S4M-13442 Employee Rights and Access to Justice

The Deputy Presiding Officer (John Scott):
Good afternoon, everyone. The first item of business this afternoon is a debate on motion S4M-13442, in the name of Roseanna Cunningham, on protecting employee rights and access to justice.

14:30
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15:01

Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):

The signs for a consensual debate are not particularly favourable, given that the two selected amendments and the Liberal amendment that was not selected would simply delete the whole of the Government’s motion. Let me redress that apparent breakdown of consensus by saying that, personally—I have no idea what the Government’s view is—I welcome the first four clauses of the Labour amendment, which reflect multiple views and call for legalisation of online ballots for trade unions. Unless I am missing something, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for.

At the core of my take on the debate is the Tories’ egregious attitude to democratic mandate. I am talking about a party that continues to support the undemocratic, anti-democratic and undismissable House of Lords—which constitutes the majority of the UK’s legislators—and of a party that, on a mandate of 37 per cent of the electorate who voted a few weeks ago, wants to impose a substantially higher requirement on trade unionists. Note that I say “trade unionists” and not “trade unions”. That is deliberate, because what the Tories are really about is weakening the position of individuals in our society. In particular, they want to weaken people whose relative lack of power means that they choose to work collectively to nudge the balance just a little in their favour—through membership of trade unions, for example.

I have long heard the Tories say that they are champions of individualism, but their current plans give the lie to that and reinforce my long-held view that the Tories are the party of big businesses, to which they are in thrall. They are no more the champions of individual citizens—from whom they also wish to remove the human rights that were championed by previous generations of their party, including Winston Churchill—than Napoleon was an intimate friend of Wellington’s 150 years ago.

For many of us, a substantial part of our constituency work is about care and, in recent times, about carers. As our population ages and more people live with multiple concurrent disabilities, conditions and ailments, that is not surprising. However, the Tory motion refers to the creation of 2 million private sector jobs, but they are not necessarily new jobs. Many of those jobs have been transferred from the public sector to the private sector; they do not represent 2 million new jobs.

Moving jobs that prioritise public benefit to the private sector means they are now in companies that prioritise their owners’ business interests. That situation has rarely improved the conditions of individuals who have been affected by such moves. In particular, for carers, the commercialisation of carer services has created jobs in which the relationship between employed and employer is wholly out of balance.

In Aberdeenshire, we might be comparatively lucky—I understand that 11 of 13 companies that provide carer services are living wage employers—but there are other difficulties. In particular, not paying staff as they travel between care appointments is commonplace throughout Scotland.

John Finnie (Highlands and Islands) (Ind): The statutory obligation rests with local authorities. They have responsibility for care and are outsourcing it to the private sector and so are, by default, condoning the practices that Stewart Stevenson describes.

Stewart Stevenson: Now that my SNP colleagues have taken over the running of Aberdeenshire Council from the Tories, I certainly intend to seek to persuade them that there might be a different way forward, but they will be locked into existing contracts, so there are difficulties. However, John Finnie is right that there are opportunities.

Aberdeenshire is the most rural area in mainland Scotland—more of the population live in a rural setting there than is the case elsewhere—so carers spend a bigger proportion of the day travelling from appointment to appointment. Not being paid for that is a particular issue for them. There are many reasons why we need new powers over those matters: that is but one and I am sure that others will emerge in the debate. I suspect that a majority of members could make common cause on how we might exercise such powers, even if we were not unanimous—I suspect that the Tories would think otherwise.

Fair work is an awful lot easier to support if we have the powers to do so. Making it more expensive—impossibly expensive—for people who are on low wages to access the legal system in order to enforce their employee rights is simply part of an unambiguously clear Tory agenda to remove the legal system’s protection from the people who most need it. The debate is about protecting employee rights. There have been various references to trade unions and to borders. I cannot help but note that the Labour leadership contenders went to Dublin to speak to trade unionists because we have a trade union that works across borders. Borders are barriers against effective delivery of policy only if we choose to make them so. Collaboration is the way forward.

I hope that we can build some consensus, and I hope that by pointing to the first half of the Labour motion, I have done so. Perhaps, at some future date, I will say that it is time that we helped low-level bank employees who have been damaged by the irresponsible actions of a tiny number of highly paid senior bankers.

15:07