Employment Rights Bill (Second sitting)

Uma Kumaran Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th November 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Marie Tidball (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

I refer again to my declaration of interests and to my membership of the Community union, Unison and the GMB.

[Uma Kumaran (Stratford and Bow) (Lab)]

I refer Members to my declaration of interests and my membership of the GMB union.

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

I refer Members to my declaration of interests and to my membership of Unison and Community trade unions.

Examination of Witnesses

Allen Simpson and Neil Carberry gave evidence.

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[Steve Darling]

Q Thank you, Chair. This has been touched on before, but there is something I really want to understand, if anybody can address it: productivity is a big issue for the British economy, so are there any opportunities that you see in this Bill for driving a bit harder towards that goal?

Paul Nowak: Absolutely, Mr Darling. I think the evidence is clear from research undertaken by, for example, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that employers tend to invest less in staff who are insecure and low paid. What we want to do is create a situation where employers are investing in staff. We have a problem in the UK: if you look at employer investment in skills, it is about half the EU average, so I think we want to move away from a low-skill, high-turnover situation.

Somebody talked before about the impact of staff churn. I was at an employer at the end of last week where they had 46% staff turnover each and every year. As the trade union representatives pointed out to me, every new person being recruited by that business works out at around £4,500 per person. I think that the Bill actually incentivises employers to invest in their staff, and to invest in the way that they use staff, and that certainly will have a positive impact on productivity.

There is also the fact that, when you give workers a collective voice, they are more likely to work with employers on things such as the introduction of new technology. How are we going to get to net zero in a way that secures good-quality employment? What does that mean for training? It really does open up the potential for much more productive working relationships.

[Uma Kumaran]

Q Thank you, panel, for your thoughts and representations today. My constituency of Stratford and Bow has a rich history—I am sad that the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire is not here at the moment to listen to this part—and we are rooted in the fight for working people’s rights. It is the site of the 1888 London Bryant and May strike, better known as the matchgirls’ strike.

Paul, 136 years ago, Sarah Chapman was first elected as the TUC rep from the then-formed Matchmakers’ Union. She fought ardently for women’s rights, and she made great representations at the TUC for women’s rights, but it has been 136 years and there is still much more to do for women in the workplace. I am really pleased to see that the TUC has said that

“Labour’s Employment Rights Bill is so vital for women’s pay and equality.”

I am keen to hear your thoughts on why you think that is, and other reflections from the panel.

Paul Nowak: It would be good to hear from colleagues from Unison and Unite, who directly represent hundreds of thousands of women at work. We know, for example, that women are more likely to be employed on zero-hours contracts, and are more likely to be in low-paid occupations. I think things like the fair pay agreement in social care could have a transformative impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of women who go out to work.

That is alongside all the other provisions in the Bill—for example, the presumption around flexible working, which will allow people to balance work and family life but also, crucially, allow us to bring people back into the labour market who are struggling at the moment to find work that suits their caring and other responsibilities. There is a whole range of provisions in the Bill that will have a direct, positive impact on women at work, and a direct impact on those sectors in which we know that low-paid, insecure employment is most concentrated—retail, social care and hospitality.

Maggi Ferncombe: I represent Unison. We are 80% women. I talked at the very beginning about the significant difference this Bill will make, but I will give you some examples. Paul touched on flexible working. You could sum up this Bill in lots of different ways, but it is going to make such a difference to carers who care as a profession but also to carers who have caring responsibilities outside work, most of whom are women.

I will not touch on the fair pay agreement, because Paul already has, but the other area is the reinstatement of the school support staff negotiating body. These workers are again majority women and majority working part time. It will be transformative for those workers to have a set of standard terms and conditions, opportunities for training and salary, and not to have to take part-time jobs outside of their school work to be able to make ends meet. That will be the transformation for women.

Dave Moxham: We have been fortunate in Scotland—not completely fortunate—to get a bit of a head start on some of this discussion, particularly about low-paid care workers. We have a strong developing consensus that care workers’ voices are women’s voices in the collective bargaining arena, and that is something that we want to develop in Scotland. It is something that I think the Bill may just have to address for Scotland, because this is one of those situations where, because of the devolved nature of the delivery of care, we may need to invest powers in the Scottish Government rather than the Secretary of State. That is something we would intend to submit to the Committee on.

But I think we have really good early indications that a living wage for care workers, and the full involvement of unionised care workers in the delivery and shaping of their services, can pay enormous dividends. We are a long way from getting it right in Scotland, but I think we have got a good start there, which I hope some of the legislation here will reflect.

Hannah Reed: Very briefly, I fully endorse what colleagues have said. I am not going to repeat it, so as not to take the Committee’s time. Many women are part of trade unions because they want their voices heard and they want to be able to address issues such as inequality, bullying and pay discrimination in the workplace. The introduction of equality reps’ rights will provide an important focus to say that equality must be at the heart of the negotiating agenda within workplaces.

Alongside that, I recognise that there are improvements to parental rights that will help to ensure that there is a fairer share of parental responsibilities in the home. We have already talked about a lot of zero-hours contract workers being women. One of the things we are very aware of in hospitality is that, too often, employers bring in too many workers for shifts and say: “Sorry, we do not need you any more. Go home.” They then cancel a shift without any compensation for the workers for their travel time, costs or childcare. We hope the Bill will help to address some of those concerns.

