Steve Witherden MP speaks at the Labour Party Conference on the Employment Rights Bill and the need to legislate to protect workers from exploitative employment practices.

This speech was delivered at the fringe event “Socialist Solutions to the Crisis” at the Arena and Conference Centre Liverpool, Tuesday 24 September 2024.

Thank you for inviting me to speak. As I said at another fringe I spoke at, as the only Welsh MP speaking, I’ve got to draw attention to the fact that the Welsh people are now living in a Tory free Wales.

I also wanted to thank you, the activists, for all the work you did in the summer, for tirelessly knocking doors and delivering leaflets to ensure that Montgomeryshire got the first ever Labour MP in its history.

This evening’s event is titled socialist solutions to the crisis. There are not only socialist solutions, but there are socialist solutions in our manifesto. The New Deal for Working People, which has now morphed into the Employment Rights Bill. That was an incredibly popular policy on the door, when we were doorknocking around our constituency we mentioned it everywhere we went. As a trade unionist it is very close to my heart, and it was an incredibly popular policy. It is going to be enacted in the first 100 days of office.

We are approximately 60 days in and these next few days are going to be crucial. Since then, we have heard ministers say to business leaders “not everything that was in the New Deal for Working People literature is going to end up in the Employment Rights Bill.” We’ve also heard that the banning of zero-hours contracts, something that I feel incredibly strongly about, some people are now talking about the banning of exploitative zero-hours contracts. Now in my experience, they’re all exploitative, and all the arguments that are made can be easily quashed by saying “temporary contract” – whether it is a fixed term contract, or a rolling contract, it doesn’t matter – that worker will still get holiday pay, they will get sick pay, and they will get guaranteed hours the next day and the next week. The solutions are there.

The banning of fire and rehire is also there. That is something that we have seen a big spike in recently. A lot of the most unscrupulous and ruthless employers are thinking they are going to get in these restructurings and fire and rehiring processes before the legislation comes in. The sooner we can get it in, the better. Those are two solutions – the banning of zero-hours contracts and the banning of fire and rehire. Also in our manifesto, a commitment we made during the election campaign, was the Green New Deal – a huge expansion in green energy, in renewables, in tidal, wind, solar. We are going to not only save the planet, but we are going to create a whole raft of new jobs in this new industrial revolution. These solutions do exist, they are there.

I also wanted to talk about what the solutions are not. The solutions are not more privatisation and more outsourcing. That is something we cannot see. I was just speaking at another event and I told an anecdote – my background is in teaching – about privatisation and about the privatisation of supply teachers, which we have seen over the last few years, including in Wales where we are fortunate enough not to have academies and the backdoor privatisation of education. What we have seen is the privatisation of supply teachers. We’ve seen supply teaching taken out of the hands of local authorities and given to private sector agencies who don’t pay to scale. They still take the same amount of money out of the public purse, it’s just that the private sector agency gets a massive cut, and the teacher take-home pay is hugely depreciated. Worse – they don’t pay pension top-ups for the teacher’s pension scheme, so a lot of teachers have to forgo their pension rights.

Supply teachers are waiting by the phone every morning hoping that a teacher somewhere is ill so they can get called in to cover their lessons. We’ve been speaking with people who wait for that call – it doesn’t come. The next day, they’re waiting for the call – it doesn’t come. The next day – it doesn’t come, and they’re thinking “how am I going to pay the bills this month, I’m not going to be able to.” Then they get a call, and the agency gives them work, but not as a proper supply teacher, but as a supply cover supervisor or a supply teaching assistant, so they can depreciate your pay even more. When you get to the school, as a supply cover supervisor, you’re told that the title doesn’t mean anything – but of course the worker knows it does, because they see a massive cut in their pay.

To bring prosperity back to Britain we need a respected, resilient, and productive workforce. We must be bold and bring the Employment Rights Bill into law as promised, to deliver the biggest upgrade of workers’ rights for a generation and make work pay again. Thank you.