House of Commons Hansard Debates for 13 Dec 1995 (pt 6)

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris): Order. No hon. Member should insult any other hon. Member in this House.

Mr. MacShane: If we wish to tell the truth about another hon. Member, we will find that the Bible is a rich source of quotations. We should recall the moving words of Ecclesiastes:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven . . . A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance".

In that marvellous quotation from the Bible, the author finds time for everything. We now find that we have time for nothing except to slave for the re-exalted god of mammon that the Conservatives have set above us. The making of money is now far more important than the making of a family or a community in which all may work hard, but should not do so to the exclusion of all else.

The new trend represents the values of the 1960s in a sense, which have come home to roost. In that regard, I commend to the House the elegantly penned, if vitriolic, denunciation of the baby-boomer generation by my friend Mr. Christopher Hitchen in the current issue of that underrated journal of comment, Vanity Fair. That generation fills almost all the Government posts, and it was sublimely understood by the former Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher. It is a generation that spoke only of its rights and never of its responsibilities: the right to buy, the right to hire, the right to fire, the right to manage, the right to wealth, the right to share options and the right to consume. It is an endless litany of rights, rights, and rights again. The values and limits of self-control, balance, equilibrium and responsibility were utterly forgotten. As we have created a society in which rights hold a higher place than responsibility, I fear that the responsibility that we have to our children has been lost in the wash.

We know that the Government are not family-friendly. There has been a 20 per cent. increase in divorce since the Tories took over in 1979, and the number of single-parent families has increased by almost 50 per cent. This morning, we read in our newspapers that Mr. Archie Norman, the quintessential would-be Conservative Member of Parliament and the head of Asda, has said that women who take maternity leave this year will not receive a Christmas bonus. Mr. Norman combines the Christmas generosity of Scrooge with the love of babies that was expressed by Herod.

The debate should focus on families. It is about children, not about divorce, nor it is particularly about the legal institution of marriage. Some of the happiest couples and families I know have not tied the civil knot of marriage.

I pay tribute to the excellent contribution that has been made by the Parents at Work campaign, the National Council of Women, the women's institutes and the Demos

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Foundation. The Parents at Work campaign commissioned the Gulbenkian Foundation to carry out a survey of the employment conditions of working mothers, which was published last month. It found that almost a quarter of all working mums work for more than 50 hours a week. Five per cent., which is still a significant number, work for more than 60 hours a week. The survey also found that three quarters of our working mothers report coming home exhausted, and almost two thirds say that they do not see enough of their children. A fifth say that their relationship with their partners has been put at risk by long hours.

Britain has the longest working hours in Europe: one in three British men work a six or seven-day week, according to the labour force survey of 1990-91. The Institute of Management--again, not a trade union-friendly organisation--reported in March 1995, on the basis of a survey of its members, that individual work loads had increased greatly for nearly half its respondents in the past two years. One in five are working an extra 15 hours a week, virtually two working days.

Overtime is the new British disease. According to information supplied to me by the House of Commons Library and taken from the labour force survey, last year we worked nearly 69 million hours of overtime a week. Divided by the 37 hours of the normal working week-- I think that I can do it without a calculator--that is equivalent to nearly 2 million jobs.

It is, of course, not possible to construct a simple equation relating excessive overtime to the mass unemployment that still disfigures our society, but until overtime is under control, and until employees' wages and salaries are not merely sufficient unto their needs but sufficient without necessitating reliance on massive overtime, we shall continue to live in a society in which there is far too much working time for many and no working time at all for all too many others--the unemployed.

I must declare an interest as a trade union-sponsored Member of Parliament and a strong supporter of trade unionism here and abroad. I must, however, also appeal to my friends in the trade unions to accept responsibility for an unpopular task--that of persuading, cajoling and ultimately instructing their members that overtime must be severely limited. There are examples of work forces that have shared overtime to safeguard jobs, but if we are to develop a working-time policy as part of a new labour market, unions and the workers themselves must be empowered to limit overtime.

Saturday's edition of The Guardian featured a letter from a member of my former profession, journalism. Sue Watkinson of Aberporth, Dyfed, writes:

"As the hard-pressed deputy editor of a local newspaper and the mother of three children aged five, three and 20 months, a job share would seem the perfect solution."

Her problem was not seeing enough of her children. But who would pay the bills? As a professional journalist-- a deputy editor--she earns £14,000. Half that amount will not bring home the bacon, or finance help with looking after the children.

That brings us back to the need for fair wages, and to Labour's advocacy of a minimum wage. In Asia, wage differentials are much narrower and more compressed than they are in this country. In my constituency--

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The Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (Mr. John M. Taylor): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. MacShane: May I just finish what I am saying?

In my constituency a cashier at the National Westminster bank earns about £7,000 a year, while his or her chief executive officer in London earns 100 times that amount. In countries such as Taiwan, Singapore and Japan the narrower differentials mean that people have a living wage.