[Chris Law]

Q Following on from Mr Moxham’s comments, I wonder whether there are parts of this UK-wide Bill that give you concern for employment rights in devolved nations where devolved Governments already have responsibility for employment relations? Is it not time that employment law was devolved, as is supported by the STUC, TUC and Scottish Labour, and as already exists in Northern Ireland? That is not least because it will help to protect us from future Conservative Governments that may wish to repeal all the good legislation that is coming forward.

Dave Moxham: There is a growing consensus in favour of the devolution of employment law to Scotland, but I think we all know that the Bill cannot achieve all of that, whether this Committee was in agreement with it or not. What is of interest to us is the interface between employment law at a UK level and the responsibilities of the Scottish Government, who obviously employ the vast majority of the public sector in Scotland. In a sense, that is what I am referring to here. Through procurement and other regulations, the Scottish Government are working with us to deliver collective bargaining arrangements in Scotland, which interface and have a potential complication—if not conflict—with what is in this Bill. We would like that to be looked at.

It is important to recognise that not all employment law is reserved to Westminster. In Scotland, there are the Agricultural Wages Board and the employment tribunals already, and a range of other things are devolved. Partly with respect to Wales, which I will not try to speak for, but definitely with respect to Scotland, which I will, there may be aspects of this Bill that might need to be looked at, particularly the relative responsibilities of the two Parliaments.

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[Chris Law]

Ninety per cent?

Joeli Brearley: Ninety per cent; it is a significant proportion. Often, these are for quite measly sums of money. They are pushed on women when they are feeling very vulnerable. Women are told that, if they sign this non-disclosure agreement, they will get a really good reference and it will all go away—“You get this lump sum of money, off you go.” But what they mean is that you cannot talk about what has happened to anybody. Legally, you can talk about it to your spouse and your lawyer, but that is about it. That really damages the mental health of women who sign them, because they cannot say what has happened to them. They sort of harbour this dirty secret, and that really is very damaging to them.

It also means that we do not know what is happening behind companies’ closed doors. I can tell you now that there are companies that win awards for being brilliant employers for women, but behind closed doors they are pushing women out when they are pregnant and forcing them to sign non-disclosure agreements so they cannot talk about it publicly.

Along with Zelda Perkins, who runs Can’t Buy My Silence, we would like to see that non-disclosure agreements are unenforceable unless the claimant—the person signing it—wants them to be enforced. That is a piece of legislation that Ireland has just pushed through: making NDAs unenforceable unless the claimant would like them enforced, and unless the documents are written in very clear language—often non-disclosure agreements are really complicated to read and nobody can fully understand them—and there is still the opportunity to report what happened to a trade union and to the ombudsman. Again, at the moment nobody knows what is happening because, by their very nature, non-disclosure agreements stop you talking to anybody, so we would like to see a similar change here.

[Uma Kumaran]

Q Thank you both for your representations. Joeli, I follow your work and have a lot of friends who have followed Pregnant Then Screwed—thank you. Jemima, I have read the Fawcett Society’s report on the gender pay gap, and heard your views here. Listening to you both today has put some new questions in my head on top of those that I already wanted to ask.

You have both talked about maternity provisions and what they could mean for the country. More broadly, what is the benefit to the economy and to businesses of having stronger maternity provisions as set out in the Bill?

Joeli Brearley: By maternity provisions, do you mean maternity leave and pay?

[Uma Kumaran]

Yes, maternity rights.

Joeli Brearley: As I mentioned before, we know that 54,000 women a year are pushed out of their jobs from the point that they get pregnant, while pregnant, while taking maternity leave or just after they return. That is one in nine; it is a woman every 10 minutes.

What tends to happen is that it takes those women a very long time to recover. Sometimes it is a slow drip feed of bullying and harassment, because people know that just pushing them out is unlawful and they could go to tribunal. This is severely damaging to women’s careers, and to their first year with their new baby—it really damages their mental health—and it is a big contributor to the gender pay gap. We do not know exactly how much it contributes to the gender pay gap, but it obviously is a big contributor.

What we need to see—and what we have been campaigning for—to change this is, first, ringfenced, properly paid paternity leave, because until an employer sees any employee as somebody who could go off when they have a child, they will always have a bias against women. At the moment, men do not take time off—a maximum of two weeks, often—once they have become a father, so they are not seen as a risk, whereas women are seen as a risk, so that bias starts in the recruitment process. We know that if we ringfence paternity leave and pay it properly, men will take time out, which also reduces the unpaid labour gap; we know that men tend to do less of the unpaid labour, so taking these steps would mean that women could excel more in their careers.

Secondly—I know it is not within this Committee’s scope but I have to mention it—our childcare system is a chaotic mess. It needs to be affordable and it needs to be accessible. Until that happens, women will take a step back from their careers. We also need enhanced redundancy protections, like what is in this Bill, but we need them to be very specific and to be about, “If the business fails—”

[The Chair]

Order. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you both for your evidence. We now move to the next panel.

Examination of Witness

Alasdair Reisner gave evidence.