Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
I’m writing this from the ASLEF annual conference, a union whose members are all too familiar with the devastating effects of asbestos exposure, as well as of other industrial diseases.
In the main, members who have become ill, and the many who have tragically died, have been able to claim compensation from the former rail industry employers who exposed them. Even those employers which no longer exist can be traced, more often than not back to British Rail. This means that historic employer liability insurance policies will usually be available and a claim against them can be made.
But thousands of industrial disease sufferers negligently exposed in the course of their work have been unable to trace their employers’ liability insurers and so are unable to bring a claim
Now the government has launched the Mesothelioma Bill, which had its second reading in parliament this week. It establishes a scheme of last resort for untraced employers’ liability insurance claims and has given the coalition a fair few positive news stories.
But it’s not the act of benevolence it is portrayed as. It’s certainly not the proposed scheme which the last Labour government consulted on, which would have created an insurance fund of last resort to compensate all industrial disease victims where the employer has gone out of business and their liability insurer can’t be traced.
It’s unlikely the scheme will pay more than 70% of the average compensation claimants would have got if they could trace their former employer’s liability insurance. And it will only compensate mesothelioma claims, but only then the ones where diagnosis was on or after 25 July 2012 – an arbitrary cut off date based on when the coalition finally got round to announcing the outcome of the consultation which had ended the day before the 2010 general election.
So aside from the thousands of people who have been deprived of compensation over the years due to the insurance industry’s incompetence in losing or destroying the policies it sold for decades in a compulsory market, hundreds more will lose out due to the government’s delay of over two years in announcing its intentions.
A delay no doubt caused by ministers’ cuddling their insurance industry buddies until the latter were completely reassured that the scheme would not dent their vast profits.
There are lots of other holes in the scheme. To read more see this week’s LELR weekly.
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The abbreviation UKCES doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue in the same way as, for example, CWU, or TUC. But the contribution that the UK Commission for Employment and Skills is making to industrial relations is nevertheless very important.
But I would be surprised if many readers had ever heard of UKCES or was aware of the really impressive research work that has been undertaken by them.
The Commission itself contains representatives from business, education and the trade unions. It was set up in 2008 and has survived the twin challenges of public expenditure cuts and deep antipathy to organised labour in some sections of government.
It works closely with other organisations with mysterious acronyms such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES).
So in short, the research commissioned by UKCES and its partners is really top notch. There can be no doubt about its quality or the integrity of the research methods, statistical analysis or the eminent academics who have been involved in writing the final reports.
And what reports they are. In 2012, UKCES surveyed 3,200 working peopled aged between 20 and 65. They made sure the sample size was balanced in terms of gender, what people were doing, age and residency. The interviews were conducted face-to-face by experienced and skilled researchers.
And crucially, the 2012 survey built on the results of previous surveys in 2006, 2001, 1997, 1992 and 1986. In other words we can go back over 25 years to see how things have changed in key areas in the workplace.
Six papers were produced dealing with various aspects of the research findings: the title of the papers themselves gives you an inkling of what those results might be.
- Skills at work
- Training
- Job Control
- Fear at work
- Work intensification
- Job-related well-being
The papers were presented at two linked seminars in London. There were close to 200 people in the audience at each event and the attendance list read like a who’s who of industrial relations practice and research. In other words, this stuff matters. And in the words of Professor Duncan Gallie who lead much of the research, it matters because it is centred on data from those who know most about these issues - the workers themselves.
The research confirmed feelings that most of us have had for some time. On one level involvement in decision making seems to have improved. There has been more formal consultation, but this finding is not reflected in questions about job control – or in questions about fear at work. Those interviewed feel that they have less control and more frightened of arbitrary and unfair treatment. The trend over the last 25 years is absolutely clear on this.
This to me is the stand out feature of the results of the survey. There are, of course, other conclusions and these are summarised very helpfully on the front page of each of the download-for-free research papers.
Because without wanting to jump on the table and shout “we told you so”, it is clear that you cannot pay lip service to consultation and expect it to have no impact.
As the researchers themselves have acknowledged: Even though there maybe formal consultation, if people feel they have less control over their work, this can lead to “organisational dysfunctionality”. For “organisational dysfunctionality” read tension at the workplace, lower productivity and poorer economic performance.