Mr. Taylor: I apologise for interrupting the hon. Gentleman so clumsily at the wrong moment.

The hon. Gentleman referred to Labour's espousal of a minimum wage. Would he care to tell us how much that wage might be?

Mr. MacShane: I can tell the House that Labour proposes a new model of partnership. The minimum wage will be arrived at after discussions between those directly concerned: employers, workers and their representatives--the trade unions--and Government. I believe that that will allow us to develop a wages and incomes profile that will ease the tensions that are so damaging to stable family life and community harmony.

One of the arguments against any control of working time is that it militates against economic efficiency, but we must draw a sharp distinction between hard work and long working hours, however. When I went to work in Switzerland 15 years ago, I found to my horror that I was expected to start work at 7.30 am. I had been used to more gentle office hours in England in the 1970s, and at first this was a shock to the system, but I subsequently found that finishing work at 4 pm gave me time for friendship and family life. No one there worked after 4 pm: the obsessive "yuppie" need to stay for hour after hour in banks, consultancies and legal firms was unknown in what is, after all, one of the most prosperous countries in western Europe. We need smart, efficient work; we need quality output rather than quantity input.

According to a recent survey by the Health and Safety Executive, 80 million days a year are lost through work-related stress. The International Labour Organisation says that stress at work costs up to 10 per cent. of Britain's gross national product. That amounts to roughly $100 billion--about a third of total Government expenditure. The loss of that money is a direct result of the amount of time that we take off. We work inefficiently, we work long hours and we have work-related illnesses, which, according to the ILO, have increased by 500 per cent since the 1950s.

As for our dynamic competitor partners, Japan's Government say that the number of annual working hours must be reduced. The Government of China, which many Conservative Members now pray in aid as the model economy, are legislating for a two-day weekend. In Germany, the dominant economy in Europe, working hours were reduced substantially in the 1980s. That was followed by an increase in engineering employment and a boom for the German economy, along with outflows of investment--some of which have saved industries in this country.

Britain is now internationally isolated. We have opted out of the European and world debate on working time. Let us take the example of Sweden--and here I cite not

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the Social Democratic party or the trade unions, but the leader of one of the conservative parties that were in alliance during the period of Swedish conservative rule in the early 1980s. He insisted on the passing of a new law allowing a man to take a month of paid leave when his child was born. He also insisted that only the father could take that leave.

As many hon. Members may know, Sweden already has generous laws relating to parental leave: parents can jointly take up to a year off. That arrangement has significantly increased the birth rate in Sweden. It appears that parental leave makes not only for happy families, but for bigger families.

In France--I leave aside the current travails of one of my favourite countries, after my own--the employers federation, the Confederation National du Patronat Francais, and the trade unions are discussing the possibility of a four-day week and a reduction in working time, with the full backing of the Government. Once the current troubles have calmed down, the idea will once more be a major item on the French economic agenda, promoted by employers and management.

In Germany, the president of the 3 million-strong German engineering workers union, Klaus Zwickel, has launched a Bundnis fur Arbeit, which means an alliance for jobs, in which the unions agreed to hold back on wage increases in exchange for a reduction in working time. That has been taken up by German employers and Chancellor Kohl--another Conservative; I am stressing what Conservative Governments are doing throughout the world, especially in Europe--is discussing the issue with Mr. Zwickel and the employers, so his Conservative Government is taking this issue extremely seriously.

My interest in this subject was sparked by a remark made by the Minister for Industry and Energy, the right hon. Member for Enfield, North (Mr. Eggar), who is currently in Committee doing doughty business for British Steel workers. I wish him well in those discussions. He said that he had visited a factory in Essex where people were working 60 or 70 hours a week. As an historian, my ears pricked up. In 1876, Benjamin Disraeli passed legislation limiting the working week to 56 hours. That Minister, 120 years later, was boasting, proclaiming, relishing and wallowing in the 60-hour week worked by people in that Essex factory. What time do they have for family life?

Conservative Members talk of returning to Victorian values. I would welcome a return to some Victorian values, notably the long-sustained campaign by Victorian social reformers to bring working time under control. From Lord Shaftesbury to Benjamin Disraeli, political leaders of that era accepted the responsibility to limit working hours. The Shops and Factories Acts of the 1930s controlled working time, and further legislation was passed in the 1950s. I cite Conservative Administrations who accepted their responsibility because it is necessary to stress that the control of working time is not a demand of the Opposition Benches, the left, the trade unions or the Labour movement. Today, big organisations such as the Women's Institute and the Institute of Management are taking the lead in demanding that working hours be reduced. They echo the great Victorian reformers in saying that the main victims of long working hours are children.

What are the alternatives and how do we deal with the matter? We have an excellent proposal from Europe. As a former Member of the European Parliament, the Minister