There have been arguments about the length of the working day since the building of the pyramids, when the first union is recorded on behalf of the bricklayers! From the Factories Acts of the early nineteenth century until the recent European Directive on Working Time, trade unionists around the world have persuaded society that there should be limits to the hours their members are required to work. An eight hour day or forty eight hour week is now considered the most anybody should have to labour generally. Yet if you listen to David Cameron and his ilk, this European law of maximum working time of 48 hours (in fact, easily exceeded with the worker’s consent), is what makes the EU objectionable to all free-thinking Brits.
So, what are we to make of the NUT’s recent demand for a four hour daily teaching time limit? Nice, if you can get it, was my first reaction, but how realistic would a 20 (teaching): 10 (preparing): 5 (other duties) hour week be? As a school governor in a primary and a secondary school, I can see that with the increasing pressures on all their conditions from government and Ofsted inspections, that teachers might have a case about the actual hours they have to teach in what can be a high-pressured job.
But how should their unions – ATL, NUSAWT and NUT – handle it? One thing is sure, they must get more people on their side. Any proposals to change school teaching hours would receive a better hearing if it could be shown objectively that over-worked and stressed teachers can not give their best in the classroom. Anecdotal evidence of untypical cases are unlikely to do it.
The history of the last thirty years in education if one of successive governments winning round after round against the teacher unions for the changes they wanted. This is largely because they succeeded in portraying teachers as having a ‘producer’ interest. Teacher unionism was also seen as being detrimental to their professional standing as educationalists. Grossly unfair, but they seem to have got it across to a large section of the population that teacher actions were inimical to parent and school aspirations for their kids. Actions which cost teachers no or little loss of pay, but which send the kids home early, will not evoke public sympathy, however justified. But good teachers leave a lasting impression on pupils for the rest of their lives as parents, councillors, journalists (and even politicians sometimes). Why not tap into that widespread appreciation instead?
Remember what is happening ‘out there’ to many parents during this recession. The recent 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Survey found that the proportion of firms with agency workers on zero-hours contracts, rose from 11% in 2004 to 23% in 2011. How would you get people like this on the teachers’ side for wanting to teach only four hours out of a seven hour day? Although this may be an extreme demand thrown up at the fag end of an Easter conference, it does highlight the sort of tough challenges that all modern unions face. In my view, many need ‘to go up a gear’ to crack them.
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
Ministers have hit on a new way of slipping attacks on working people past us. Make the consultations so confusing that not even us lawyers (I am not being ironic) can be sure what they mean.
A recent meeting of colleagues fell momentarily silent when one asked if anyone shared his reading of a DWP consultation about amending the TUPE pension protection regulations.
TUPE and pensions, a brilliantly baffling combination. So when a DWP press release claims it simply wants to clarify the 2005 regulations to reflect the original intention of enabling the member to choose their rate of contribution, it’s tempting to accept it’s as innocuous as that.
But my colleague was right to read the proposals differently. The reality is the proposals will remove significant rights from employees in occupational pension schemes who transfer under TUPE to another employer.
The government appears to be trying to over-ride primary legislation that obliges the new employer to make contributions to the money purchase scheme (MPS) of a transferring employee.
We’ve been cautiously generous in our response to the consultation, which is reported in this week’s LELR. We ask if the government really intended the amendment to the pension protection rules to enable transferee employers to not pay into a MPS if the transferor was, for example, on a pension holiday at the time of the transfer.
We “doubt” if the amendment was meant to allow the new employer to say to an employee that because at the time of the transfer they didn’t have enough accrued service to join the MPS, they can never join the MPS.
We’d like to think it’s all a mistake, a drafting error that the DWP will correct by withdrawing the amendment. If it doesn’t it will confirm our reading, and that the government is again reducing workers’ rights under the guise of endowing them.
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On Easter Sunday I spoke at the NASUWT conference in Bournemouth at a fringe meeting on austerity, here’s my speech:
Thanks for opportunity to speak. I’ve been coming to the conference for a few years and it’s great to be able to speak as Unions21 celebrates 20 years of serving the union movement.
Frances O’Grady talking about us at our conference earlier this month said: “I always like to think of Unions21 as the trade union movement’s answer to the TaxPayers’ Alliance – but with less money and more brains.” – which we appreciated.
And the support of NASUWT has always been appreciated through the years.
I’ve been asked to talk about how austerity has impacted on young people.
So: Unions21 as an organisation is 20 – what’s it like to be a 20-year-old person in austerity Britain? And can unions provide credible hope for young people?
