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Mr. Graham Riddick (Colne Valley): The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the ruling by the Advocate General last week on the working time directive. Who should take those decisions, the European Court or this House?
Mr. Meacher: The fact is that the Conservative party supported the European Communities Act 1972. The only reason why the matter went to the European Court was that the British Government challenged the view that the Commission was right to advance it under health and safety legislation. The Government wished the matter to be advanced either under article 100 or article 118 so that the veto would operate. As we now know from the Advocate General--I suspect that that view will be followed by the Court--the Commission was perfectly within its rights in advancing the matter under health and safety legislation. Working more than 48 hours a week--sometimes up to 60 hours or even more--is clearly a health and safety issue.
Mr. Denis MacShane (Rotherham): Does my hon. Friend agree that the 48-hour directive is a tremendous blow for family life? The institution that suffers most from the excessively long hours that men and women are expected to work is the family. More and more, children never see their parents for quality time, or any time at all.
Mr. Meacher: That is an important issue. There is no doubt--I had not intended to mention this, but it is an important issue--that increasing strains and pressures are imposed on social and family life as a result of deregulation and the requirement, which employees feel that they cannot resist, to work excessive hours of overtime. That is an important issue and although it is not part of the economic calculus, it needs to be taken into account.
Mr. Patrick Nicholls (Teignbridge): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Meacher: No, because I want to make progress.
The third claim constantly made by Ministers is that social costs are too high in Britain and that burdens on business must be reduced if more jobs are to be created. There are several things wrong with that argument. Britain does not have high social costs. In terms of taxes and social security as a proportion of gross national product, Britain is ninth lowest of the 11 leading industrial countries. From figures produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, it is clearly not the case that the lower the tax take, the lower the level of unemployment; if anything, it is the reverse.
If social expenditure is reduced and private incomes are increased, at least for the highest paid, as has happened in Britain over the past decade, it matters a great deal where that extra private income is spent--whether on yachts or on investment in new technology. All that one can say is that, in Tory Britain, it must have gone predominantly on yachts because it has certainly not gone on investment in new technology or on research and development, which has fallen in real terms under this Government. Manufacturing investment is no higher today at constant prices than it was in 1979.
Mr. Fabricant:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Meacher:
Out of kindness to the hon. Gentleman, I should not expose him to a further opportunity to ask questions.
The real irony in the Government's denunciation of the costs falling on businesses is that those burdensome costs do not come, in general, from the employment rights that the Government are now so determined to sweep away--whether health and safety protections, anti-discrimination measures or unfair dismissal rights. The main cost burdens now afflicting small businesses come from a quite different source.
A report to the national small business conference in London last week summarised the views of small business men; they had been collected from a range of regional meetings across the country. The report states:
The fact is that all the statutory impositions about which small business men are complaining have come from the Government. The Statutory Sick Pay Act 1994 transferred the whole cost of statutory sick pay to employers. In 1987, the administration of statutory maternity pay was transferred to employers. It is true that, at first, those costs were reimbursed in full, but from 1994 that was reduced to 92 per cent. It was the same with redundancy payments--originally employers were able to claim substantial rebates from the redundancy fund, but in 1989 all the rebates were abolished. The problem is not the employees; it is not employment rights; it is Government-imposed burdens. That problem lies with Conservative Members.
It is a bit rich that, at a time when the Government propose to take away protection from employees of small firms--ostensibly to ease the pressures on them--they are
also proposing to add to the responsibilities and burdens of small firms under the proposals in the Asylum and Immigration Bill. I do not know whether the Government properly considered the impact of such measures on small businesses. Instead of pointing a finger at employees as the cause of financial and administrative burdens on small businesses, they might consider pointing it at themselves, because that is where the problem lies.
Mr. Meacher:
The hon. Gentleman is nothing if not persistent. I doubt whether what he wants to say is relevant, but I shall give way to him.