When combined with the recession and constraints on public expenditure, it is no surprise that public sector workers now feel more vulnerable than those in the private sector – and it is no surprise either that now 51% of all those surveyed believe that it is likely they will suffer the consequence of an unfair decision affecting them at work. Indeed 1 in 6 of those surveyed believe that there is a likely chance of them losing their job within the next year.
More people are now more concerned about victimisation than discrimination, which given the change in the makeup of the workforce over the last 20 years is a striking shift.
For union negotiators and policy makers this is a very valuable resource. It validates the concerns that we have and the arguments that we have been making over the last many years. But for government – and opposition – politicians there is an even clearer message: the current strategy is not working, it is in fact making things worse – and there is no reasonable prospect of that improving.
Those who commissioned and carried the research should be rightly praised for their diligence and professionalism in making sure that we have the opportunity to develop policy on the basis of evidence.
All titles are downloadable free from www.llakes.org – the 20 May 2013 news item on the front page has all the links you need.
*This is the title LLAKES themselves gave to their news release when the survey results were published.
I have waited some time to see it, but the dramatisation of the days of the 1974-9 Labour government, ‘This House’ at the Olivier National Theatre, which we just caught on the last night, was well worth it. It took us back to those heady days when we had a radical Labour government and a strong trade union movement.
I was then a very junior, but deeply committed, official in the mighty Jack Jones’ T&GWU at Transport House, Smith Square (we celebrated 2million plus members at the Festival Hall in 1976).
Although I had joined the Labour Party, my head was still full of Marxist dreams and so I didn’t appreciate what was going on in the real world across in Parliament. But ‘This House’ has captured the parliamentary side of the real thing. Its by an amazingly young new playwright, James Graham, who has talked to almost all the key players on both sides of the House then and ransacked Hansard for gems. Like the fact that ‘Big Ben’ stopped working for the first time ever (not even during the Blitz), during a critical part of the Party battle in the Chamber. This conflict at times came to physical blows and Members falling dead (though not in the Chamber, of course)! This unprecedented Big Ben stoppage is used by Graham very effectively to symbolise the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.
The play starts with the downfall of the Heath Conservative government in February 1974, when he went to the country with a ‘who governs – us or the unions?’ election question. The Coal Board – a nationalised industry since 1948 – had to cave in to the miners’ union in 1972 at ‘Saltley Gates’ in Birmingham. Heath’s attempt to ‘reform the unions’ with a fairly mild but over-legalistic framework – like Wilson’s Labour government before him- became a dead letter by 1973. This was in the face of one of the biggest TUC campaigns of civil disobedience ever. He had to release the ‘Pentonville Five’ London dockers or face a General Strike. In 1973\4, another national coal dispute and his attempt to counter a power workers strike, with a 3 day working week imposed on everybody, didn’t work either. Unsurprisingly, he got the ‘not you’ answer to his question from a bemused electorate. It was this that started the move, by a relatively unknown Tory woman MP from Finchley, to remove him as Tory leader in 1975. [See my 'We Made Thatcher' blog]
Although we never get to see ‘the Iron Lady’, her brooding presence is always there in the Tory Whips’ office and at the end, as her voiceover intones, ‘Where there is strife, may we bring harmony’ etc!!
As the new minority Labour government of Harold Wilson takes over, most of the action takes place in the respective party Whips’ offices. First one, and then the other, group of fixers in the ‘engine-rooms’, scheme, investigate and exploit every foible and weakness of their own ‘flock’ of MPs, to keep them voting for or against the government on all key issues eg a Bill to nationalise the Shipbuilding and Aerospace industries – would that we had one today! Scottish devolution was then but a Labour promise to keep the Scot Nats on board.
The action and dialogue is fast and furious, as the Whips in both parties, argue, curse (the bad language is choice but effective in recreating the torrid atmosphere), cajole, ‘bribe’ and generally lean on the self-interested, unfortunate or pig-headed MPs (about 30 ‘odds and sods’ Liberals, Scot Nats, Irish Nats and Unionists and a hard-core of far Left Labour MPs.) The dour but committed ‘hard-left’ ‘Audrey Wise of Coventry South West, is wonderfully portrayed. As is the headstrong Michael Heseltine, with his golden mane, as he removed the sacred mace and swung it around in the Chamber to the horror of all true ‘parliamentarians’. This was an outraged Tory reaction to an alleged Labour Whip flanker, calling one ‘paired’ MP to vote to save the government’s skin, again, the excuse being that they had not paired a minister, delayed elsewhere.
