<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,461508,00.html> Employee rights are a vote winner for Labour. Let the Tories hang themselves with 'red tape' hysteria
Special report: election countdown
Polly Toynbee Friday March 23, 2001 The Guardian
Red tape! Bureaucracy throttling industry! Thousands of regulations and taxes burden British industry! The leaders of business organisations are coming together in a joint assault on the government before the election: the CBI and Institute of Directors are joining the Chambers of Commerce annual conference next week, addressed by William Hague. These are threatening battalions, as frightening to the government as the unions once were - and every bit as over-mighty in their pretensions to power. If Labour once cowered before union barons, now they blench when business bellows. Yesterday the Institute for Public Policy Research published some damning research, commissioned by the employment department, showing how low-paid workers are being denied new rights the government has introduced. Many are forced to sign a "voluntary" waiver from the 48-hour maximum working time law as a condition of employment. Britain was the only country to insist on a loophole making the 48-hour rule voluntary: the idea was that high-powered people should work as long as they liked. But as many predicted at the time, the reality is that the low-paid are now forced to work the longest hours in Europe. The survey found serious violations of new rights to sick pay and holidays: some knew their rights but dared not demand them. It proved beyond doubt the need for an enforcement agency which workers can call in when their rights were denied.
The IPPR - the think tank created within New Labour - has been laying out a far more radical agenda than the government currently looks inclined to adopt. But Labour should be considering it carefully - in particular, their ideas on work. Here is fertile territory for a profound policy difference with the Tories. Hague and Portillo may promise to match all Labour's spending plans, but they carve their own niche in cutting red tape and regulation. Here is a chance for Labour to take the "red tape" and wrap it round the Tories' necks. (It is unfortunate that Labour has so often itself played the "red tape" card in Europe, trying to woo the business lobby by resisting quite reasonable EU proposals.)
The CBI's "red tape challenge" and the Chambers of Commerce "burdens barometer" campaigns all follow identical themes. The CBI claim £12.3bn extra is paid out by industry for Labour's new employment rights. (This turns out to be notional, and not an annual sum but an arbitrary three years' worth rolled up together). They list billions they say the working time regulations cost - that is the 48-hour week, and four weeks' holiday for the first time given as a right to every worker, with pro-rata holiday rights for every part-timer too. They add in the minimum wage and other "burdens" to create a portrait of a country weighed down by socialism.
There is no truth in any of this. The OECD - conservative economists - finds Britain has the least market regulation, the lowest corporation tax (lower than any time in its history), and the lowest employment costs - not just lower than the rest of Europe - but, when everything is added in (including US employers' health insurance), lower than the US too. Social insurance and labour taxes average 24% in Europe, 21% in the US and only 13% in Britain.
And it feels like it in this under-taxed and over-worked island. Yesterday's Warwick University research showed how British workers' stress levels had risen and job satisfaction plummeted in the last decade. The IPPR's focus groups found a weary acceptance of bad working conditions among middle and lower-level workers, little expectation of anything much better. Adair Turner, previous head of the CBI, writing in the Financial Times this week, praises a high productivity and success in European countries unaffected by their high taxes and tough employment regulation. "The Dutch economy has performed better than the US over the past 10 years in spite of regulatory and tax burdens that are anathema to a simplistic ultra-liberal creed." Britons, he finds, work 25% hours longer than workers in Europe and the US.
So in the manifesto the government should rebut all this "red tape" talk. The bosses' red tape is most people's decent pay and conditions. It is time for a great leap forward in the way Labour talks about work and people's aspirations. Employment minister Tessa Jowell was (without firm commitments) reaching out in that direction in a speech to the IPPR yesterday. "Quality of work and equality of opportunity are the important challenges for the next stage. Quality of work is about employees - whatever their income - achieving four key factors: a feeling they are in control, employment rights, training and development and work-life balance." Better work, better conditions and an upward ladder for all, not just any old job, but a better job. Will employers be forced to deliver evidence of equal pay and non-age discrimination policies? John Monks at the TUC waits to see if Britain will fight in the EU against a right for employees to be consulted before mergers and closures affecting their lives. The IPPR points out that Gordon Brown's full employment is unachievable without something he has always refused - job-creation in the worst areas - gardeners, caretakers, bus-conductors - doing useful work that improves neighbourhoods.
Hard tests lie ahead. There is a fierce battle going on for the right for new mothers to return to work as part-timers. If even this minimal demand is thrown out, then Labour will have missed a chance to enthuse voters with a new political agenda.
The big idea is to reconnect politics with what really matters in people's lives - quality of life, happiness, family, freedom and control over their time. Ask people what matters most to their lives, and often it is the chance to take half a day off work for something special, control over their time without feeling chained to a desk or bench. It might be the right to start work later or leave work earlier. It might be a right for all to work part-time if they wanted to train for a better job, spend more time with children, or pursue some richer aspect of their lives. This would be subject to feasibility - but the onus would be on the employer to prove why it couldn't be done. It is quite remarkable how resistant virtually all employers are to job-sharing, even though research shows that two part-timers work harder and better. Many employees could not afford to work less, but knowing they could vary the pace of their work would give them a new control over their lives. In this time of plenty, giving people back their time is easily affordable. Tory red tape is Labour freedom.
polly.toynbee at guardian.co.uk