Employment Rights

Debate between Michael Meacher and Julian Smith

Thursday 12th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered employment rights.

Hitherto, discussion of the impact of austerity has focused largely on public services being cut, benefits being slashed, jobs being lost, insecurity becoming rampant, and wages falling—they are now, in real terms, 9% below the 2007 level. However, another process has been going on during this time which is equally relentless and callous but which has not been accorded the attention it deserves. Remedying that is part of the purpose of today’s debate. I refer, of course, to the continuing vicious attack on employment rights.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Meacher]

No, I do not have time because of the two ministerial statements and the overrunning of the previous debate. A lot of other people wish to speak, and I want to be fair to them.

Because this attack has been pursued piecemeal and gradually across a wide spectrum of employment law, its cumulative impact has been concealed, but collectively it amounts to something very substantial. Workers with less than two years’ service in their current job have already lost the right to go to a tribunal over unfair dismissal. Very recently, fees of up to £1,200 have been introduced for anyone who wants to make an application to an employment tribunal. Then there are the heartless cuts—drastic cuts of £1,500 to £2,000—in compensation for the innocent victims of crime in occupations that deal directly with the public.

Now the Government have plans for a further range of attacks on employment rights. Proposals for reducing consultation rights over redundancies are well advanced. The Government want to introduce so-called settlement agreements to make it easier for employers to pressure or bully workers they want to get rid of into resigning. Compensation for unfair dismissal is to be limited. Even though there has been widespread opposition, and only lukewarm support even from business, the Government have still pushed ahead with introducing a new employment status of employee shareholder so that employers can buy out the rights to unfair dismissal, statutory redundancy pay, time to train, and the right to request to work flexibly. The Government want to reduce the protection that TUPE offers to workers who have their job transferred to another business. In addition, leading Tories, including the Mayor of London, are making noises about attacking trade union facility time, increasing thresholds for strike ballots—to levels, I might say, that no politician would dream of allowing with regard to their own election—and making statutory trade union recognition even more difficult.

This sledgehammer—I do not think that is an exaggerated word, because cumulatively it amounts to that—attack delivered piece by piece to weaken the whole range of employment rights is clearly designed to overturn the social settlement after 1945 and return Britain to workplace conditions similar to those operating in the 1920s and ’30s when employers flaunted overwhelming market power. The attack on the Agricultural Wages Board has already removed the last vestige of the wages safety net, which was originally erected by Winston Churchill, and the removal of strict liability from health and safety law means that in future injury victims will have to prove negligence even when their employers have brazenly broken the law.

The one area of employment law that the Tories have not been able to touch has been those rights provided for by the European Union: paid holidays, health and safety, equal treatment for part-time workers and women, protection when a business is sold off and a voice at work. They are all valuable rights. By repatriating those rights—I think this is a big part of the motive of current Tory Euroscepticism—the Government will make it easier for bad employers to undercut good ones, which was, of course, the reason why Winston Churchill favoured wages boards in the first place; to drive down wages; and to make people who already work some of the longest hours in Europe work even longer hours.