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Mr. Ian Bruce: The hon. Lady is robust on these matters. I am sure that she will be able to tell her Front-Bench team what rate she would recommend. What minimum wage does she think is right?
Mrs. Wise: The Labour Front-Bench team has established that it will set up tripartite consultations between employers, trade unions and government. It has done that, in my view possibly unnecessarily, as a concession, to meet the cries of Conservative Members. I expect the trade unions and a Labour Government to ensure that employers do not take undue advantage of that concession, and that the formula results in some sort of fair play. If that rather longer way round than I would have liked results in a solution that employers are more likely to operate, some good may come of it. One of the adverse characteristics of the wages councils system was the widespread evasion of the minimum wages that were laid down.
I hope that what comes out of the consultations is a worthwhile figure which will benefit a substantial number of people. I also hope that, having been involved in it, employers will not be sufficiently bare-faced to evade the minimum wage and fail to meet their legal responsibilities.
Mrs. Gillan:
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. It is most kind. The hon. Lady will not put a figure on the minimum wage. I understand that she has a problem with her Front-Bench team and the consultation process. Will a Labour Government take child care costs into account in the minimum wage calculation? If not, why not?
Mrs. Wise:
The hon. Lady is wrong to think that I have any problem with my Front-Bench team. The
I remind the Minister of what she said. She said that she wanted employers to operate the policies that made economic sense for their business. So, if an employer thinks that it makes economic sense to introduce career break arrangements, that is fine. The benefit to the family is clearly incidental to the benefit to the profits of the employer. Conversely, if an employer feels that it is to his benefit to pick up a worker and put her down, to have a zero hours contract, or to employ her for eight or 10 weeks and then say, "Sorry, dear, no more at the moment," that is permissible because it makes economic sense for the business. Family-friendly policies are strictly incidental. I happen to think that it is long past time when work was organised to suit people rather than people's lives were distorted to suit the profit-making desires of employers.
Women are clustered disproportionately in low-paid, insecure jobs in which their hours are not simply part-time but seven hours, zero hours or whatever suits the employer. Casualisation removes the strength of those workers. Most are women. I am in favour of flexible working as long as the flexibility is mutually beneficial and does not involve treating the worker as a disposable, dispensable commodity.
The other side of the coin of short hours is long hours. The Government have resisted the extremely modest proposed European Union directive which would place a maximum of 48 hours on the working week. I was horrified to hear on the radio this morning employers talking happily about workers who work 100 hours a week. One employer said that his workers were young men with young families who wanted to earn as much as they could and therefore wanted to work 100 hours a week. I suggest that those young men with young families do not fulfil their family responsibilities properly; they see themselves as a walking pay packet. If a worker has to work 100 hours a week to pay his mortgage, something is drastically wrong with the housing market, the labour market and the wages.
The idea that we are doing families a favour by resisting a modest maximum of 48 hours a week is disgusting. The Government's case is that it is not a health and safety at work issue. Those men who work 100 hours a week are not only gravely damaging, and putting at risk, their health: they are risking the health, well-being and happiness of their families. Even though they may think that they are acting for the best, they are not being good fathers.
I believe in proper maternity leave. It is disgraceful that the European directive had to be watered down to suit the backwardness of this country, to the disadvantage of women throughout Europe. The Government behave disgracefully in resisting such provisions. I would go further and say that it is long past time that working and maternity leave arrangements acknowledged that babies benefit greatly from breast-feeding, and that mothers should not be prematurely forced back to work.
Mr. Ian Bruce (South Dorset):
I am grateful to be called so early in the debate. It has been interesting to follow the hon. Members for Dulwich (Ms Jowell) and for Preston (Mrs. Wise) and to note the contrast between them. The hon. Member for Dulwich introduced the debate in a glossy--I do not mean to be rude, perhaps I should say smooth--way and the hon. Member for Preston continued it in a more fiery and emotional way.
From both speeches I gained the strange feeling that new Labour's image of partnerships between business and employees, and between Government and business, is being brushed away. Businesses are profitable when they deal with their employees sensibly. By over-regulating a market, one restricts businesses and prevents them from introducing the policies in which everyone in the House believes.
The hon. Member for Dulwich spoke of people, particularly women, who are in the part-time labour market, their satisfaction with their working hours and the way in which this country has provided more part-time work than virtually any other country in the world. I thought that she was going to come to the conclusion to which her words naturally led: that market forces and deregulation were at work.
In this country, we do not place a tax on jobs for people who earn under a certain amount; we do not charge employers national insurance. The more we place extra on-costs and social costs on employers while trying to hide them away so that employees do not realise that those costs constitute a tax on their jobs, the more we reduce our ability to create jobs in the marketplace.
I ran an employment agency in Yorkshire for 12 years. Many of the people who came to me were women; many of them were women who wanted to be returners. I had filing cabinets full of lists of people wanting part-time work. It was always difficult to persuade people to take full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs, but there was no shortage of people wanting part-time work.
There is no evidence that, when workers work side by side in an organisation, with one person working part-time hours and another working full-time hours, there is a significant difference in the hourly rate. I know that Opposition Members would love it if no differential were allowed. I can well remember companies in which people would rather go from full-time to part-time working even if it meant taking a lower hourly rate. There is resistance among the work force to believing that someone working full-time hours should not receive a slight premium over those working part-time hours. It is important to maintain flexibility--the flexibility that the hon. Member for Dulwich was describing when she talked of creating so many jobs in the United Kingdom.
The Labour party has started to talk about market forces. Labour Members mouth off about how they would like to see market forces, but they do not seem to accept the inevitable consequences. The hon. Member for Preston clearly said that she did not believe that people should work for low wages and she would be happy to see those jobs disappear if those doing them were not paid
the wages that she believed should be paid. That is the natural consequence of what she was saying and of what the Labour party constantly says.
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