I support my noble friends Lord Monks and Lord Stevenson. Trade unions are a very important part of civil society. In their contribution to it they have many proud achievements: the equal treatment of part-time workers; the financial assistance
scheme for pensioners whose companies go bust; and the national minimum wage, to mention just a few. These concepts were challenged at the time, but are now accepted as an integral part of a civilised and advanced society.
A free and independent collective voice for ordinary working people is also an essential ingredient for a secure democracy, whether we look back to the 20th century or to what is happening in some emerging economies. Oh, for some of the mature, stable, free, independent voices to address some of the issues that have occurred in those civil societies! In spite of that, at the moment we have a narrative that quite crudely says, “Unions bad, employers good”.
We are seeing in this Bill an opportunity to give extensive powers to part of the state to access trade union membership records, allowing third parties, whoever they may be, to make complaints. These powers are being granted in the absence of coherent reasons for the Government to make this necessary, or of a problem that they are seeking to remedy. We are struggling to understand that. This is a sizeable attack on an important, voluntary set of organisations in their contribution to civil society, and they are being subjected to potential onerous conditions.
Much mention has been made of strike ballots. I confess to having conducted quite a few in my previous existence. As my noble friend Lord Whitty commented, they are about bargaining units and who are the union members within those units. The employer wants to know exactly who is involved in the strike and which employees will be absent. Employers can readily seek injunctions if they are unhappy with the information that unions provide. I know to my cost—I have experienced those injunctions and have had to stand there and explain in detail. I do not bite ankles, but I still found myself facing an injunction.
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If you have a very large employer and employees move around a lot, it can be quite difficult. You have a very good database of the members and their membership, but you do not know which operational unit members may have been moved into by that employer. There are some quite significant challenges on trade unions to keep on top of their membership records, and to keep on top of them for strike ballot purposes, which seem to be being swept away as somehow not fit for purpose and really quite trivial, as if we really needed these more onerous conditions to come into play.
The right to freedom of association should not be made too onerous or undermined too lightly if one values democratic society or if one is having difficulty with the terms of political debate, because the price is really quite high. I fear that the Bill may have unintended consequences, because it is being rushed through. It has not been thought about and there is no evidence of the compelling reason for these changes.
The Bill provides the certification officer with extensive new powers to access and retain the registers of members’ names and addresses, and several other documents that he may wish to get his hands on when he has reason to decide that he needs them. It is a fact of life—I have gone to factories in my coat when it is
quite cold and spoken to employers and union members—that employees are frightened of letting their employer know that they are a trade union member. Even if there is not black-listing, it is quite scary when you feel that your company, your factory or your workplace is getting really bad, with random redundancies and wages being cut. You cannot articulate that as an individual, so you take the initiative to try to find a collective voice or some lady or man who will come to speak for you, because it is quite frightening to speak to your employer. People say, “I want to join the union, and I want the union to come, but don’t tell them I’m a member because I’m petrified of the consequences. When you’ve got enough members and you’ve got recognition, fine—but I don’t want it to be known that I’m a union member”. That is the reality in some workplaces. They are not all colossuses, striding around; a lot of it is about frightened people without a voice, and sometimes the trade union is their only prospect of getting a collective voice. I have had it said to me, and I have done it myself. You have to put their details on the central membership record, but you take action to make sure that their details are not circulated; you promise that you will not bandy around the details of their membership but will protect them. I worry that with third parties and whoever—and who knows how the provisions of the Bill could evolve, when we start getting into the granularity of challenging membership records—things might be done to vulnerable individuals that were never intended as a consequence of the Bill. We may start to undermine the freedom of association and the right to the collective voice of which, I hope, we are all so proud and which are such an essential part of an independent democracy.