Events rush on to the breakdown of the ‘Social Contract’ in 1977, as unions return to ‘free collective bargaining’ in response to Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan’s insistence on a well-below inflation level pay increase limit. That imaginative, but too ‘top-down’ initiative of Jack Jones and the TUC, worked for a while, giving pay restraint/lower inflation in return for many of the core employment legal rights which workers still enjoy – despite their severe erosion today. However, the big union battalions at Ford’s and then the road haulage drivers, quickly drove ‘a coach and horses’ through Callaghan’s 5% limit with the connivance of the employers. Where are those battalions now? – depleted in numbers, non-unionised and far more poorly paid! Soon, the low paid local government and health service workers were getting in on the act in what became a most indisciplined affray. Rubbish piled up in city streets, hospitals ran short of vital medicines and the dead remained unburied in the winter of 1978/9 (‘the Winter of Discontent’). Callaghan had hung on to the summer of 1979, failing to call an election that Autumn, before the proverbial had hit the fan . Soon the Whips were packing their bags after losing a vote of confidence by one vote. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you get a chance to ever see,’This House’ (the final night was filmed and broadcast to twenty cinemas around the world – a new innovation for the Olivier, so it should be available on disc), make sure you do. Though a bit depressing at the end, as the Iron Lady emerges as Prime Minister, the ‘might have beens’ of that tempestuous decade continue to inform our debates in the trade unions. A very different relationship with today’s new Labour Party, has still to be hammered out. ‘This House’ is a reminder of what happens when the unions and Labour fail to get it right, as we have been doing ever since.
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
The Thompsons Solicitors Weekly Blog
Another consultation lands. The Health and Safety Executive is proposing a revised Approved Code of Practice (ACoP) on the workplace health and safety regulations.
It’s a mild one by the standards we have become used to from this government. Another emanation from the Löfstedt review of health and safety, it implements the recommendation that the HSE should review all its ACoPs.
We will be studying the detail before firmly concluding that the proposed changes are of little concern. But in general they are updates of various aspects to reflect amendments in the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 themselves, including the deletion of out of date duties and responsibilities.
Ironically, whereas the ministerial motivation for commissioning the Löfstedt review was the now well-worn path of reducing burdens on business, health and safety ACoPs are not obligatory for businesses to follow.
If they do however, they can be reasonably sure that they are complying with legal requirements. And if they don’t, and an accident happens, a court may take a dim view. So as burdens go, the ACoP is more of a help than an hindrance. It’s certainly not proactive regulation.
Yet the aim of the consultation is “to establish if the changes make it easier for employers to understand and meet their obligations”.
The Löfstedt review, and Lord Young’s before that, found little evidence that employers don’t really understand their obligations. And the burden on business was more perceived than real.
That’s an inconvenient truth. No amount of re-drafting of the regulations and codes will satisfy those in the business lobby and in government with a seemingly pathological hatred for health and safety regulations.
Every time we secure compensation for someone injured in a workplace accident, it’s a cost that could have been avoided if the employer had observed some simple rules and guidance.
At a time when the HSE is operating under swingeing budget cuts do we really need another consultation based on anecdotal evidence that life must be made easier for employers, when what is needed is increased inspections and prosecutions and to hammer home the truth that safe workplaces are more successful businesses?
And let’s not forget that this government is making it increasingly difficult for accident victims to be properly compensated by their employer’s insurer. Ironically, for a government that wants to minimise state intervention, this means that the state is likely to have pick up the tab for an employer’s negligence through welfare claims.
To read more about the consultation see this week’s LELR.
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
The weekly UnionHome Thompsons Solicitors Blog
Employers’ body the Institute of Directors accused the government of a “poverty of ambition” in its response to this week’s Queen’s Speech. It complained that the new legislative programme “does little to cut back red tape for employers and nothing to tackle the problem of ‘gold-plated’ EU regulation”.
