Employment Bill [Lords]

I shall come on to the percentages of current cases; at present, they are minuscule, which demonstrates that there is inadequate protection for workers in respect of reinstatement. I shall say more about that point later, and the hon. Gentleman can then come back at me if he wishes. If a dismissal takes place, the new clause would make it automatically unfair. For employers, that will act as a powerful disincentive to taking on replacement staff and making strikers redundant. Interim relief would be available in all unfair dismissal claims relating to lawful industrial action and employees who had been unfairly dismissed would be entitled to automatic reinstatement if they requested it. The same principle would apply to the imposition of a detriment on the worker by the employer. The employer would have to show that the reason was not the worker's participation or proposed participation in lawful industrial action. However, let me be clear that that would not invalidate the normal process of withholding remuneration and benefits, limited to those that the employee would have received had he or she not taken industrial action. Let me explain what the new clause means and what has motivated it. Most hon. Members are aware of the case of Friction Dynamics, which demonstrates that a group of workers can take lawful strike action—they went through a proper ballot and sent out the due notices—yet be sacked. Two years later, a tribunal found that they had been unfairly dismissed. But what happened? What redress did they then have? Their jobs were gone. They could not gain reinstatement orders or even compensation because the employer company had gone into liquidation. Actually, the real owner was trading at the same factory under a differently named company, and the strikers' jobs had been filled by others. That was grotesquely unfair, and that example—one of the starkest—shocked the House and the Labour trade union movement into action.