Aviation Sector

Debate between Patricia Gibson and Emma Lewell-Buck

Thursday 10th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

The star award for using covid as an opportunity to demoralise and destroy its workforce has to go to British Airways. One of my constituents—a long-standing employee of 25 years—told me that after months of toxic bullying and mental anguish, she has been offered a new contract that is so deliberately ambiguous that she feels she has to take it or face redundancy. The worrying proposals in the new contract include, for example, that she may be forced to relocate temporarily or permanently to anywhere in the world. An associated company may also take over her holiday entitlement; that company will also have access to her health records and, bizarrely, the right to search her and her property. All that for a 40% reduction in her pay, while the outgoing chief executive is £3 million better off.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady has made an important point. Does she agree that because this appalling behaviour towards the workforce has gone unchecked, it has been replicated by other companies such as Centrica? Does she also agree that the Government should support the Employment (Dismissal and Re-employment) Bill, sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), which would stop this appalling practice?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

The hon. Member’s intervention leads me nicely on to my next point. My constituent tells me that some of her colleagues have actually taken their own lives and some have suffered heart attacks. The Government are not powerless. They can put a stop to these awful fire and rehire practices before they spread through other industries.

Our easyJet base in Newcastle has also closed. Our neighbours in Europe, recognising the value of regional connectivity, jobs, skills and a supply chain that benefits the wider local economy, have given substantial bailouts—not loans—to their operators. They have also substantially extended furlough, which the Government here rejected outright yesterday. I spoke to an easyJet pilot who asked me to put to the Minister why the Government are not considering travel corridors on a region-by-region basis in the same way they have applied measures in the UK. It does not make sense to shut down access to an entire country when just one part of it has an outbreak of coronavirus.

I am sure that the Minister will tell us that the Government have set up the aviation engagement unit, but can he tell us exactly what it has achieved? From what I can see, it has achieved very little so far. My constituents’ futures and jobs are on the line. It is in the Government’s gift to do something. Why don’t they?