Aside from the fact that one of the most vicious pieces of legislation – the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act – has just received royal assent, a swathe of further employment law reforms are still in process.
So if working people appear to have been given a bit of a breather from further dismantling of their rights at work, it is not, I fear, for lack of government ambition.
The IoD is of course miffed that its bonkers “Beyond Beecroft” Bill to bring in no-fault dismissals didn’t make it onto the legislative agenda. [see this week’s LELR weekly]
Nor did its “Too Big to Strike” and “Midas” Bills – the former requiring at least 50% of union members to back industrial action and the latter restricting implementation of EU directives into UK law to the minimum required.
But if the bosses body didn’t think it had the wind behind it, it wouldn’t be persisting in its efforts to further restrict trade union rights and to rob workers of the little job security they still have.
A curious theme emerged from the comments made by IoD director general Simon Walker. Marital breakdown.
Unions have, he claims, become divorced from their original purpose, no longer representing workers from specific industries and able to cause disruption beyond the site of the original dispute.
Compensated no-fault dismissals are, he thinks, “like a divorce” – the relationship isn’t working and there is no point in going on or even going to court.
Given that a key part of the original purpose of trade unions was collective action in the absence of other influence over injustice in working life, Walker seems to be arguing against himself.
And his no-fault dismissals analogy only works if it is assumed that marriages are built on the same master and servant relationship as the employment one is. How cynical.
Walker’s “super unions” line – he wants the Competition Commission to investigate union mergers – makes no more sense. Interviewed on the Today programme, he attacked public sector super unions for being too strong, but praised private sector ones for being constructive and helping to keep factories open, citing specifically the unions at Ellesmere Port. It was early in the morning, perhaps I missed something, but aren’t those the exact same super unions that organise in the public sector?
A colleague told me of a strange lunch she was “treated” to in the IoD’s swanky brasserie at its Mayfair headquarters. The brasserie was used as a set for the Batman film the Dark Knight, in which the Joker is bent on turning Gotham on itself.
Time to return these clowns and their lunatic ideas back to Arkham Asylum.
Talk of another General Strike does bring to mind the parallels with the last one in May 1926, eighty seven years ago this month.
Like today, a new General Secretary of the TUC with much to prove, Walter Citrine, had just arrived at their pokey office in Eccleston Square, Victoria. On the sudden death of the General Secretary, Fred Bramley, he was called back from a delegation to the Soviet Union to become Acting General Secretary – would the TUC opening diplomatic relations with what was still viewed widely as the ‘first workers’ state’?
Like today, there was a right-wing Conservative government which had bowed to Treasury, Bank of England and City financial orthodoxy and tied Britain once again to ‘the Gold Standard’, so depressing wages generally and making British exports, especially coal exports, uncompetitive. Keynes’ pamphlet, ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill’ (the Chancellor), exposing this stealthy impact, had a major influence on the union leaders, particularly Citrine. The miners were seen as the ‘shock troops’ to defend against a general employers’ offensive on wages. They had a fiery left-wing General Secretary, Arthur J. Cook, General Secretary of the Miners Federation – Arthur Scargill’s hero – and the TUC General Council fell in behind them.
In fact, the TUC did its best to avert that General Strike by intervening in the coal dispute negotiations, with the blessing of the Mineworkers Federation, its 800,000-strong largest affiliate. With the threat of a repeat of the wholly successful 1925 solidarity action by the rail and road transport unions (‘Red Friday’), they tried to pressurise the government into reining in the mine-owners who were ‘gung ho’ to lock-out the miners, cut their pay and increase their hours of work. They also tried to get the government to continue the coal subsidy and re-organise the industry. Citrine, who was involved in all the negotiations, thought they were close to doing so.
Two things prevented a settlement. First, the inflexibility of the miners leaders, who felt bound to their rank-and-file pit opinion ( ‘not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’). The TUC had not insisted on them giving full authority in writing to conduct and conclude it, before involving themselves in the fraught coal industry dispute. The other reason was that the hawks in the Cabinet, led by Churchill, (smarting from what they saw as the humiliating government retreat of ‘Red Friday”), wanted to ‘teach the unions a lesson’. They persuaded the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to break off the negotiations using the pretext of a Daily Mail compositor’s refusal to set a clearly provocative anti-union front page.
