannot see how Ministers, or the owners who will control many of the train operators, will be able to say, “Well, you do that. It is not your decision as to whether it’s safe or not; it is our decision”. I do not think a Minister will ever want to say that they have given an instruction that might be seen to be unsafe, because they will probably be for the high jump if it goes wrong. But many of the issues on the railways exist because the safety rules have built up over the years. Driver training used to take two years; it is a little quicker now but not much, and that is for a reason. You are not allowed to use a mobile phone when you are driving for a very good reason, because you lose your concentration. I cannot see how it can really work when Ministers are effectively giving instructions about someone going to drive the train and being responsible for the safety—closing the doors, making sure everybody is all right, and making sure the track is all right, which is really important.

I support my noble friends Lord Monks and Lord Collins, and the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, in saying “Think again”.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I will now reply to the debate on Amendment 21, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and Amendment 23 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, which have been grouped. These seek to limit how and when a work notice can be issued by an employer.

Amendment 21 seeks to place an additional and, in our view, burdensome requirement on employers in relation to issuing a work notice. Amendment 23 seeks to alter, fairly fundamentally, how a work notice operates. Both amendments would create unnecessary uncertainty for employers, unions and workers around their respective obligations for work notices.

Amendment 21 requires the employer to exhaust all options to prevent a strike before they issue a work notice. However, it is my submission that employers are already incentivised to avoid strike action due to the substantial cost and disruption that it causes them. If a trade union has given notice of a strike under Section 234A of the 1992 Act, which must happen before any work notice can be given, it seems reasonable for the employer to assume that the options to avoid a strike have, in fact, already been exhausted for the purposes of producing a work notice.

It is also not clear what the test would be for an employer to show that all the options had been exhausted to prevent a strike, creating significant uncertainty for employers and trade unions. The Bill does not prevent employers and unions continuing to negotiate to reach a settlement on the broader trade dispute and, we would hope, for the strikes to be called off. However, we know that negotiations can be complex and can cause uncertainty, so all parties, especially the public, need the fundamental reassurance that the minimum service will operate on a particular strike day. Therefore, the Government resist this amendment.

Amendment 23 seeks to alter how work notices are to operate by specifying that the work notice must identify only the number of persons required to work during a strike rather than actually naming them. There are a number of problems with this approach. First, trade unions are required under the legislation to take reasonable steps to ensure that members identified in the work notice comply with that notice. For that to be true, the trade union would need to see the work notice and to know which union members have been identified as required to work in order for it to take those reasonable steps to ensure that those members attend work rather than going on strike. Secondly, this amendment could lead to confusion between employers and workers about who exactly is required to work, particularly in instances where a large number of individuals are employed to deliver essentially the same duty—for instance, call handlers. There would no longer be workers

“identified in a work notice”

for the purposes of paragraph 8(3) in Part 2 of the Schedule. Consequently, the provision removing the automatic protection from unfair dismissal would presumably also not apply, and therefore cannot be accepted.

I reassure noble Lords that individuals named on a work notice will be notified of this as regards themselves only. They will not be issued with the work notice itself, and the work notice will not be a public document. Unions will be bound by data protection law in the usual way, and there will be no sanctions or consequences for individuals if the minimum service level is not then achieved.

Identifying individuals to work in advance of the strike day helps to provide clarity for workers, unions and employers about who exactly is required to work and the arrangements for that particular working day, as well as strike. Without this we believe it will cause confusion and would potentially lead to minimum service levels not being achieved, continuing the disproportionate impact strikes can have on the public, as well as potentially costly and unnecessary litigation between unions and employers.

Finally, let me pick up on the questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady.

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

Would the Minister accept that there is tremendous scope for victimisation in the provision that he is talking about, which this probing amendment is opening out? If the work notice is imposed on union officials—convenors, shop stewards, secretaries or whatever—they are in an extremely vulnerable position. They may have been doing the negotiation. They may have been regarded by the employer as awkward. All of a sudden they are put in the frame to say that you are coming into work, regardless of the role they may have played in the origins of the dispute. Is this not a victimisation permit for employers to use in all kinds of circumstances?

I worked in a place where the senior steward had been sacked and was victimised, and it is quite a common occurrence—other colleagues here will perhaps know more about that than me. It seems that the Government are giving a blank check to employers to take on individuals who are prominent in the union, and putting them in an impossible position of being summoned in by the employer at the same time as they may well have been leading the workers in the particular dispute that is taking place. What would the Minister say about that idea that he is giving a charter for victimisation?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I understand the noble Lord’s concerns but I do not believe he is justified in his worries. The Bill is clear that an employer must not have regard to whether a worker is or is not a member of a union when issuing a work notice. If an employee feels that they have been unfairly targeted then they can raise a grievance with their employer or ultimately take legal action to challenge whether the work notice complied with the law. That would then be a matter for the courts to decide.