Employment Bill [Lords]

Let me begin by thanking the many hon. Friends who have turned up to support this important Bill, which deals with a number of issues that are close to our hearts. I think it is safe to say that the new clauses would take the Bill into some new areas compared with the debates we have had so far, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said, some of them reflect the private Member's Bill that he and other Members sponsored not long ago. New clause 1 proposes extensive changes to the law protecting individuals against dismissal or the suffering of other detriment for taking, or proposing to take, industrial action. My hon. Friend is always modest when proposing these changes; he describes them as modest and minor tidying procedures, but although I appreciate that these are sometimes subjective judgments I am not sure whether everything he has said would be regarded as such. The law with which new clause 1 deals was changed by the Employment Relations Acts 1999 and 2004, which introduced two new forms of protection against dismissal for employees taking part in protected industrial action—in other words, action that is official and lawfully organised. The first protection was that it became automatically unfair to dismiss individuals for taking protected industrial action lasting 12 weeks or less—we also discounted lock-out days from the calculation of that 12-week period. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington and the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams), who spoke for the Welsh nationalists, mentioned the Friction Dynamics dispute. Some of these changes came in after that dispute, and reflect the changed legal picture since. The second protection covers the actions taken by an employer to resolve a trade dispute with a trade union. Under the law, it is unfair to dismiss a person for taking any form of protected industrial action, including action lasting more than 12 weeks, where the employer has failed to take reasonable procedural steps to try to resolve the trade dispute—a protection does extend beyond the 12 weeks where the employer refuses to engage. Those significant protections have come into force since some of the disputes that have been mentioned, and they cover the vast bulk of official industrial action. Most industrial action is relatively short-lived; few disputes last more than 12 weeks. We can argue about the past, but the statutory protections against dismissal are greater than have been in place for a long time. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington believes that the law should specify in detail what sanctions short of dismissal the employer may apply against those taking part in protected industrial action and that those sanctions should be limited to the loss of earnings when the workers are on strike and, therefore, not working. That is typically what happens at the moment, although I accept that there can be disputes about this. For example, I understand that in a recent case in the education sector there was concern that the employer had deducted larger sums from pay than was fair in relation to the dispute. The court found in favour of the union member, stating that the employer had incorrectly calculated the amounts of pay to be deducted. In that case, the existing law provided an adequate constraint against abuse. New clause 1 contains an extensive proposal to change the law by making it, in effect, unlawful for an employer to terminate a contract, where it is broken by a worker, for taking protected industrial action. The new clause would make it automatically unfair to dismiss an employee if any of the reasons concerned the taking of protected industrial action and would lift the limit of compensation.