So, on 4th May, the General Strike started in response to that government ultimatum to call off the General Strike. This followed a conference of 1300 union delegates at the Memorial Hall, Faraday Street, as each union roll-called their decisions after rousing speeches and songs. Amazingly, over 1.5 million workers walked out in support of the 1million miners already locked-out. Never before had so many British workers been out on strike together. The transport system in the cities ground to a halt (especially in London), as hardly any buses, trams or underground trains ran. The railways closed. The docks, furnaces, iron and steel, heavy chemical and power industries became as silent as the pits. One writer described it as a ‘strange and even eery experience’.
Amazingly, by the second week, it was still solid, with the engineering and other manufacturing workers coming out. Most European General Strikes only lasted days, despite their much more syndicalist traditions. Even the government realised that they were in uncharted waters, despite their middle class ‘Volunteers’, despite the propaganda of the BBC, their ‘British Gazette’, The Mail and The Times and their best efforts to undermine the will of the strikers. Surprisingly, there was hardly any disorder (many strikers played football with the police) and it was lovely sunny May weather.
However, the General Council leaders were becoming anxious as to where it was all going. They had never intended it as a political challenge to the government, but clearly that’s what it had developed into. You can’t close down the country (food was exempt), without any government intervention, and troops were being placed on standby in their barracks. At Wellington barracks, Citrine ‘saw troops drawn up on the parade ground. Some were practising with machine guns; others had gas masks on, while some were in full marching kit.’ Some, like Jimmy Thomas of the NUR had worried from the start that they would all be arrested and some even shot! His 455,000 rail workers had been solid from the start even though they faced legal challenges and for some, loss of pension. But he was also an MP (and had been a Minister in the 1924 Labour government), with contacts all round Westminster. He was close to the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, who was now also worried.
Even tough strike leaders like Ernest Bevin, whose dockers would have stayed out as long as the miners, was also perturbed by the miners’ intransigence and unwillingness to consider the wider movement. They had tried to restart negotiations but they broke down again as the miners’ leaders would not budge. This really exasperated Citrine and the negotiating committee, as the Miners Federation had, supposedly, put the negotiations in the TUC’s hands. In the circumstances, Citrine gauged the mood of the General Council generally now as being to call it off, and retreat in an orderly fashion.
This was not to be. It is not clear from Citrine’s account – though he kept a daily diary and notes of all the key meetings – why they capitulated without a ‘return to work’ agreement, which would have safeguarded the strikers from victimisation. They only had ‘warm words’ from the Prime Minister and the King. The impression is that Baldwin issued the TUC with an ultimatum to call it off ‘forthwith’ or face the consequences – the use of police and troops to break the strike, and the General Council feared that this would have meant bloodshed. So, on the night of Tuesday 11th May, Citrine received a phone call from Downing Street saying ‘the Prime Minister wants to know whether you have any news for him. He [and the Cabinet] had been sitting up for you’. The General Council were waiting for the Miners’ leaders to tell them if they would compromise. On being told no, Citrine and the TUC President, Arthur Pugh of the Iron & Steel workers, and Thomas went into the Cabinet room to give a ‘haggard and drawn’ Baldwin and other Ministers their decision. When Pugh announced the calling-off of the strike, Baldwin replied, ‘I thank God for your decision’. It was back from the brink.
Hardly surprisingly, Citrine and the TUC leaders took a lot of ‘stick’ from the miners (who stayed out for another six months!), the Left and those later victimised – though most workers were relieved. A ‘post-mortem’ conference of all the unions in January 1927, overwhelmingly accepted their account. It rejected Arthur Cook and Herbert Smith’s Minerworker’s Federation version of things, though Citrine acknowledged that it had been ill-prepared and called off without consultation with them. He regarded it as ‘a protest against the degradation of the standards of life of millions of good trade unionists’. I’m sure that Len McCluskey would say the same today with much justification! But would he accept Citrine’s view that ‘the theory of the General Strike had never been thought out ‘ and that a stoppage on such a scale for any length of time, would inevitably be taken as ‘a challenge to the Constitution’?
