This Friday, in the dusty corridors and echoing chambers of Westminster, a war for the Labour Party’s soul will commence. A swelling of more than a hundred Labour MPs is poised to stage the biggest party rebellion since the Iraq War. They will be fighting over whether the weakest employees in Britain should be forced to work in an anxiety-soaked economy where they have no rights — and where every day they turn up for work could be their last.
There is a toxic loophole in British employment law, which 1.5 million people have been lassoed by. If I go to work for Joe Bloggs Ltd, after a short period I begin to acquire employment rights. I get sick pay, holiday leave, and the right to not be arbitrarily dismissed from my job. But if I go to work for an employment agency that then places me in exactly the same job at Joes Bloggs Ltd., my employment rights never come. I can work there for 20 years and still be given no sick pay and no paid holidays, and be sacked in a second. They are financially trapped: they can’t get credit, never mind a mortgage.
What does this do to your head? Geoff Collins, a 57-year-old plumber who has worked for employment agencies in Southampton for more than 20 years, explains: “You feel unsettled the whole time. You know that you can be laid off immediately with no notice at all. You know that if you get ill, you get nothing but the statutory sick pay of £75 a week paid by the government. You don’t get holiday pay or a pension or anything. It’s just a constant feeling of insecurity.”
The unfairness of this loophole in our law is symbolized by the experiences of Rebecca Ames, a 34-year-old mother from Cornwall. For three-and-a-half years, she worked for a major telecoms company via an agency. At her desk, she sat between two directly employed workers doing exactly the same job as her. These two employees were on £20,000 a year with annual pay rises. She was on £8,500 with no pay rises. They had holiday pay and sick pay; she did not. They were given an hour’s break, at a time of their choosing; she was given half an hour’s break at 1 p.m. sharp. They were given free parking spaces; she had to pay £4.50 a day for hers. She describes this to me as “the most demoralizing and depressing period of my life. You were constantly reminded you were just an agency worker, a second-class citizen”.
More and more British workers are being shifted out on to agencies in a casualization-carousel touring the country. The people who are choked hardest by this loophole are recent Eastern European immigrants like Vicktor Klokcos, a young former peacekeeper in Bosnia. He signed up with an agency in Hungary which told him he would make £7.50 an hour and have decent accommodation here in Britain. But when he stepped off the plane, he was driven overnight to a processing plant and told to start work cutting chicken thighs immediately.
Vicktor was then put in an unfurnished three-bedroom house with 14 other people. It didn’t even have a fridge. For working 10 hours a day, five days a week, he was paid £120. His agency employers claimed to stay on the right side of the minimum wage by deducting from his pay-packet “charges” like £8 a day for the minibus to and from the factory. The job ended when Vicktor caught a fever, and he was sacked. “I had better experiences in Bosnia during the war than here,” he says, with only a touch of hyperbole.
This unregulated agency work creates a pool of miserable, insecure people at the bottom of the wage chain. We as taxpayers end up paying to mop up some of the stress through a swelling anti-depressant bill and tax credits. But now a coalition of Labour MPs — led by an excellent campaign from the trade union UNITE — intends to do better. They want to guarantee agency workers the same basic rights as the rest of us.
This shouldn’t be hard. The Labour government made a manifesto commitment to do precisely this back in 2005 — but in practice, they have tried to kill any attempt to deliver on it. At the European level, most governments are keen to introduce a law that would grant basic rights at six weeks — but Gordon Brown’s government has been frantically thwarting them.
Why? They won’t actually tell us, blocking any parliamentary debate on the matter. But they seem to have gobbled down the Confederation of Business and Industry (CBI) propaganda. The CBI has wheeled out their old threats about the minimum wage, which they claimed would “cost one million jobs”. (In fact, the number of people in employment rose to its highest level in British history after the minimum wage was brought in.) Today, in a dull-witted sequel, they say basic protections for agency workers would “cost 250,000 jobs”. Tell them that most agency work is in sectors that couldn’t be carried out offshore — security guards, construction workers, catering — and they carry on anyway. Ask them how they calculated this oddly round figure, and they hum and haw and say they’ll call you back.
Yet the fictitious threats of a tiny number of the superrich still seem to outweigh the worries of a growing mass of struggling people like Geoff and Rebecca and Vicktor.
This Friday, the government will not be able to dodge the arguments any more. The Labour MP Andrew Miller is bringing a Private Member’s Bill to introduce equality for agency workers. Last year, the government tried to swat away a similar move — but now, nearly a third of the Parliamentary Labour Party is poised to rebel and force it to committee stage.
So Gordon Brown has a choice. He can be dragged into a draining, demoralizing row with his own party, which he may well lose — or he can make this a bright, populist dividing line between Labour and the Conservatives. He could make job security an election issue, by offering the electorate two clashing models of how to deal with globalization. David Cameron is committed to racing-to-the-bottom with your rights by repealing swathes of basic employment protections. In this Redwoodian worldview, every right is a “restriction” on the “freedom” of corporations: the weakest workers just have to live with the perma-stress.
