Trade Union Bill — House of Lords, 2016-01-11
Topic: Labor
Julian Charles Roland Hunt (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I began my interest in trade unions as a student of engineering when I was at Cambridge University. I spent my vacations in various factories and on building sites, and I began to see that unless management and workers could collaborate, we were never going to develop our industry as well as we should I had other experiences of being a member of a trade union when I worked for the Central Electricity Generating Board. I was so impressed with the trade union that I then became branch secretary. Later, I realised that trade unions were extremely important for management. On my first or second day as head of the Met Office, I talked to the trade unions and learned a great many things that I had not learned from other people. One of the extraordinary things about being both a staff member and a trade union person in an organisation is that you see a cross-section of the organisation The Minister mentioned some positive aspects of trade unions when she introduced the Bill. She also said—I think she is right—that some elements of the Bill are useful, with a move towards greater openness and more information. However, as we have heard in this debate from the opposite side, the general spirit is not as constructive as one would like to think in trying to move this country forward from a spirit of division and inequality to the kind of modern country that one sees in Germany. Of course, it was the UK after the Second World War that encouraged Germany to have a trade union role on the supervisory boards of companies, but we debated the Bullock report in the Lords and regrettably the conclusion was that we were perhaps too divided to have the same kind of approach as in Germany. In the UK, public and private bodies have ad hoc roles for union involvement that relate to pay, welfare, safety and the functioning of the organisation, but they do not have the same strategic role as in Germany Paragraph 54 of the Explanatory Notes is explicit that the proposals to reduce the time spent by trade union officials in running public bodies will lead to some reduction in cost, and various very small numbers have been mentioned this afternoon. The question is whether reducing the involvement of trade union representatives and management in public and private bodies will make business and organisations more competitive—a point made by my noble friend Lord Young. In fact, modern organisations are increasingly complex and put increasing responsibilities and stress on staff at every level The authors of this legislation in BIS or the drafting office clearly have never run, and know nothing about running, a large public sector organisation. It is very important that higher management, technical staff and trade unions work together and take more time away from their daily duties to attend courses and meet professional colleagues. The evidence given to us in documents by the Royal College of Nursing was extremely powerful. It said that without spending time on understanding the whole management, mistakes will be made, and we will not be able to use modern technology in medicine Of course, I look forward to a future Labour Government, when Ministers will ask City of London companies how much time their staff spend hobnobbing and drinking at City livery companies, and perhaps seek rules to reduce that. We all know that these organisations are simply front organisations for the Conservative Party and are far from being the national representative bodies that one would expect in a country no longer in the Middle Ages. I should have said "England" in the Middle Ages; Wales has clearly moved somewhat further ahead As head of the Met Office, I had 3,000 staff and excellent, responsible trade union representatives, which I found very helpful in an informal way, as well as the more formal methods of the well-established Whitley Council meetings. What is extraordinary is the proposal, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, that some Minister—perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Maude, in an earlier existence—will be sending out orders to the chief executives of public sector bodies to tell them how much time they can allow staff to spend on trade union activity. This is a grotesque diminution of the managerial role of these chief executives. I do not think that even "Yes Minister" would have conceived of this level of managerial small-mindedness Surely what we should be doing is moving in a different way. The Lord Maudes of this world should in fact be encouraging chief executives to have in their job description that they should work closely with the trade union movement to improve the way that companies operate and to have wider participation in the management of companies. This will be the most important way to reduce disruption and make this country safer and more modern When the coalition Government took power in 2010, they waxed lyrical about the need for people’s greater involvement. Clause 14 is another step backwards from this modern public and private organisation. It seems curious that, now we have a Conservative and not a coalition Government, they are a bit cooler about this idea of the people’s society. Surely a strong society is one where people join and collaborate in organisations, and people need to be encouraged. We know, after all, that the Government give tax relief for donations to charities. In most progressive private organisations, subscriptions to professional bodies by professional staff are subsidised and paid for completely by the organisation. Even small enterprises, such as the one that I am chairman of, do this for staff. No one is suggesting that subscriptions to a trade union should be subsidised by the company. All that we are asking, for reasons explained by my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn, is that employers should make it easy for people to join a trade union. Only with people joining trade unions will we have companies working in a modern way, as they do in Germany Sadly, the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, is not with us today, but I have had many conversations with him. He was a very active member of the BALPA trade union when he worked in BOAC. His dynamism as a trade union official clearly benefited the entire organisation; it is not just about, as it were, looking after a narrow interest. That was the reason that I joined a trade union: the Electrical Power Engineers’ Association. I could see that, through joining, I could understand the whole organisation. You have quite a different role in a company when you are on the trade union side and the management side; you see different aspects of the organisation. This positive, visionary aspect of the union movement needs to be emphasised. The other important point I expected to be discussed more today is that women are often slow to see the advantages of trade union membership—perhaps the culture of trade unions is sometimes rather on the blokeish side. But the role for women in trade union organisations is very important, and management everywhere must see the advantages of stronger involvement by women. One way to do that, of course, is to make sure that it is very easy for people to join a trade union and to have their subscription taken from their pay I will give noble Lords a story. We have discussed here the need for an understanding of the positive role of trade unions. In the 1970s, I encouraged a brilliant woman medical researcher at a certain university to join the Association of University Teachers, which then took up her case of the unreasonable age-related withholding of tenure, which was very widespread in the university world. Her case went to a tribunal and, subsequently, an important change was made in the way that tenure decisions for women were made. Many, many more women now have a more advanced career in universities Similar problems arise all the time and it is, therefore, essential for the Government not merely to withdraw the pernicious Clause 14 but to change it and put an obligation on trade unions and employers to provide more information about trade unions so that staff can participate. The Government should also make it easier for staff to pay their subscription In the Minister’s opening remarks in this debate she sounded so progressive, but we then learned many of the rather negative aspects of the Government’s view of the trade unions. That certainly did not reflect a modern, effective, democratic, technically advanced country. Technical advances have not been allowed to be used and, therefore, this is a disappointing Bill. As my noble friend Lord Bragg implied, the future of England as a divided and ineffective country comes nearer with this Bill.