Looking back in 1964, Citrine still didn’t resile from his long-held view – ‘I did not regard the General Strike as a failure’:
“We have had our General Strike. Imperfect as it has been…it was the most
magnificent effort of rank-and-file solidarity that the British movement has
ever displayed”.
The general employers’ offensive on pay did not happen.
Citrine was elected General Secretary at the September 1926 annual Congress, with the support of the Miners’ leaders, Cook and Smith, who respected his conduct during the whole coal dispute. He would serve with distinction – he became Lord Citrine of Wembley – for another twenty years in some of the most eventful decades of the twentieth century. He (and Bevin) would take the TUC in a different, less confrontational direction altogether after the strike, with considerable success (after the Great Depression 1928-34). By WW2 the TUC and the union movement were being described as another ‘estate of the realm’. But that is another story.
So, the story of the General Strike is many dimensional. It could not be repeated today. Talk of General Strikes, from a movement that is so much weaker, seem ‘cloud cuckoo’ stuff, though many of the same issues are around again to justify such a nation-wide protest. So, it is not enough for our ‘One Nation’ Labour theorists to simply reject the notion of such protests – Occupy, Uncut etc and Len McCluskey, are expressions of the desperation again setting in. They must also come up with alternative policies which are not based on Treasury, Bank of England and City orthodoxy in government economic policy. Who will write and act on, ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr Osborne’?
Source: Walter Citrine, ‘Men and Work’ (1964), Volume 1 of his very interesting autobiography.
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
The Thompsons Solicitors weekly blog
Fees for pursuing employment tribunals are expected to come in at the end of July, though a letter to stakeholders from the Courts and Tribunals Services is vague about the date and whether the systems will be ready.
In fact, now that the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has passed into law, there’s a long list of employment law changes that the government has yet to give clear implementation dates for [see this week’s LELR weekly].
A consultation on how the fees remission system will work in practice was expected last autumn but has only recently opened. It closes on 16 May.
The government’s stated aim is that through fees it will achieve 100% recovery of the costs of running the system. Given that targets below full cost recovery have already been agreed with the Treasury, I wonder what the point of consultation on fees remission is?
Not that many claimants will qualify under the government’s proposals anyway.
If an applicant has too much “disposable capital” there will be no remission and no need to consider income levels. Disposable capital includes such things as jointly held capital, ISAs, savings and redundancy payments. The test has been set to “prevent fee remissions being paid to wealthy individuals”.
An individual or a couple with savings of as little as £3,000 will be expected to pay up to a third on fees. This rises to a half for those with £8,000 put away for leaner times. Nothing is said about the practical problems of liquidating capital assets within the three-month time limit for lodging a claim.
An applicant who passes the disposable capital test is then subject to an income test, which is now based on gross monthly, not annual income. No explanation is given for this, nor for the fact that the income threshold is being slashed at the same time.
A single person’s lower threshold remains at about £13,000, but a couple’s threshold drops from £18,000 to £15,000 – a mere £2,000 above that of a single person. The minimum wage for one person working 40 hours a week is just under £13,000. So is the majority of the population “wealthy” on this analysis?
A partner’s income is taken into account on the basis that “both the applicant and their partner gain financially or otherwise from the use of a court or tribunal”. Income levels must be proved by showing their last three months bank statements.
No account is taken of the fact that those claiming unfair dismissal or unlawful deduction from wages will no longer be in receipt of the income those statements show.
And if you want to retrospectively claim a remission you must do so within two months – so there’s not much chance to produce three months of post-dismissal bank statements.
These proposals have nothing to do with making the wealthy pay, or saving the taxpayer money. As we have come to expect from this government, the bar to qualify for remissions is being set so deliberately high that it will simply deter people pursuing legitimate employment tribunal claims, denying access to justice to those who need it most.
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
The Thompsons Solicitors Weekly Blog
It’s been a dismal week for health and safety and rights at work.
On Monday the House of Lords voted to change the law which makes employers automatically liable for breaches of health and safety regulations, meaning an injured worker cannot rely on that breach as evidence of negligence in any claim for compensation [see this week’s LELR for more details and Thompsons’ response].
And on Wednesday peers accepted the government’s assurances on its deeply flawed shares for rights scheme.