I’m going to use some polling conducted last month by Survation for Unions21 of 1000 working people to help describe what it feels like to be a young worker and also present some of a report that was written previously for Unions21 by Professor Melanie Simms on young workers in the recession.
The two main effects of austerity I’ll concentrate on are unemployment and the decline in standards of living, but I also want to bring in some related effects around reduced training and opportunities.
Some of these issues are clear social issues and there’s also issues for unions to organise around too.
Read More…
As was highlighted on their release, the results of the Unions21 Fair Work Commission employment survey contained some encouraging lessons for the trade union movement.
There is evidently an appetite amongst the UK workforce for a type of ‘social justice’ campaigns which the unions are well placed to deliver. Three quarters of working people are more likely to buy from Living Wage employers, 83% think that the national minimum wage is not sufficient to meet the living costs in Britain, and 72% would support a legal cap on the total bonus any individual can receive.
However, if we look beneath these headlines, and focus in on the views of young people (18-34) some interesting, and some worrying, trends are revealed. Some of these are well known. Young people, for instance, are less likely to be trade union members. Others can be directly linked to recent developments in the workplace. Younger workers place less emphasis on discrimination and temporary employment as barriers to ‘fairness’ in the workplace, likely reflecting increased regulatory protection against employment discrimination and the normalisation of a far more flexible labour market.
Some findings will come as more of a surprise. To start with, young workers are significantly more likely to think that power lies in the employee’s hands, rather than in the employer’s. Twenty seven per cent of those surveyed felt that this was the case, compared to 17.9% amongst the 35-54 age group, and 9.6% amongst those above 55.
Whether this reflects reality, or just a growing naivety, there are corresponding lessons to be learnt for unions. As can be seen in the graph below, significantly fewer members of the younger age group see protection from employers as a trade union priority compared to older groups. By contrast pay is growing importance to young workers.
These lessons are not as simple as they may seem. Contradictorily, compared to the rest of the working population members of this same age group are 12% more likely to think that pay is already fairly distributed in their workplace and 15% more likely to think that their wages have kept up with rising living costs over the last two years,. Assuming that these younger workers are employed in the same workplaces as their older colleagues this suggests a troubling acceptance of pay disparities and a lack of awareness of real term cuts in their salaries.
Furthermore, amongst younger workers there is a noticeable decline in interest in the ‘social justice’ agendas mentioned at the beginning of this article. Younger workers are 11% less likely to support a legal cap on bonuses and 6% less likely to oppose unpaid internships. This second point is particularly bizarre as younger workers are far more likely to be exploited by unpaid internships. It suggests either a growing acceptance of unpaid internships, or a growing desperation amongst young people, or both.
For the labour movement all of this suggests an emergent need for extensive education and awareness campaigns amongst young workers. The example of the normalisation of temporary work cited previously, a battle seemingly lost long ago, should be enough of a warning of what may happen if we do not act.
Here the Living Wage should be a source of optimism. Amongst the 18-34, which is 5% more likely to feel that the minimum wage is already adequate compared to the rest of the workforce, there is actually 7% more support for the concept of a Living Wage. Credit for this must go to those behind the Living Wage campaign, whose use of imaginative organising strategies and modern communication methods has evidently caught the imagination many young people. For the unions this dissonance suggests that the right campaign can still reach out to young workers, and can push back the incoming tide of apathy.
The germ of one such campaign is perhaps contained within these results. Young workers are impressively progressive in their views of paternity leave, with 60.3% of 18-34 year olds in support of the extension of paid paternity leave from two to six weeks, compared to 32% amongst the rest of the workforce. Similarly, young people are 14% more likely to support paid leave for those caring for seriously ill family members. Furthermore, as can be seen in the graph above, family friendly workplaces is an area which younger generations are increasingly identifying as a priority for their trade unions.
Modern marketing techniques often teach us to segment individuals based on their narrow self-interest. However, it would seem that in an increasingly isolated and fragmented society we need to look beyond the supposed individualism of younger generations, and consider the importance they place on the relationships they have with those around them. There are few easy answers for trade unions today, but protection of the family and an emphasis on localised relationships, two things which are, coincidentally, closely associated with the Living Wage, would seem a sensible starting point.
Unions21 will be at the NASUWT conference on Sunday to take part in a discussion on young people and fair work.
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
If the Department of Work and Pensions can’t get it right when shedding staff, then no wonder the government is making it easier to sack workers. It claims that employment laws are a burden on business and that employers are scared to take people on for fear of facing an employment tribunal should they later want to get rid. But the case of the Public and Commercial Service union members who last week won their right to redundancy payments should tell ministers, both as policy makers and employers, that simply applying plain common sense should keep them out of the courts.