Mr. Nicholls:
The hon. Gentleman is nothing if not always courteous. I do not want to misrepresent him--I do not need to--but is he seriously suggesting that no one should work more than 48 hours a week? Is he seriously trying to tell the House that he does not work more than 48 hours a week? Has he any conception of what self-employed people, who actually provide jobs for employees, will think when they hear that those employees must not be allowed to work more than48 hours a week, when they will be working 60, 70, 80, 90 or 100 hours a week? Is it not about time that the hon. Gentleman injected some reality into his remarks?
Mr. Meacher:
The hon. Gentleman is losing his touch. A whole range of exclusions are written into the directive--
Mr. Meacher:
Perhaps that is a great revelation for the hon. Gentleman, although one would have thought that he would actually look up the details of the directive before intervening. I can inform him that it excludes many public service workers such as police, ambulance staff, nurses, doctors, fire fighters and, perhaps surprisingly, lorry drivers. In addition--this is crucial--it does not impose a limit of 48 hours; it says that an employer cannot force an employee to work more than 48 hours. Of course, that employee is perfectly able to work more than48 hours if he so agrees. That is extremely important. Perhaps we should examine the facts rather than indulge in a great paroxysm based on absolutely nothing.
The tragedy for Britain is that this Government have ruthlessly pursued the wrong model for economic success. That is the essential point that I want to make. Low wages and skills, few or no employment rights, de-unionisation and casualised working do not produce efficiency, productivity or jobs; they produce fear and economic uncertainty, which undermine long-term commitments. That is shown by the damage that has been done to the housing market and to manufacturing investment.
I am glad that the President of the Board of Trade is here, because it was he who recently cynically observed that job insecurity was a state of mind. It is now a plague that affects all regions, all classes of workers and almost all workplaces. Economic success and competitiveness do not come from robbing people of their employment rights and security but from strong motivation, pride in the job, up-to-date skills, high morale and mutual, long-term commitment between employer and employee. All those are undermined by an insecure labour market.
This Government have become the Burger King Government, with their obsessive drive for low wages,no rights and anti-unionism. The Tories have become the party of social devaluation. Ministers cannot see--or perhaps they refuse to see--that any advantage that could be derived from low wages is more than outweighed by poorer education, inadequate infrastructure and lower levels of skills and capital investment. They cannot understand that Britain's low productivity is, in part, the result of long working hours, poor employment conditions, high staff turnover, high absenteeism and poor training.
I remind the President of the Board of Trade of one his predecessors who said:
He also argued that, without proper regulation,
That was Winston Churchill, who must be turning in his grave with revulsion at the dogma of today's Tory party.
Finally, although I suspect that this least concerns the Conservative party, a wholesale removal of employment rights will perpetuate and deepen injustice in the workplace. Cases involving the growing exploitation of part-time and agency workers have flooded into my office, as I am sure they have to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney).I shall mention some of them.
A low-paid employee was forced to sign away his employment rights in return for a succession of temporary, three-month contracts. A skilled draughtsman was required by his employment agency to accept,in advance, legal liability for anything that he did when on work placement. A citizens advice bureau in the Chilterns reported to me the case of a young man who had been working for his employer for 18 months and who was working seven days a week, with no time off allowed.A citizens advice bureau in the south reported the case of a man who was dismissed when he asked his employer for a written statement of his terms and conditions of employment and raised health and safety conditions in the workplace.
That is not efficient management but Gradgrind economics. It is also dangerous to employees and to the public. In the case of employees, the Department of Health commissioned a stress guide for employers to examine the effects of working excessively long hours in a week. The guide concluded:
What did the Government do? They suppressed that guide because they found its results embarrassing.
"Most of the costs associated with employing somebody are no longer met by the state and retrospective legislation places new burdens on individual employers. This is obviously acting as a disincentive for small businesses to take on an extra person. Things like statutory sick pay, maternity pay and redundancy pay were thought to be a particularly crippling burden on small businesses."
"We believe that decent conditions make for industrial efficiency and increase rather than decrease competitive power."
"the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad employer is undercut by the worst."
"Working more than 48 hours per week doubles the risk of coronary heart disease."
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