I had been following both amendments – the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and Growth and Infrastructure Bills – as they pinged and ponged between the chambers. It was impossible not to have admiration for the Lords’ determination to see them off – perhaps constitutional reform wasn’t so urgent.
But the law in place since 1898 to protect workers, and which went on to be enshrined in the Factories Acts, was wiped out at 11.30pm because there were just too few peers left to vote the government’s amendment down.
The calling of last trains, bed and cocoa overcame the need to prevent workplace health and safety returning to the standards of Victorian England.
And then the ever-strengthening cross-party and cross-bench opposition in the Lords to Osborne’s ill-conceived and offensive plan to deny fundamental employment rights to certain workers melted away with a number of concessions, including on the need for individuals to receive independent legal advice.
So I am again firmly behind modernising our constitution.
The last ditch changes to shares for rights were in addition to earlier protections dragged out of ministers by MPs and Lords, including for jobseekers and for others who refuse the employee-shareholder status.
But the scheme remains open to abuse by employers determined to try to get something for nothing. It does not herald a great advance in share-holding democracy, whatever is claimed from the rostrums at this year’s Tory and Lib Dem party conferences.
The AWB is set to be abolished if the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill gains Royal Assent in its present form.
Labour has tabled the following motion:
That this House notes that the Agricultural Wages Board was set up in 1948 to provide a fair wage and skills structure for agricultural workers; recognises that it is used as a benchmark for other employment in the food industry and that it was the only wages council not to be scrapped in the 1980s; further notes that around a quarter of agricultural workers live in tied accommodation and that casual seasonal workers may move around the country; regrets that the Welsh Government’s wish to retain the AWB has been ignored by the UK Government; condemns the Government for its abolition of the AWB, which took place after just 4 weeks consultation and will take £260 million out of the rural economy over the next 10 years, lead to a race to the bottom on wages in rural areas, reduce living standards and impoverish rural workers, exacerbating social deprivation and harming social inclusion; further regrets that Honourable Members could not debate this issue as part of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill; and calls on the Government to drop its plans to abolish the AWB.
The Twitter hashtag for this afternoon’s debate is #ruralwages Read More…
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
The weekly Thompsons Solicitors blog
Although the government’s proposed changes to the TUPE regulations will benefit employers and employers alone, there’s little evidence that they actually want them.
At a recent meeting of the influential Westminster Policy Forum, a number of representatives from City law firms – employers’ lawyers – said there was no appetite among bosses for the reforms.
And for good reason. Employers appreciate the certainty that the 2006 amendments relating to service provision changes (SPCs) – which happen when work is outsourced, taken back in house, or when the contractor providing the work changes – afford.
Certainly, no clamour for change emerged from the BIS call for evidence on the issue last year. The majority of respondents wanted to retain SPCs.
Our response to the TUPE regulations consultation, reported in this week’s LELR points out that until 2007 there was a steady stream of appeals to the Court of Appeal, and even to the Court of Justice, dealing with the fundamental issues relating to whether there had been a transfer under the 1981 version of TUPE.
But the introduction of SPCs in 2006 changed all that. There have been a handful of appeals to the employment appeal tribunal, but the existence of SPCs has greatly reduced the scope for dispute as to whether TUPE applies.
Inevitably, that’s a problem for this business burden obsessed government. As with its resolve to remove strict liability from health and safety laws because they provide certainty over an employer’s responsibility for a workplace accident caused by a breach of the regulations, it is determined to free up employers to try to circumvent the TUPE rules.
That doing so will mean more litigation and cost for employers seems not to have occurred to ministers, though it has to businesses – hence their support for the status quo.
Appallingly, the government’s justification is that, anecdotally, employers have been seeking legal advice on how to avoid TUPE or at least mitigate its effects. There’s no evidence this is widespread, and the comments of the City boys this week would imply it isn’t.
There will always be employers who try to get around the rules. It’s what keeps union reps and union lawyers so busy. But it doesn’t mean the rules are wrong, anti-competitive, damaging to the economy or a deterrent to employing people.
Neither does it mean that businesses who want to be free not to respect workers’ rights are entrepreneurs while everyone else is in hock to employment lawyers, as was implied by business minister Michael Fallon during last Tuesday’s Commons debates on the equally illogical shares for rights scheme.
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