Employment legislation exists to protect employers as well as employees. Regulations are not, on the whole, difficult to understand. Get it right, or just admit when you’ve got it wrong, and you won’t have to pay significant lawyers’ costs for the pleasure of having an employment tribunal judge explaining why you got it wrong.
The DWP’s refusal to pay redundancy payments to Jobcentre Plus workers whose fixed term contracts had ended was always difficult to fathom. Its lawyers argued throughout that the JCP workers were dismissed because their fixed term contracts had not been renewed, not because it was a redundancy situation. Yet the law is clear: if an employer decides it needs fewer employees of a particular kind to carry out work, the reason for the dismissal is redundancy.
As the employment tribunal judge concluded, there were “no distinguishing factors” to disapply the decision of the Court of Appeal in a similar case involving a lecturer whose fixed term contract was not renewed.
In that case (known as Lee), the appeal court ruled that the decision of the college not to renew the claimant’s contract because it had less need for lecturers was a redundancy situation. Just because it was known that the contract would not be renewed did not alter that.
And so the same was always, in our view, going to apply in the JCP cases. In 2010, as a direct result of coalition cuts, there was a freeze on civil service recruitment and no extension of fixed term contracts without ministerial permission. Some limited extensions were granted over the following months, but the need to reduce headcount remained and both the lead claimants in the case – Ms Fanis and Ms Ricciardi - were eventually dismissed when their contracts were not renewed.
Thousands of other fixed term employees suffered the same fate in order that the DWP could meet head count reduction targets set by ministers. To argue that this was not a redundancy situation showed either a determination to ride roughshod over fixed term workers’ rights, or was just plain stupid.
Read more about the PCS fixed term contract case in LELR weekly
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Last week TAEN published the latest edition of its 50+ Job Seekers Survey. In some ways the results are predictable – surveys so often tell us things that we already know by instinct – but there are surprising insights too.
ONS figures show more older people in work and there is a general feeling that older people are doing reasonably well in the labour market.
The sad fact is however, that deeply embedded structural disadvantages and ingrained ageist attitudes bar hundreds of thousands of older people from returning to work. It is clear that older job seekers struggle harder than most.
Overwhelmingly they want to work because of financial need, a desire to feel valued and the social interaction work brings. Many are ‘worried’ or ‘desperate’ about not working.
They identify adverse attitudes by recruiters, mismatches of their own skills or qualifications with employers’ needs and the national focus on youth unemployment as being among the reasons for their problems.
These barriers to older job seekers continue more than six years after age discrimination was outlawed by the 2006 Age Regulations and two years after the end of the Default Retirement Age, allowing people to be forcibly retired at 65.
Today, despite these reforming legal changes, the challenge of ending age discrimination is as relevant as ever. Only one in ten over 50s looking for work think age discrimination law had helped them.
47 per cent of our older job seekers believed that the law had not had any benefit at all. One respondent, a former managing director seeking work, commented, “Age discrimination is rife in my view. Employers can work out your age with ease.”
Some respondents even volunteered the view that repeal of the DRA had made it harder to get work!
These findings cast an interesting perspective on seminar I attended in Rome to talk to Italian HR mangers about the global phenomenon of population ageing and its implications for employers.
Italian businesses are seriously worried, as are their Governments – when they manage to get them in place. (The wrangling over coalition alliances following the recent inclusive elections continues). The proportion of the Italian population over 65 has doubled since 1950 and will continue to grow, reaching 33 per cent of the total population by 2050. The average number of children born to Italian women is 1.41 – well short of replacement levels. So leaving aside massive immigration, the Italian labour force is shrinking.
Shrinking and ageing at the same time. Logic says that working up to existing pension ages would be a start. As long ago as 2001 the Stockholm meeting of the European Council of Ministers set a target of 50% for employment rates of people in the 55-64 age range across Europe. In Italy only 36.6 % of the older workforce is in employment.
Over the past decades across Europe, millions of older workers have been eased out of their jobs as one round of industrial restructuring follows another. The early quitting culture has stuck and become an expectation. Now like so many mucky pigeons coming home to roost, the problem appears as an unwelcome threat to economies that simply won’t have the people to do the jobs their businesses need in future.
Hence, on one hand, we have in countries with the most acute demographic threats, emerging concern to find ways of making it possible for people to work longer. At the same time, bizarrely, we have massive age discrimination at the point of hiring.
I couldn’t resist reflecting with my Italian audience on the homily of Nero fiddling whilst the fires raged outside!
Here in the UK, how do we respond to our respondents who claimed their problems could be explained by employers being charier about hiring people who want to work longer, now the DRA has been removed?
Perhaps they are right.
