Employment Rights Bill

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Commons Chamber

I particularly welcome the Government’s new schedule 2, which will update frameworks for trade unions, reflect modern work practices and rebalance industrial relations. It will ensure that the size of a workplace bargaining unit will be frozen and cannot be increased during the recognition process. A recent example of where this new schedule would have supported workers occurred at Amazon. When my union, the GMB, first applied for statutory recognition there, Amazon reported that it had 1,400 employees working at the site and refused to have any discussion on trade union recognition. Amazon workers faced a David versus Goliath fight in having to prove that they had at least 40% support in the workplace for union recognition. As amended, the Bill will vastly simplify that process, with the new schedule freezing the bargaining unit at the point of application. We want to be able to bring good practice and good employers to our constituencies.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

In 2023, BH Live, a company based in my constituency, was named as not paying 130 workers—130 of the lowest-paid workers in my constituency—the national minimum wage. Ultimately, BH Live did make payments, but does my hon. Friend agree that it is wrong for anybody to be paid less than the national minimum wage, and that through the introduction of the new Fair Work Agency we are going to be able to right wrongs like that?

[Steve Yemm]

I absolutely agree; my hon. Friend has spelled out why enforcement is so important.

I would happily speak further in support of so many of the amendments that have been tabled, but I am acutely aware that we are at the end of the debate.