Lisbon Treaty (No. 3)

I should like to explore that point in a moment, as ECJ rulings tend to be complex and we need to understand them better. The CBI said that title IV would threaten Britain's flexible labour market, but there is an interaction between the legal processes involved and the socio-economic processes that run alongside them. I shall give three examples of the problems that can arise. Although they come from my constituency, I am sure that other hon. Members will recognise them from their own. The first involves a company that employed what might be called indigenous workers—people who had lived in the area all their lives. They were due to acquire additional labour rights after a year's employment, but as the deadline of 11 months, three weeks and six days approached, they were sacked. Within eight days, they were replaced: exactly the same number of employees were put into the same jobs, having been imported from Poland on agency labour contracts. The second example involves a company that had an agency labour stand inside its factory. Two years ago, Parliament raised the minimum wage by 30p an hour, and the company immediately told its agency work force that it would accept that increase but that it would reduce the bonuses to which workers were entitled—and which were paid at a rate of £1 an hour—by precisely the same amount. The third example from my constituency involves one of the largest firms in the UK. It is a big employer in my area, and it takes on huge numbers of migrant labourers. I assure the House that I attach no responsibility to those workers, as they are unfortunate people who are being dragged across the continent by profiteers. However, the company decided to do away with overtime payments. On new year's day 2008, it changed its shift patterns to avoid paying the workers double pay. Those are the kind of actions taken in the much-vaunted flexible labour market that the CBI and our right hon. Friend Tony Blair had in mind when he decided to tackle title IV, which gives workers the right to collective bargaining and to take action in cases of conflict with management. We have heard on a number of occasions that title IV will give rise to no further justiciable rights in the United Kingdom, so we are entitled to ask the Government why on earth we are not having a proper debate in Government time about those labour market issues, which are of great concern in the labour movement. Why are we dealing with them in this debate? Why do promises made to me privately appear to have been dishonoured? It is not acceptable that we have to address such matters in this way. Will the Government explain why they have put a double lock-out on title IV—““Solidarity””—which deals with those matters? Why are they allowing other rights and freedoms under the fundamental charter and not subjecting them to the same lock-out? It seems to me that the treaty deals with rights attached to collective bargaining and collective action that the Government have decided to put at arm's length and shove away from us, but other rights, such as the right of companies to establish themselves anywhere in the UK and to provide services anywhere in Europe, are not subject to the same lock-out. The position is anomalous and creates asymmetry; on the one hand, capital has rights to provide goods and services and to move across the continent, yet on the other hand there is a lock-down on the rights of workers to organise collectively should they be faced with oppressive management. That leads to the point about the ECJ that my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Ms Clark) raised a few moments ago. The Court is apparently inhabited by a neo-liberal culture that attempts to give primacy to the needs of the free market and the internal market, with the open movement of labour, goods, services and capital, at the expense of collective bargaining rights. We have already heard reference to the Viking and Laval cases. I shall not go into them again, save to note that a contract made between an employer and an employee in Latvia now appears to have legal validity in the UK—this also applies elsewhere—should the company decide to bring Latvian workers to the UK. In considering the two cases in general terms, it appears to me that there is a series of rights, responsibilities and freedoms under the charter and that the Court—a non-political body—will be left to arbitrate between them. The Court will make political judgments in each case about which rights or freedoms should have priority. In the Viking and Laval cases, it is clear that the decisions taken by the Court gave primacy to the right of a company to establish itself and to provide services anywhere in the EU at the expense of the right to collective bargaining and collective action. Arguably, other case law in the ECJ and in the UK may contest the decisions in those two cases, but the opt-out on title IV, and the particular phrase in question, seems to give a clear nudge and wink to the ECJ that it is right to interpret the hierarchy of rights and responsibilities as it has so far, and that in the minds of at least the British and Polish Governments, it is right to give primacy to the rights of companies to trade, sometimes oppressively in relation to their work force, rather than to the right of workers to take collective action. I think the ECJ will regard that wording as more than a nod and a wink to say that it should continue making decisions such as those in the Viking and Laval cases and in others. In the absence of the proper debate I feel I was promised, I must press the Minister to address those specific points to give us some reassurance. A large number of Labour Members are concerned and every trade union in the country has endorsed the questions we are trying to ask. Without a satisfactory explanation, I fear that there is only one conclusion: the British Government, for whatever reason, have decided that the asymmetrical relationship between labour and capital that I described should continue, and that that asymmetry should work at the expense of labour and in favour of the interests of capital.