While rights for full-time and part-time employees were improved under the last Labour Government, there was also an expansion of agency work as the flexible economy grew. That meant far more workplace insecurity with all that implied for general wellbeing. Now all the Labour leadership candidates should commit to the proper enforcement of the European Union’s Agency Workers’ Directive and so set the tone for a new culture of responsibility at work.
A two-tier workforce inevitably means social inequality and instability. One former agency worker, who is now a lay official with shopworkers’ union USDAW, likens his experience of agency work to a modern slave trade. He describes the lack of respect shown to staff, poverty pay, summary dismissals and a shocking disregard for workplace safety. None of this would have seemed out of place 100 years ago, but this is the 21st century. There are serious questions to address about corporate responsibility, accountability and market regulation.
Labour delivered the highest ever employment rate by mid-2007 and a range of new economic rights: the national minimum wage, increased parental leave and pay, an improved family-friendly working environment, the right to paid holidays, increased protection against unfair dismissal and the working time regulations.
However, under Labour, there was also a growing casualisation of the workforce. Agency staff performing the same tasks as permanent employees were denied pay parity, and had no access to training, employment progression or job security. They were excluded from benefits such as maternity pay, sick pay and pension contributions. Labour had a chance to change this and failed to take prompt action. There are now 1.4 million agency workers – nearly 5 per cent of the workforce. Unsurprisingly, in the recession, agency work is on the increase.
Over the past decade, there have been a number of instances of factory “reorganisations” being preceded by redundancies and the sacking of trade union activists. Many permanent jobs were replaced with temporary ones. The end result was to engender a climate of fear at work. Temporary workers can be summarily dismissed after just a few days on sick pay – which would not happen to permanent staff.
People without a permanent job cannot obtain credit or a mortgage. It cannot be coincidence that many temporary staff are laid off before a year’s service – meaning they are denied redundancy rights. And so the cycle of insecurity continues and this can demoralise an entire workforce.
There is nothing wrong with agency work as a short-term choice. But we cannot allow it to trap people in ongoing social and economic exclusion.
It took Labour 13 years to enact the Agency Workers’ Directive – which will not come into force until 2011 – to deliver greater protection and workplace equality for agency staff after an initial qualifying period of 12 weeks. Why the delay? The plight of agency workers is not a necessary consequence of globalisation.
In 2004, Barclays Bank introduced a living wage and an in-house package of terms and conditions for its cleaners in London’s Canary Wharf. This was in response to pressure group London Citizens’ living wage campaign. The bank found its actions were “completely commercially viable”, as they improved the quality of work and commitment of employees, reduced absenteeism and improved performance and customer satisfaction levels. The new policy dramatically reduced staff turnover.
Was the Labour Government afraid to act because it thought most people were unconcerned about an issue thought mainly to affect illegal migrant workers? In fact, agency workers may be migrant or indigenous and agency work impacts on the whole workforce. Casualisation undercuts responsible employers. It has a social fallout in terms of increased child poverty, where women are denied occupational maternity pay. It will mean increased pensioner poverty, as more people are excluded from occupational pensions. It encourages the payment of poverty wages and increases the burden on taxpayers of paying means-tested benefits. It reduces job satisfaction for permanent staff who train the constant stream of new entrants, whose employment is often cut short. High staff turnover and reduced productivity have their own costs and make a bad situation worse.
Was Labour’s ambivalence towards the regulation of the flexible labour market because it did not listen enough? Labour’s share of the vote among social groups C2, D and E has fallen year-on-year since 1992. Labour has lost five million votes since 1997 and one reason for this is its neglect of those who ought to be its core supporters.
Now, in opposition, the party must reach out to communities with its values of neighbourliness, duty and obligation, responsibility and solidarity. Labour must not forget that it exists to champion the dispossessed and downtrodden. And that must include standing up for the most vulnerable at work.
