Trade Union Bill — House of Lords, 2016-01-11
Topic: Labor
David Edward Lea (Labour, Centre-left): I do not think that the Bill has helped to facilitate it; that is all I can say. The issue is that we are now not being seen as part of the great happy family, which was the idea, but delegitimised, which is my thesis. I am trying to get someone to point out whether that is true or not with some evidence. The Bill seems, with one provision after another—beginning with my noble friend Lord Monks, everybody has gone through the list—to be intended to reduce the number of members, the size of any political fund and so on. That is the effect. If that is not intended, someone has not done their arithmetic properly in designing the Bill. I should be interested to hear whether the Minister thinks that I have got that wrong, and why Organising is inherently more difficult at present than when we had lots of big workplaces and there was a higher trade union density. That is true across the OECD. Where we are at the moment was summed up in a Financial Times editorial: the Government are crossing the road to pick a fight with the trade unions. Why? One reason might be political advantage—perish the thought. If the idea is not to cut the legs off the trade unions or the financing of the Labour Party, the Government have a very funny way of going about it On the point about check-off, the Government seem to think that because some private sector companies are working to government contracts, they can somehow reach into the private sector and tell them how to organise check-off. This has certainly been mentioned to us as what is happening at Sellafield and Dounreay. Even before the Bill has passed, the Civil Service has written to companies saying that this is how they have to go, and they have to step into line as if they were in the public sector. I would like that to be looked into, if it has not, because we are told that that is what is happening The reason I find that rather strange is that, having been a member for some years of the central arbitration committee judging recognition claims, I know that if you get recognition, you have a collective agreement—in Sellafield or wherever it is—and it is a natural part of the agreement that you do check-off. Unless the Government have some ideological reason in mind for doing it, I do not think they should interfere with or intervene in voluntary arrangements that suit both parties I shall say a couple of sentence about party funding. A joint approach on this is an idea whose time has come. There are naturally the usual caveats, but we know that there is something weird about the attempt to go back to 1927, after the General Strike. Contracting in was repealed by Attlee in 1945 and was not revisited by Churchill or Thatcher. I therefore have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is trying to do, but there are cherry-picking problems in this. I do not think it is possible to assume that an individual and a union with 1 million members are the same thing. It is clear that there are trade-offs, but the time has come to investigate because there is mutual interest at present, which there has not been until now, to do something along that line.