Fire and Rehire Tactics

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I am enormously grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) for securing this important debate.

I should begin by declaring an interest: I am proud to call myself a lifelong trade unionist, having served both as a shopfloor convenor and, more recently, as the north-west regional secretary of Unite the union. However, in all my decades in the trade union movement, I do not think I have ever seen workers so much at the mercy of unscrupulous and uncaring bosses as they are today. I say to colleagues in this room that when we at last sweep away this tired and ailing excuse for a Government, one of our first priorities must be not only to outlaw fire and rehire, or even to establish new workers’ rights, although those are both vital; we must also unshackle the unions from decades of onerous anti-trade-union legislation, which bears so much responsibility for the parlous state of affairs we face today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Slough has set out the case against fire and rehire with characteristic eloquence, and it does not need repeating. After all, this is hardly a complex matter. Fire and rehire is wrong. It has used the spectre of the dole queue to condemn workers into accepting the most heinous attacks on their pay and working conditions. It is a form of industrial blackmail that has been happening on a massive scale throughout the pandemic, and it must be stopped. My constituents know it, especially the 130 workers at the local Wabtec site who were threatened with fire and rehire only in February. The wider public know it, with 70% of them, including 69% of Tory voters, wanting to see it made illegal. Even the Prime Minister knows it, as he said so many times from the Dispatch Box.

When the Minister rises to make his contribution, much of what we will hear will be familiar: “Fire and rehire is wrong; this Government back good employers; and every worker deserves security and dignity in the workplace.” The question now is: what is he going to do about it? Empty platitudes will not comfort the single parent who has just been told to accept a pay cut or face the sack, and nor will they clothe or feed a child in the north end of my constituency who is being forced to bear the brunt of this Tory cost of living crisis.

I warn the Minister that the act is wearing thin. The British public can see clearly now that, for all their mealy-mouthed excuses and empty pledges about introducing a statutory code of conduct, this Government have no interest whatsoever in standing up for British workers. In fact, at every stage they have given bad bosses the green light to treat their workers exactly how they please. When my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) came forward with a credible plan to tackle the scourge of fire and rehire, the Government Whips spun into action to ensure that his efforts were thwarted.

My message to the Minister is this: prove me wrong. Stand up today and show us that there is more to this Government than warm words and empty rhetoric. Show us that this Government are capable of mustering a shred of empathy for the millions of workers whose working lives were totally upended during the lockdowns. Prove to us that you care. Unless the Minister has come here armed with a plan to put an end to fire and rehire once and for all, my advice would be that it is better to stay silent than to confirm all our suspicions. The time for talk is over—what British workers deserve now is action.