Liam Byrne

Thank you very much indeed, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am going to be very brief—I will just make three quick points—and will do my best to salvage a degree of consensus from the conflict that has characterised this debate at its outset. If there are a couple of things that unite us across this House, it is that we all believe in fair play, and we all believe in an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. However, the reality is that millions of workers in this country are simply not earning their fair share of the wealth that we produce together. If labour income were the same share of national income as it was back in the 1950s, something like £12,000 a year would go into the pay packets of every single one of the 33.8 million workers in this country. As such, following a decade that has seen 4 million people trapped in low pay and during which we have had a living standards crisis, it behoves each and every one of us to think more creatively and constructively about how we support workers in this economy to earn a good life for them and their family. We on the Business and Trade Committee have the privilege of hearing from some of the best employers in the country, but we also have the duty of interrogating many firms that, frankly, have been letting down our country. I will highlight three examples, in order to illustrate some of the amendments that have been tabled in my name and in the names of other right hon. and hon. Members. They are not amendments that I wish to press to a Division; they are probing amendments, on which I think the Minister needs to provide the House with some answers. I will start with McDonald’s, which I referenced in an earlier intervention. It is one of the most significant employers in our country, employing over 200,000 people. Some 90% of McDonald’s workers are on zero-hours contracts. On the day of our hearing, a BBC investigation by Zoe Conway, its employment correspondent, exposed the reality that hundreds of McDonald’s employees were contacting the BBC and the EHRC with allegations of the most appalling harassment. We heard about the case of a 17-year-old McDonald’s worker who alleged that she was being asked for sex in return for a manager giving her the shifts that she wanted—how on earth can that be acceptable in today’s economy? Yet when we put that point to the chief executive of McDonald’s and asked, “Do you think that the imbalance of power that has flourished in McDonald’s because 90% of your workers are on zero-hours contracts has anything to do with this litany of abuse, or with 700 workers contacting their solicitors to bring a case against McDonald’s?”, the answer was no. It was an absolutely extraordinary denial of reality. We then heard from Evri, which, as many people know, is one of the most significant courier firms in the country, employing tens of thousands of people. Mr Hugo Martin came before our Committee to give evidence, and told us that all at Evri was sweetness and light. However, the Committee has now received hundreds upon hundreds of complaints from whistleblowers, alleging that they are being cheated and undercut, most recently through the rate cuts, the packet racket which is still persisting, health and safety abuses at work, intimidation, bullying and harassment. They are being told repeatedly that their shifts will be cut, or that they will be out of the door if they do not work six days a week. Our constituents are experiencing this completely unacceptable behaviour. I must be careful about scope at this point, Madam Deputy Speaker, but we also heard from the company Shein, which could not even tell us whether the products that it made contained cotton from China. We were simply trying to understand whether workers in our country were being undercut by an abuse of modern slavery practices abroad. I say to the House that although we may have our differences on the Bill, we must accept the reality that millions of people in this country—millions of the people we are sent here to represent—are being treated in a way that should be unacceptable in a 21st-century economy. What the good employers told the Committee, time and again, was that they supported the spirit of the Bill, although of course they had concerns about the detail, and it is good that the Minister is listening. What they did not want to see persist was the situation that they feared, in which the good firms were being undercut by the bad. We must have a level playing field in this country: that will be a necessity if we are to win a global race to the top. My amendments 275 to 277 suggest alterations to the zero hours regime that the Minister has set out. I think we should abolish the definition of “low hours” in contracts. I accept the evidence that was given to us by Paddy Lillis, the brilliant general secretary of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, that retaining the definition creates a risk of loopholes that will be exploited by bad employers. Amendments 278 to 281, which might be termed the McDonald’s amendments, urge the Secretary of State to put on the face of the Bill a definition of “reasonable notice” in relation to the moving of shifts and the compensation that should be entailed in the event of unreasonable shift movements. We need to ensure that our workers, particularly young workers, are never again subjected to the kind of abuse that we have seen unfold at McDonald’s. Those days must be consigned to the past. New clause 80, which might be described as the Evri amendment, creates an obligation and duty for the Secretary of State to bring to the House, within six months of the Bill’s coming into the force, the final version of a review of the single status of workers. We heard compelling evidence from the director of Labour Market Enforcement, who told us that the Government, Ministers and civil servants could consult “until the cows come home”. We could put off the consultation about the different definitions of “worker” for ever and a day, when what we need to do is end the kind of abuse that we see at Evri now. Ensuring that these loopholes are closed so that bogus self-employment is no longer a loophole through which bad employers abuse honest workers: I should like to see the Minister step up to that requirement. New clause 81, which we might call the Shein amendment, requires the Government to update the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and section 54 in particular, to ensure that the employment rights granted in the Bill are not undermined by companies operating in this country that are abusing this legislation. At the time the Modern Slavery Act was world-leading legislation, but we heard clear evidence from companies such as Tesco that this country risked becoming a “dumping ground” for bad products produced by workers exploited abroad. We cannot allow this country, which led the abolition of slavery, to be a country in which we have second-class protections against modern slavery in the 21st century, and I should therefore welcome a commitment from the Minister on when the Act will be updated. We welcome some of the Government amendments, particularly the enhanced protection for agency workers and the action on umbrella companies. Both are recommendations in the Committee’s excellent report, which I commend to all Members. I hope that, as a result of this debate, we can salvage some consensus. The Bill will go through today, and this will be the biggest overhaul of employment rights in the country. We must ensure that it lasts for the future, and the more we can do to bring a cross-party consensus around that simple idea that all workers—all constituents—in the country should have the right, the power and the freedom to earn a good life for themselves and their families, and the sooner we can do it, the better.