We have a labour market that is ambivalent in its attitudes to older people. Employers will allow them to work longer in the same jobs if they wish but they bottle out of offering them new jobs, believing they may want to work for ever.
People are working longer in part because they can choose to remain in work longer but the lot of the older person who has left a job is problematic.
He or she is likely to fall outside the person specification offered by employers to recruitment agencies, simply on grounds of age. And there is significant evidence that some recruitment agencies connive and fail to challenge ageist attitudes.
It seems clear that the law is being flouted with impunity and there is a presumption that, ‘of course employers will discriminate by age if they wish to so.’ The eradication of age discrimination in employment is a far from complete.
The time has surely come to assess the effectiveness of the law against age discrimination in recruitment. One speaker on Thursday spoke of employers and politicians ignoring a demographic tsunami in Italy, but it is not only the Romans who emulate the feats of Nero.
We’re currently in the first phase of Labour’s policy review. Jon Cruddas, who is co-ordinating the review, spoke at the Unions21 conference earlier this month and said that there is a stronger framework for joint policy work between Labour and the unions than in many years.
He said it is significant for unions that the review is putting front and centre issues of economic and industrial democracy, vocational skills and apprenticeships and the notion of a modern industrial policy. Read More…
Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors
Last week the government published another self-congratulatory report on the red-tape challenge – a progress report on its employment law reforms.
Two passages in Jo Swinson’s foreword stand out:
“Our reforms support better relationships between workers and employers. They are aimed at making evolutionary improvements to the labour market so it retains a flexibility and dynamism that benefits individuals, employers and the economy.”
And:
“There is a range of employment laws that seek to make the process of taking people on fair. The Government continues to review these regulations to ensure they do not unreasonably burden employers or disincentivise them from hiring people, ensuring the labour market remains flexible.”
There is no trace of irony in either statement.
How a wholesale dismantling of employment rights, collective redundancy rules, equality laws and health and safety regulations are evolutionary improvements to the labour market only Jo Swinson may be able to explain.
But perhaps I’m missing something.
After all, the reforms aren’t yet all in place. In fact the timetable for some of them has changed, as this week’s LELR reports. The new employment tribunal rules, which are intended to make them easier to understand and which give employment judges new powers to strike out claims, will be with us in the summer rather than on 1 April in order to coincide with the introduction of ET fees.
So perhaps manufacturing output will take off when these rules come in. Or when it costs so much to lodge a claim that thousands of unrepresented workers will be unable to access justice.
Or when the TUPE regulations are reformed (currently out for consultation yet happening in the Autumn, BIS says) and employee-owners can give up their rights in return for shares – though the Chancellor’s much derided flagship policy suffered a humiliating defeat in the House of Lords on Wednesday (it was described by former Thatcher-era minister Lord Forsyth as a “positively dreadful clause”), the 71st Lords defeat for the government this Parliament.
Perhaps the sharpest wage fall of any developed economy, as highlighted by the TUC, will be reversed when unfair dismissal compensation is capped and employers are no longer liable for third party harassment or have to fill out discrimination questionnaires.
But of course it won’t. Scapegoating workers is not the economic medicine the economy needs. Jo Swinson, pictured in her report standing in leafy woodland, can’t see the wood for the employment rights trees that she and her colleagues are determined to fell, no matter what the damage.
Click on the image to access the full Thompsons Labour and European Law Review
Unions spend a lot of money on PR these days – rightly so. But why don’t we produce classics like ‘Made in Dagenham’? ( – the BBC-made film by Nigel Cole – shown on TV again recently)
‘Dagenham’ captured the spirit of the Ford women machinists’ struggle for equal pay in the late 1960s. Sadly, the all-male union cast, came out badly from Cole’s rather stereotypical portrayal, but it need not have and the micro-battle in the O’Grady union family home, came out far better. Read More…
The High Pay Centre, an independent, non-partisan think-tank researching issues of corporate governance and executive leadership, is currently undertaking a programme of work looking at workplace relationships, employee morale and productivity, in partnership with the Unions21 Fair Work Commission.
They would like to conduct a series of focus groups with trade union members, discussing attitudes towards their employers and senior management, how this shapes working habits; and what workplace relationships say about society as a whole. Focus groups are taking place as follows:
- London: Wednesday March 20 5pm, TUC
- Bristol: Tuesday March 26 5pm, Thompsons Solicitors
- Birmingham: Friday April 26 5pm, NASUWT
All responses will be treated with complete confidentiality and all participants will receive £20 payent as thanks for taking part. Please contact Luke Hildyard, Head of Research at the High Pay Centre, for further information via luke.hildyard@highpaycentre.org
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